Eric Calvert's List: Organizational IQ

• 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.

• Virtually all talk of cognitive enhancement focuses exclusively on the enhancement of individual intelligence. But what about enhancing group intelligence?
• In a fascinating paper published in Science entitled “Evidence for a Collective Intelligence Factor in the Performance of Human Groups” (2010), Dr. Anita Williams Woolley and her colleagues (yes, the research was collaborative!) make two important discoveries:
• 1. They find that there is such a thing as collective intelligence. What is collective intelligence? Well, it’s the analogue of general intelligence, or IQ, except it exists at the level of the group rather than the individual. What’s useful about IQ – our best measure of an individual’s general intellectual ability – is that it can be used to predict how an individual will perform in a number of different cognitive domains. (That’s why it’s called “general” intelligence!) Using the same basic approach for quantifying individual general intelligence, Woolley et al find that groups exhibit a similar property that is both measurable and allows for accurate predictions of how a group will perform on a range of cognitive tasks.
• 2. The researchers find some quite intriguing – and counterintuitive – correlations between properties at the level of the individual and the level of the group.
• However, Woolley and her colleagues find only a statistically weak correlation between the intelligence of groups and these two member-level properties. In other words, it’s not possible to accurately predict how well groups will perform on a range of cognitive tasks simply by averaging the IQs of its members, or by noting a single exceptional individual within the group.
• What, then, determines how smart a group of collaborating individuals is? The researchers find three individual-level features that correlate in a statistically significant way to collective intelligence.
• First, the greater the social sensitivity of group members, the smarter the group. Second, the more turn-taking within the group, the better the group performs. And third, the more women in the group, the higher the group IQ.
• What I find most interesting about the paper, though, at least from the perspective of transhumanism, is the following remark at the end: “More importantly, it would seem to be much easier to raise the intelligence of a group than an individual. Could a group’s collective intelligence be increased by, for example, better electronic collaboration tools?”
• This is interesting because virtually all talk of “cognitive enhancement” in the literature today focuses exclusively on the enhancement of individual intelligence. But what about group intelligence? Maybe there are technologies or strategies for cognitive enhancement that are applicable on the group rather than individual level? The authors themselves suggest, in the quote above, that increasing the information-sharing abilities of group members using “electronic collaborative tools” might enhance the intelligence of the group itself (without necessarily increasing the intelligence of individual group members).
  
• Thus, according to the Parity Principle, inanimate objects like a pad of paper, a calculator, a computer, Wikipedia, an iPhone, and so on, can all, under just the right conditions, constitute a literal component of one’s cognitive system – of one’s mind. But, one might wonder, what’s stopping one from considering other brains to be literal components of one’s extended mind too?

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