Collective Intelligence in Human Groups

Speaker
Anita Woolley
Assistant Professor of Organizational Behavior and Theory, Tepper School of Business, Carnegie Mellon University

When
-

Where
Newell-Simon Hall 1305 (Michael Mauldin Auditorium)

Video
Video link

Description

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 192 groups, 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. Ongoing research explores the relationship between collective intelligence and group learning, and the implications for collaboration in large groups in online environments.

Speaker's Bio

Anita Williams Woolley is an Assistant Professor of Organizational Behavior and Theory at the Tepper School of Business. She has a PhD in Organizational Behavior from Harvard University, where she also earned Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees. At the Tepper School of Business, she teaches MBA and undergraduate courses on managing groups and teams in organizations.

Prof. Woolley’s research and teaching interests include collaborative analysis and problem-solving in teams; online collaboration and collective intelligence; and managing multiple team memberships. Professor Woolley’s research has been published in Science, Academy of Management Review, Organization Science, Journal of Organizational Behavior, and Small Group Research, among others. Her research has been funded by grants from the National Science Foundation, the U.S. Army Research Institute, as well as private corporations. She has won awards for her research and her teaching.

Professor Woolley has served on the editorial boards for Organization Science and Small Group Research, and is a member of the Academy of Management, the Interdisciplinary Network for Group Research, and the Association for Psychological Science.

Host
Sara Kiesler