I’m open to the idea that the factors informing group performance might not be identical to those informing individual performance, and it seems plausible that intra-group communication could play a strong role in that, but this is a result suspiciously amenable to the NYT’s politics. Probably deserves a grain or two of salt.
You have probably actually heard of this study already—it was in the news briefly when the Science article got published in 2010, this is just a rehash.
Anyhow, to some extent this is factor analysis smoke and mirrors—just because there’s this nice factor that correlates well with performance on group tasks doesn’t mean that the causal mechanism doesn’t go through cognitive skills. This is especially obvious in the case of gender, where it seems implausible that women improve average performance just by exuding some sort of aura. They probably do it by using skills that are distributed differently among genders and weren’t captured by the study’s emotional-perceptiveness test. So as soon as they include number of women in their c-factor, you know it’s correlational and not necessarily telling you useful actions to take (e.g. the intervention “get people to talk more equally” has no guarantee of helping, even though equal time spent talking correlates with success).
But, that said, there is this nice factor that correlates well with performance on group tasks, and if one wants a diagnostic test, and your tasks look like those in the study (e.g. brainstorming, within-group bargaining, playing checkers, designing a building), and your participants are drawn from a population similar to college students, it’s more valuable to measure social skills than it is IQ.
EDIT: Nor are they discounting intelligence. From the paper:
If c exists, what causes it? Combining the findings of the two studies, the average intelligence of individual group members was moderately correlated with c (r = 0.15, P = 0.04), and so was the intelligence of the highest-scoring team member (r = 0.19, P = 0.008). However, for both studies, c was still a much better predictor of group performance on the criterion tasks than the average or maximum individual intelligence
The correlation coefficients for intelligence are about half to 2⁄3 those for the social perceptiveness and turn-taking—and also about half to 2⁄3 what the correlation with IQ is when doing these tasks alone. this is consistent with the hypothesis that when working in groups, less of the variation depends on IQ and more of the variation between groups is due to different levels of social skills.
That’s pretty much exactly what the article, and the quoted selection, said. The improved performance of teams with more women is attributed to from gender disparity on the test for “Reading the Mind in the Eyes, which measures how well people can read complex emotional states from images of faces with only the eyes visible.”
I’m open to the idea that the factors informing group performance might not be identical to those informing individual performance, and it seems plausible that intra-group communication could play a strong role in that, but this is a result suspiciously amenable to the NYT’s politics. Probably deserves a grain or two of salt.
You have probably actually heard of this study already—it was in the news briefly when the Science article got published in 2010, this is just a rehash.
Anyhow, to some extent this is factor analysis smoke and mirrors—just because there’s this nice factor that correlates well with performance on group tasks doesn’t mean that the causal mechanism doesn’t go through cognitive skills. This is especially obvious in the case of gender, where it seems implausible that women improve average performance just by exuding some sort of aura. They probably do it by using skills that are distributed differently among genders and weren’t captured by the study’s emotional-perceptiveness test. So as soon as they include number of women in their c-factor, you know it’s correlational and not necessarily telling you useful actions to take (e.g. the intervention “get people to talk more equally” has no guarantee of helping, even though equal time spent talking correlates with success).
But, that said, there is this nice factor that correlates well with performance on group tasks, and if one wants a diagnostic test, and your tasks look like those in the study (e.g. brainstorming, within-group bargaining, playing checkers, designing a building), and your participants are drawn from a population similar to college students, it’s more valuable to measure social skills than it is IQ.
EDIT: Nor are they discounting intelligence. From the paper:
The correlation coefficients for intelligence are about half to 2⁄3 those for the social perceptiveness and turn-taking—and also about half to 2⁄3 what the correlation with IQ is when doing these tasks alone. this is consistent with the hypothesis that when working in groups, less of the variation depends on IQ and more of the variation between groups is due to different levels of social skills.
That’s pretty much exactly what the article, and the quoted selection, said. The improved performance of teams with more women is attributed to from gender disparity on the test for “Reading the Mind in the Eyes, which measures how well people can read complex emotional states from images of faces with only the eyes visible.”