Was the sound of distant drumming just the fingers of your hand?
New study finds groups demonstrate distinctive ‘collective intelligence’ when facing difficult tasks. (…)
That collective intelligence, the researchers believe, stems from how well the group works together. For instance, groups whose members had higher levels of “social sensitivity” were more collectively intelligent. “Social sensitivity has to do with how well group members perceive each other’s emotions,” says Christopher Chabris. (…)
The average and maximum intelligence of individual group members did not significantly predict the performance of their groups overall. (…)
Only when analyzing the data did the co-authors suspect that the number of women in a group had significant predictive power. “We didn’t design this study to focus on the gender effect,” Malone says. “That was a surprise to us.” However, further analysis revealed that the effect seemed to be explained by the higher social sensitivity exhibited by females, on average.
photo { Helmut Newton }
