Evidence for a Collective Intelligence Factor in the Performance of Human Groups
- Anita Williams Woolley1,*,
- Christopher F. Chabris2,3,
- Alex Pentland3,4,
- Nada Hashmi3,5 and
- Thomas W. Malone3,5
- 1Carnegie Mellon University, Tepper School of Business, Pittsburgh, PA 15213, USA.
- 2Union College, Schenectady, NY 12308, USA.
- 3Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Center for Collective Intelligence, Cambridge, MA 02142, USA.
- 4MIT Media Lab, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA.
- 5MIT Sloan School of Management, Cambridge, MA 02142, USA.
- *To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: awoolley{at}cmu.edu
Abstract
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.
- Received for publication 2 June 2010.
- Accepted for publication 10 September 2010.
