5. Collective Intelligence

Note that we made this class into one of the Academy's

FreeMiniCourses, enroll onto Course D. to participate

it was recorded with Tom Atlee,

of the Co-Intelligence Institute

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.

And each of these is addressed by designing for Inclusion in groups. See Inclusion and Collective Intelligence article.