Anita Williams Woolley

Evidence for a Collective Intelligence Factor in the Performance of Human Groups

Meeting of Minds The performance of humans across a range of different kinds of cognitive tasks has been encapsulated as a common statistical factor called g or general intelligence factor. What intelligence actually is, is unclear and hotly debated, yet there is a reproducible association of g with performance outcomes, such as income and academic achievement. Woolley et al. (p. 686, published online 30 September) report a psychometric methodology for quantifying a factor termed “collective intelligence” (c), which reflects how well groups perform on a similarly diverse set of group problem-solving tasks. The primary contributors to c appear to be the g factors of the group members, along with a propensity toward social sensitivity—in essence, how well individuals work with others. A metric for group performance on a battery of cognitive tasks yields a group intelligence quantity: collective intelligence. Psychologists have repeatedly shown that a single statistical factor—often called “general intelligence”—emerges from the correlations among people’s performance on a wide variety of cognitive tasks. But no one has systematically examined whether a similar kind of “collective intelligence” exists for groups of people. In two studies with 699 people, working in groups of two to five, we find converging evidence of a general collective intelligence factor that explains a group’s performance on a wide variety of tasks. This “c factor” is not strongly correlated with the average or maximum individual intelligence of group members but is correlated with the average social sensitivity of group members, the equality in distribution of conversational turn-taking, and the proportion of females in the group.

Construct Validity of a Self-Report Measure of Teacher Beliefs Related to Constructivist and Traditional Approaches to Teaching and Learning

The development and validation of the Teacher Beliefs Survey (TBS) is described. The TBS, an instrument for assessing the beliefs of teachers related to constructivist and traditional approaches to teaching and learning, contains 21 items in three hypothetical constructs. Elementary teachers, preservice (n = 61) and in-service (n = 137), participated in the development of the TBS. Analysis of this pilot data suggested a four-factor structure: Traditional Management, Traditional Teaching, Constructivist Teaching, and Constructivist Parent. A validation study included preservice teachers (n = 896). The results did not confirm the four-factor structure; further analysis suggested a three-factor structure, eliminating the Constructivist Parent factor. Future plans include development of a Constructivist Management factor and a larger pool of items for existing factors.

Bringing in the Experts: How Team Composition and Collaborative Planning Jointly Shape Analytic Effectiveness

This study investigates the separate and joint effects of the inclusion of experts and collaborative planning on the performance of analytic teams. Teams either did or did not include members with expert-level task-relevant cognitive abilities, and either did or did not receive an intervention that fostered collaborative planning. Results support the authors’ hypothesis that analytic performance requires both task-appropriate expertise and collaborative planning to identify strategies for optimally using that expertise. Indeed, high expertise in the absence of collaborative planning actually decreased team performance. Teams engaging in collaborative planning were more likely to effectively integrate their information on key aspects of the analytic problem, which significantly enhanced their analytic performance. Furthermore, information integration mediated the effects of the interaction of expertise and collaboration on performance. The implications of the findings for the optimal use of team member skills and the development of team performance strategies are discussed.

The role of gender in team collaboration and performance

Abstract Given that women continue to be underrepresented in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) and that scientific innovations are increasingly produced by team collaborations, we reviewed the existing literature regarding the effects of gender diversity on team processes and performance. Recent evidence strongly suggests that team collaboration is greatly improved by the presence of women in the group, and this effect is primarily explained by benefits to group processes. The evidence concerning the effect of gender diversity on team performance is more equivocal and contingent upon a variety of contextual factors. In light of the importance of collaboration in science, promoting the role of women in the field can have positive practical consequences for science and technology.

Reading the Mind in the Eyes or Reading between the Lines? Theory of Mind Predicts Collective Intelligence Equally Well Online and Face-To-Face

Recent research with face-to-face groups found that a measure of general group effectiveness (called “collective intelligence”) predicted a group’s performance on a wide range of different tasks. The same research also found that collective intelligence was correlated with the individual group members’ ability to reason about the mental states of others (an ability called “Theory of Mind” or “ToM”). Since ToM was measured in this work by a test that requires participants to “read” the mental states of others from looking at their eyes (the “Reading the Mind in the Eyes” test), it is uncertain whether the same results would emerge in online groups where these visual cues are not available. Here we find that: (1) a collective intelligence factor characterizes group performance approximately as well for online groups as for face-to-face groups; and (2) surprisingly, the ToM measure is equally predictive of collective intelligence in both face-to-face and online groups, even though the online groups communicate only via text and never see each other at all. This provides strong evidence that ToM abilities are just as important to group performance in online environments with limited nonverbal cues as they are face-to-face. It also suggests that the Reading the Mind in the Eyes test measures a deeper, domain-independent aspect of social reasoning, not merely the ability to recognize facial expressions of mental states.

Conditions Enabling Effective Multiple Team Membership

There is a long tradition of research on work in teams and their increasingly important use as an approach to organizational design. While the implicit assumption has been that individuals work on one team at a time, many individuals are now being asked to juggle several projects and their associated multiple team memberships (MTM) simultaneously. This creates a set of interesting opportunities and challenges for organizations that choose to structure work in this way. In this paper, we review the limited existing research on MTM work. We then present the results of a survey documenting the prevalence of MTM work and the findings from a pilot interview study suggesting a number of challenges, benefits, and enabling conditions associated with MTM work. We discuss the implications for managers working in MTM environments as well as for scholars of teams and, in doing so we describe what we see as key items on the agenda for future research on this topic.

Using brain-based measures to compose teams: How individual capabilities and team collaboration strategies jointly shape performance

Abstract Advances in understanding neural processes open the possibility of using brain-based measures to compose collaborative work teams. Neuroimaging studies have shown that individual differences in patterns of brain activity can predict differences in performance of specific tasks. We extended this finding by examining performance not simply by a single brain, but by pairs of brains. We used measures derived from brain-based studies to compose 100 two-person teams in which members’ roles were either congruent or incongruent with their individual abilities. The assessed abilities are rooted in the visual system, which comprises independent “spatial” and “object” subsystems. The team task required one member to navigate through a virtual maze (a spatial task) and the other to remember “tag” repetitions of complex “greebles” (an object-properties task). Teams in which members’ role assignments were congruent with their abilities performed better than incongruent teams and teams in which both members scored high on only one of the abilities. In addition, verbal collaboration enabled members of incongruent teams to overcome their compositional disadvantage but did not enhance the performance of congruent teams—and actually impaired performance in teams in which both members were adept in only one of the two necessary abilities. The findings show that knowledge about brain systems can not only be used to compose teams, but also provides insights into how teams can best perform.

Effects of Intervention Content and Timing on Group Task Performance

This study explores the main and interactive effects on group task performance of two types of intervention (interpersonal vs. task focused) administered at two different times (the beginning vs. the temporal midpoint of work). The results show that timing and content of intervention interact to affect group task performance. The discussion draws on qualitative data to expand on these findings and outlines conditions necessary for optimizing group performance on open-ended tasks.

Collective Intelligence and Group Performance

We review recent research on collective intelligence, which we define as the ability of a group to perform a wide variety of tasks. We focus on two influences on a group’s collective intelligence: (a) group composition (e.g., the members’ skills, diversity, and intelligence) and (b) group interaction (e.g., structures, processes, and norms). We also call for more research to investigate how social interventions and technological tools can be used to enhance collective intelligence.

Opinion: Gender diversity leads to better science

Pick up any recent policy paper on women’s participation in science and you will find assurances that gender diversity enhances knowledge outcomes. Universities and science-policy stakeholders, including the European Commission and the US National Institutes of Health, readily subscribe to this argument (1⇓–3). But is there, in fact, a gender-diversity dividend in science? The data suggest that there is. Under the right conditions, teams may benefit from various types of diversity, including scientific discipline, work experience, gender, ethnicity, and nationality. In this paper, we highlight gender diversity (Fig. 1). Guided by key research findings, we propose the following “mechanisms for innovation” specifying why gender diversity matters for scientific discovery and what managers should do to maximize its benefits (Fig. 2). Encouraging greater diversity is not only the right thing to do: it allows scientific organizations to derive an “innovation dividend” that leads to smarter, more creative teams, hence opening the door to new discoveries. Fig. 1. When it comes to science collaborations, there’s ample data to suggest that gender diversity pays a substantial research and productivity dividend. Image courtesy of Dave Cutler (artist). Well-run, well-performing research teams have become increasingly crucial to the success of modern scientific investigations. Already, experimental research points to positive links between gender diversity and collective problem solving. In a study of group performance, Anita Woolley et al. (4) randomly assigned 699 participants to teams of varying sizes and asked them to solve a set of both simple and complicated tasks (e.g., visual puzzles, brainstorming, making collective moral judgments, and negotiating over limited resources). Through these experiments, the authors found evidence of a collective intelligence factor that predicts group performance better than the IQ of individual group members. Key components of this factor include the group members’ social perceptiveness and parity in conversational turn-taking. Furthermore, … [↵][1]1To whom correspondence should be addressed. Email: mwn{at}stanford.edu. [1]: #xref-corresp-1-1