Measuring 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 had systematically examined whether a similar kind of “collective intelligence” exists for groups of people. In this work, we have found 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 it 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.

Our continuing work is investigating the factors that affect the collective intelligence of a group, such as its size, the electronic collaboration tools it uses, and the gender mix of its members.

Publications

Woolley, A. W., Kim, Y., Malone, T.W., Measuring Collective Intelligence in Groups: A Reply to Credé and Howardson, MIT Sloan Working Paper 5431-18, June 2018. 

Chikersal, P., Tomprou, M., Kim, Y. J., Woolley, A. W., & Dabbish, L. (2017)
Deep structures of collaboration: Physiological correlates of collective intelligence and group satisfaction. Proceedings of the 20th ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing (CSCW 2017). 

Kim, Y. J.*, Engel, D.*, Woolley, A. W., Lin, J., McArthur, N., & Malone, T. W. (2017) What makes a strong team? Using collective intelligence to predict performance of teams in League of Legends. Proceedings of the 20th ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing (CSCW 2017). (*authors contributed equally) – Research featured on Nature News. 

Woolley, A. W., Aggarwal, I., & Malone, T. W. (2015). Collective intelligence and group performance. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 24, 420-424. doi:10.1177/0963721415599543.

Engel, D., Woolley, A. W., Aggarwal, I., Chabris, C. F., Takahashi, M., Nemoto, K., Kaiser, C., Kim, Y. J., & Malone, T. W. (2015) Collective intelligence in computer-mediated collaboration emerges in different contexts and cultures. Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2015), Seoul, Korea.

Engel, D., Woolley, A. W., Jing, L. X., Chabris, C. F., & Malone, T. W. (2014) Reading the mind in the eyes or reading between the lines? Theory of Mind predicts effective collaboration equally well online and face-to-face.  PLOS One 9 (12). doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0115212

Woolley, A. W., Aggarwal, I., & Malone, T. W. (in press. Collective intelligence in teams and organizations. In T. W. Malone & M. S. Bernstein (Eds.), The Handbook of Collective Intelligence. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press

Engel, D., Woolley, A. W., Jing, L. X., Chabris, C. F., & Malone, T. W. (2014) Theory of mind predicts collective intelligence. Proceedings of Collective Intelligence 2014, Cambridge, MA.

Aggarwal, I., & Woolley, A.W. (2012) Two perspectives on intellectual capital and innovation in teams: Collective intelligence and cognitive diversity. In C. Mukhopadyay (Ed.), Driving the economy through innovation and entrepreneurship (pp. 495-502). Bangalore: Springer

Bear, J. B., & Woolley, A. W. (2011) The role of gender in team collaboration and performance. Interdisciplinary Science Reviews, 36(2), 146-153

Woolley, A., & Malone, T.  Defend your research:  What makes a team smarter?  More women, Harvard Business Review, June 2011, 89 (6): 32-33

Woolley, A. W., Chabris, C. F., Pentland, A., Hashmi, N., Malone, T. W. Evidence for a collective intelligence factor in the performance of human groups, Science, 29 October 2010, 330 (6004), 686-688; Published online 30 September 2010 [DOI: 10.1126/science.1193147]

 

Contests

Matrix Reasoning Challenge 

 

Press and other media

This research has been featured in over 30 print and online publications around the world.  A sample of these media mentions is shown below and a comprehensive list is here.

Videos

Collective Intelligence in the Performance of Human Groups, Anita Williams Woolley, National Research Council Public Workshop, April 3-4, 2013.

Why interpersonal skills are more important that you think, Thomas W Malone, Techonomy Conference, Tucson, AZ, November 13, 2013

We have developed an online battery of collective intelligence tests. To see what the battery looks like, click here

People

Thomas W. Malone
Anita Woolley (Carnegie Mellon University)
Christopher Chabris (Union College)
Young Ji Kim (UC Santa Barbara) 
Nada Hashmi (Babson College)
Ishani Aggarwal

Project Alumni
David Engel
Lisa Jing
Yiftach Nagar