Smart groups of smart people: Evidence for IQ as the origin of collective intelligence in the performance of human groups

Timothy Bates, Shivani Gupta

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

Abstract / Description of output

What allows groups to behave intelligently? One suggestion is that groups exhibit a collective intelligence accounted for by number of women in the group, turn-taking and emotional empathizing, with group-IQ being only weakly-linked to individual IQ (Woolley, Chabris, Pentland, Hashmi, & Malone, 2010). Here we report tests of this model across three studies with 312 people. Contrary to prediction, individual IQ accounted for around 80% of group-IQ differences. Hypotheses that group-IQ increases with number of women in the group and with turn-taking were not supported. Reading the mind in the eyes (RME) performance was associated with individual IQ, and, in one study, with group-IQ factor scores. However, a well-fitting structural model combining data from studies 2 and 3 indicated that RME exerted no influence on the group-IQ latent factor (instead having a modest impact on a single group test). The experiments instead showed that higher individual IQ enhances group performance such that individual IQ determined 100% of latent group-IQ. Implications for future work on group-based achievement are examined.
Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)46-56
Number of pages11
JournalIntelligence
Volume60
Early online date23 Nov 2016
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - Feb 2017

Keywords / Materials (for Non-textual outputs)

  • IQ
  • collective intelligence
  • embodied cognition
  • group processes

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