Thomas Malone [Archive.org URL]

We found four factors that were correlated—four things that might account for the degree of collective intelligence in a team. The first was the most obvious: the intelligence of the individual team members. We had expected that the group intelligence would correlate with the average or maximum intelligence of individual group members. But we were surprised to find that the correlation was not very strong. In other words, just having a bunch of smart people in a group doesn’t necessarily make a smart group. Many other factors that we thought would be significant predictors weren’t. These included things like psychological safety and group cohesiveness. But we did find three additional factors that were significantly correlated with the group’s collective intelligence. The first was the average social perceptiveness of the group members, the second had to do with the equality of contribution, and the third was the ratio of men to women in the group.

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