What Makes a Group Smart?

Today’s post is is adapted from a longer interview with Thomas Malone, conducted by Art Kleiner of strategy+business.

What if you could measure the intelligence of a group? What if you could predict which committees, assigned to design a horse, would end up with a camel, versus which would develop a thoroughbred—or a race car? The MIT Sloan School of Management’s Center for Collective Intelligence (CCI) was set up to accomplish just that sort of evaluation. Under the leadership of its founding director, Thomas W. Malone, the center’s ambition is to put forth a new theory of group performance, bringing together insights from social psychology, computer science, group dynamics, social media, crowdsourcing, and the center’s own experiments in group behavior. The results could help business teams produce more thoroughbreds and fewer camels.

S+B: How did you make the leap from individual to collective intelligence in your own research?
MALONE: We started with our basic definition: an intelligent group of individuals is one that acts together in ways that seem intelligent to an observer. As with individual intelligence, the observer has to pick some set of goals with respect to which to evaluate the group’s intelligence. But notice that in this case, the goals the observer uses may not be the same as those of any individuals in the group. For instance, you might evaluate the “intelligence” of a group of pedestrians on a busy New York City sidewalk on the basis of how evenly they distribute themselves over the sidewalk, even though each individual is just trying to get to a destination without colliding with someone else.

S+B: Are you more likely to have mediocre people become a smart group, or are you more likely to have smart people become a mediocre group?
MALONE: Statistically, either could happen. Of course, we all know from our own experience that you can have very ineffective groups made up of very smart people. Now we have a precise, scientific demonstration of that.

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.

S+B: What do you mean by social perceptiveness?
MALONE: This is the ability to correctly read the emotions of other people. We measured it using a test developed by the British autism researcher Simon Baron-Cohen. The test is called “Reading the Mind in the Eyes.” You show people pictures of other people’s eyes, and ask them to guess what emotion the person in the picture is feeling. There is a correct answer, and the test significantly distinguishes autistic from non-autistic people. Even among non-autistic people, there’s a significant enough range that it turns out to be useful for a lot of purposes, including this study. We found that a group is more collectively intelligent if the people in it are, on average, more socially perceptive—that is, if they are good at reading emotions from other people’s eyes.

We found that the same measure of social perceptiveness, the “Reading the Mind in the Eyes” test, was equally predictive of most groups’ collective intelligence. We believe this means that the autism test is actually measuring a broad range of interpersonal skills. Psychologists call these broader skills theory of mind. The term refers to the ability, which is more developed in some people than others, to create a mental theory about what’s inside other people’s brains.

S+B: And if the members of a certain group have a high level of this ability, that group is more likely to be more collectively intelligent?
MALONE: Yes, but that’s only one factor. The second factor was the degree to which the group members participated evenly. When one or two people dominated the conversation, the group on average was less intelligent. Here again was a precise confirmation of what many people have perceived in their own team meetings.

The third factor we found that correlated with the group’s collective intelligence was the proportion of women in the group. If there were more women in the group, the group performed better. In general, the higher the ratio of women to men, the better the performance.

In our results, this third factor was largely explained, at least statistically, by the first result. It was known, before our work, that women on average score higher than men on the test of social perceptiveness. So one interpretation of our results is that what you really need for a group to be intelligent is to have lots of people in the group who are high on this measure of social perceptiveness, regardless of whether the people are men or women.

MIT professor Thomas Malone discusses why women can increase a group’s collective intelligence.

S+B: Do you have a sense of why those three factors are so critical?
MALONE: Although all three factors have roughly equal correlations with collective intelligence, when put into a regression at the same time, the only one that is statistically significant is the first one, social perceptiveness. So, and this is somewhat speculative, one might conclude that the most important factor in collective intelligence is having groups where people are good at perceiving one another’s emotions accurately, or, more generally, where they have high social intelligence.

S+B: Is this a learnable or cultivatable skill?
MALONE: Excellent question, and we don’t know for sure. This quality in people appears to have some genetic component. It may also be influenced by hormones; it’s been negatively correlated with high levels of testosterone. Those are reasons to believe it’s not very changeable.

Having good theory of mind skills is not necessarily the same as having empathy. Of course, they’re related. You couldn’t be empathetic without some theory of mind skill, because you wouldn’t even be aware of other people’s feelings. But you could accurately perceive what other people were feeling and thinking, while not caring about them. If you didn’t have any actual sympathy for them, you could use that accurate perception to manipulate or take advantage of them.

– This post is adapted from a longer interview with Thomas Malone, conducted by Art Kleiner of strategy+business.  To read the full interview, click here.

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