Collective Intelligence is an underexplored research field concerned with understanding and enhancing the collaborative cognitive power of groups of humans. Woolley et al. (2010) discovered that group performance on cognitive tasks is more strongly correlated with the average social sensitivity (r = 0.26, P = 0.002) of the members of the group, than with their average intelligence (r = 0.15, P = 0.04) or the individual maximum intelligence (r = 0.19, P = 0.008).
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.
My best guess is that Wolley’s work is either really shoddy or fraud. The paper you cite from her failed to replicate pretty hard: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0160289616303282
Well damn… Well spotted.
I found the full-text version and will dig in to this next week to see what’s up exactly.