Group items tagged

Research (pdf) by Woolley et al: 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.

"Belfort and her colleagues gathered data from 1,312 mothers and children in the United States, tracking everything from the mother's frequency of breastfeeding to other factors including the mother's intelligence, the mother and father's education levels, measures of the home environment, the mother's employment and the type of childcare the baby received."

It has been claimed by some researchers that our intelligence or ability to understand the world around us is complex. Some people are better at understanding some things than others. For some of us it is relatively easy to understand how a flower grows but it is immensely difficult for us to understand and use a musical instrument. For others music might be easy but playing football is difficult. Instead of having one intelligence it is claimed that we have several different intelligences.

Vol II, Issue 2 - Spring 2002; California Science Teachers Association