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The concept of "collective intelligence" is simple — it asserts that if a team performs well on one task, it will repeat that success on other projects, regardless of the scope or focus of the work. While it sounds good in theory, it doesn't work that way in reality, according to an Iowa State University researcher.
Marcus Credé, an assistant professor of psychology, says unlike individuals, group dynamics are too complex to predict a team's effectiveness with one general factor, such as intelligence. Instead, there are a variety of factors — leadership, group communication, decision-making skills —that affect a team's performance, he said.
Anita Woolley's research supporting collective intelligence quickly gained traction in the business world when it was first introduced in 2010. The attention was not surprising to Credé. Because organizations rely heavily on group work, managers are always looking for a "silver bullet" to improve team performance, he said. However, after re-analyzing the data gathered by Woolley and her colleagues, Credé and Garett Howardson, an assistant professor at Hofstra University, found the data didn't support the basic premise of collective intelligence. Their work is published in the Journal of Applied Psychology.
[Source]: You would not ask a firefighter to perform open-heart surgery
Do you agree with this premise?
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 19 2017, @07:24AM (8 children)
"even individuals are too complex to predict their effectiveness with one general factor, such as intelligence"
FTFY
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 19 2017, @07:47AM
Was a 70-80 year old DD guy named Lyon.
He would always take the full time to do an assignment, occasionally asking me for help. However, unlike most of the people in class, who were of average or 'superior' intelligence, he had spent a lifetime working through problems due to his 'slowness' and while he had trouble understanding or memorizing things at first, he was much better at learning from his mistakes and not making the same ones over again.
In contrast, many of the other people who asked for my help would ask the same questions every few hours/days and end up STILL making the same mistakes by the time they submitted their assignments, because they thought they were smart and 'got it' and didn't take the time to either mentally or physically repeat or experiment with what was needed to memorize it.
Long story short: He got an A in the class. I got a C (ended up helping other people so much I didn't get all my own assignments completed.) And many of the rest ranged from Bs to Ds.
Collective Intelligence doesn't mean working outside of your knowledge base. But it does mean utilizing the strengths of each member of a group, and in an ideal world, admitting to your own weaknesses so your fellow team members can make up for your weaknesses as you can make up for theirs, even if it is running errands or tending to the team's nutritional needs, or just making sure they get some sleep once in a while.
Sadly in our salary based culture this often doesn't happen because people are too concerned with personal achievements for advancement, and many good, but not necessarily 'innovative' or 'technically skilled' workers' accomplishments for the group are overlooked in both salary and contribution to the success of the whole. Plenty of places where this is/was not true, but it seems to happen far more with every passing year.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 19 2017, @08:39AM (4 children)
Unlike 'group intelligence', this is something that has been tested and heavily scrutinized. In the egalitarian zeitgeist of society today, there is naturally a strong desire to refute it, and there have been many attempts to do just that. It still holds very true. The reality is that people who do well at one cognitive task tend to do well at most others by any and all possible measurements. This is why I think it's increasingly cruel in today's society to pretend that everybody can do whatever they want if they just try hard enough. In some cases that is true. In most, it is not. And I imagine a large part of the sharp increase in anxiety, depression, and various other mental disorders today is this intersection of reality and ideology hitting people. For the vast majority of people you may as well tell them they can sprout wings and fly if they just try hard enough. They can try harder than any person has ever tried at anything, and it's not going to happen. That's going to lead to self doubt, depression, frustration, damaged self worth, and other such fun things -- all because we think we're being nice and progressive by pretending everybody can be everything.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by khallow on Thursday October 19 2017, @04:19PM (3 children)
Like people who are really good at counting objects are also really good at interacting with people? Sure.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 19 2017, @08:11PM (2 children)
Whether or not someone is "good" at interacting with others is subjective.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 19 2017, @08:32PM
Correct. Was Hitler "good" at interacting with others?
*ducks*
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday October 19 2017, @09:50PM
Just like any other nebulous category of human behavior. But you can always develop objective measures of various tasks associated with said category.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 19 2017, @05:16PM (1 child)
Not really. In inconvenient fact that progressive people tend to ignore is that you can predict effectiveness with a general factor. It's not perfect and there are tons of exceptions, but it is true.
It's similar to saying that if there were two people, one is a man and one is a woman, you can predict that the man can lift a heavier object than a woman can. There are tons of exceptions, as any given woman can be stronger than any given man (so saying "women can't do ____" is shortsighted), but outright ignoring the simple biological fact is silly.
Likewise, if you took a set of 1000 people at age 20 and did some tests on them, you could make predictions of their future success at age 60. It wouldn't be a 1-1 correlation, but it wouldn't be a 0 correlation, either.
You don't have to believe me, either. Just do some honest searching online for the longitudinal studies which have been done... such as: http://www.businessinsider.com/conscientiousness-predicts-success-2014-4 [businessinsider.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 19 2017, @08:14PM
How? Using what tests? I hope you're not going to rely on the social pseudosciences, since they are simply comical and often too subjective to reach any actual conclusions.