Group IQ
What makes one team of people smarter than another? A
new field of research finds surprising answers.

By Carolyn Y. Johnson

The Boston Globe

December 19, 2010

http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2010/12/19/group_iq/?page=1

For a century, people have been devising tests that aim
to capture a person's mental abilities in a score,
whether it is an IQ test or the SAT. In just an hour or
an afternoon, a slate of multiple choice questions or
visual puzzles helps sift out the superstars -- people
whose critical thinking skills suggest they have potent
intellectual abilities that could one day help solve
real-world problems.

But separating the spectacularly bright from the merely
average may not be quite as important as everyone
believes. A striking study led by an MIT Sloan School
of Management professor shows that teams of people
display a collective intelligence that has surprisingly
little to do with the intelligence of the team's
individual members. Group intelligence, the researchers
discovered, is not strongly tied to either the average
intelligence of the members or the team's smartest
member. And this collective intelligence was more than
just an arbitrary score: When the group grappled with a
complex task, the researchers found it was an excellent
predictor of how well the team performed.

The new work is part of a growing body of research that
focuses on understanding collective behavior and
intelligence -- an increasingly relevant topic of
research in an age where everything from scientific
progress to entrepreneurial success hinges on
collaboration. Embedded in a century's worth of
Broadway shows, the interactions of online communities,
or the path a ball travels between soccer players,
researchers are finding hints about how individual
people contribute to make a group creative and
successful.

The interest is fueled in part by the Internet, which
provides an unprecedented opportunity for people to
join and leave groups, unbounded by geography. In the
digital age, interactions between people are also
creating a huge stream of data, giving scientists new
ways to glean precise insights about how complex,
aggregated behaviors arise. What they are finding is
that groups, as entities, have characteristics that are
more than just a summing up or averaging of those of
its members.

"Intuitively, we still attribute too much to
individuals and not enough to groups. Part of that may
just be that it's simpler; it's simpler to say the
success of a company depended on the CEO for good or
bad, but in reality the success of a company depends on
a whole lot more," said Thomas W. Malone, director of
the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence and senior
author of the recent study, published in the journal
Science. "Essentially what's happening as our society
becomes more advanced and more developed is that more
things are done by groups of people than by
individuals. In a certain sense, our intuitions about
how that works haven't caught up with the reality of
modern life."

As the mechanics of how groups work emerge, such
insights are forming the basis of a scientific approach
to engineering better groups, with experiments already
unfolding in sports arenas and scientific laboratories.
The best-selling book "Moneyball" told the story of how
the Oakland Athletics used an unconventional
statistical approach to build a winning baseball team
without a big budget. The new research suggests it may
one day be possible to give a test to a sales team and
predict how well it will sell in the following year, or
to pick a management team with a good sense of exactly
how it is likely to respond to an array of challenges.

"It's kind of staggering, it's 2010 and we're only
beginning to realize what look in this paper to be very
strong effects," said Iain Couzin, an assistant
professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at
Princeton University who studies collective behavior in
animals. "I run a relatively large lab, and I was
thinking reading this paper about how I could make my
lab more effective."

People have been studying group dynamics for decades,
seeing crowds variously as sources of madness and
wisdom. Theories have arisen about people acting in
plural, from the "groupthink" decision-making in the
Bay of Pigs invasion to the "collective mind" of the
flight operations on an aircraft carrier. But despite
that long history, Malone and colleagues could not find
an example in which people had asked the relatively
simple question of whether groups had intelligence, the
same way individual people do.

The field of measuring and ranking people's mental
aptitudes has been rife with controversy, but the
finding that something called "general intelligence"
exists has persevered. By giving people a set of tests,
researchers can calculate a factor that predicts how a
person will perform on a variety of cognitive tasks --
as well as their performance in school and work. The
MIT and Carnegie Mellon University researchers decided
to see if the same concept applied to groups. While
people have measured group performance on specific
tasks, what Malone sought to understand was whether
there was such a thing as general group intelligence.

In two studies, researchers divided 699 people into
groups of two to five people. They measured each team
member's intelligence individually, but then gave the
teams intelligence-testing tasks to solve -- figuring
out the next pattern in a sequence, brainstorming the
different potential uses of a brick. Then, the group
performed a more complex "criterion" task, such as
playing checkers against a computer or completing a
complicated architectural task with Legos, which was
used to understand whether the collective intelligence
researchers measured in the initial tasks correctly
predicted the group's abilities.

What the researchers found was that groups' collective
intelligence strongly predicted how well they did in
the computer checkers game and on the Legos task --
evidence that something called "collective
intelligence" did in fact exist. What was more
surprising, however, was that neither the average
intelligence of the group members nor the person with
the greatest intelligence strongly predicted how well
the group did.

Other tenets of group success also seemed to fall by
the wayside: A group's motivation, satisfaction, and
unity were unimportant. Instead, the researchers found
that when a group had a high level of collective
intelligence, the members tended to score well on a
test that measured how good they were at reading other
people's emotions. They also found that groups with
overbearing leaders who were reluctant to cede the
floor and let the others talk did worse than those in
which participation was better distributed and people
took turns speaking. And they also found that the
proportion of women in the group was a predictor of
collective intelligence -- a factor they believe was
likely influenced by women's generally superior social
sensitivity.

Though intriguing, this work is just a first step. What
Malone and colleagues are ultimately interested in is
how to predict a group's abilities in real-life
scenarios -- how they handle an environmental cleanup or
design a blockbuster product. Legos and checkers are a
surrogate for complicated tasks, but the ultimate test
will be in determining whether collective intelligence
truly predicts how teams, of all sizes, work on
everyday tasks. Since groups and situations in the real
world have fluidity and complexity whose individual
components can be difficult to break down and measure,
however, other research is focusing on dissecting the
dynamics that build to group behavior.

Take the game of soccer: A player who never scores a
goal may play an integral part in the team's success.
Baseball has its RBIs, ERAs, and OBPs, but, as with
soccer, most real-life activities do not come with
discrete statistical measures of how people interact or
work together toward a goal. In a paper published in
the journal PLoS ONE this summer, Luis A. Nunes Amaral,
a professor of chemical and biological engineering at
Northwestern University, worked with colleagues to see
if they could quantify individual players' performance
by modeling the game of soccer -- creating a network in
which each player in each match of the 2008 Euro Cup is
a node, and tracing the ball flow between them. Each
time the ball flowed toward a possible shot, it passed
through players on a team, and measuring just how
central any one player was in that team flow allowed
the researchers to develop a quantitative measure of
the individual players' contributions to the team.

Amaral has also studied how team members contribute to
creativity by analyzing 113 years of Broadway musicals.
In a 2005 paper in Science, he studied the changing
rosters of librettists, lyricists, producers,
composers, choreographers, and directors and found that
success and creativity seemed to depend on groups that
do not become stale, using the same slate of
collaborators each time. The same thing held true for
teams of scientists conducting research in various
scientific disciplines over 50 years.

Questions about how to make groups better have taken on
new urgency as evidence has accrued that teams are
usurping the central spot once occupied by solo
contributors. A 2007 Science study found that in
science and engineering, patents, social sciences, and
even to some extent in the arts and humanities, there
is a shift at work -- new knowledge is increasingly
being produced by teams.

"This is a matter that is of national interest," Amaral
said. "We have limited resources to spend on any
activity -- including scientific research -- so we would
want to get highest possible benefit from the money we
spend."

The tendency to assign credit to a discrete individual,
not a group, runs deep. There are certainly group
projects in school and bonuses built on team
performance, but there is also a seemingly inescapable
impulse to search in a group for the narrative of the
individual. How did the president guide the country at
a particular time? Who is the scientist that created
the lifesaving drug? People gravitate toward stories of
individuals who matter, despite the fact that much of
human history has been shaped not by one person at a
time but by networks of people, whether they are bands
of hunter-gatherers or corporations.

"Very rarely are we coming up with something that
influences the rest of society as a maverick, on our
own," said Robert Goldstone, a professor of
psychological and brain sciences at Indiana University.

Instead of seeing groups as nameless and faceless
affiliations that swallow up an individual's identity,
the new work on collective behavior suggests that in
company lies opportunity. The field of intelligence
testing has long been controversial, in part because of
concerns that such scores were crude and biased,
pigeon-holing people as stupid or smart. In contrast,
collective intelligence offers a new spectrum of
possibilities. Instead of pronouncing a person's
intellectual engine good or bad, the research suggests
that group intelligence is highly malleable and that
concrete steps -- such as mixing newcomers into an
established team or not allowing a single leader to
dominate -- could fundamentally alter the group's
intelligence.

More broadly, groups and the complex social structure
of human interactions may help account for how people
got "smart" in the first place. The dramatic changes in
science, culture, art, language, technology, and music
over the past thousand years are not due to the
development of brand-new mental or physical capacities.
Instead, it is a particular kind of group benefit,
Goldstone argues, in which human progress bootstraps
upon itself through a collective cultural memory.
Knowledge ratchets up in successive generations without
our having to reinvent technologies, discover laws of
nature anew, or risk tasting all the mushrooms in the
forest.

"There's been a tendency to focus on the negative, the
mob psychology, the idea that people can bring out the
worst in each other," Goldstone said. "There's just as
much evidence that people can bring out the best in
each other."

Carolyn Y. Johnson is a Globe reporter. E-mail
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(c) Copyright 2010 Globe Newspaper Company.

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