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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.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 19 2017, @08:30AM (2 children)
The "science" here is really really bad. Here [cmu.edu] is the original paper. The psychologist came to her conclusions by breaking people up into a bunch of random groups and then setting them to a variety of tasks such as playing video games, "making collective moral judgements", "group typing", "brainstorming", and planning a shopping trip... seriously. The results were pretty much random so therefore it's concluded that individual ability plays no role in groups. That is the state of psychology today.
The most obvious question would be if you have a group of 5 'video game experts', and a group of 3 'video game experts' along with 2 girls who are bad at games but who did really well on the "Reading the Mind in the Eyes test" she focused on (again, I am not making this up), how would the groups perform relative to one another? That question was not tested, and a cynic would say it's because the answer is self evident. Even worse is the psychologist's study pretended to answer this question while specifically constructing her study to avoid doing so. In other words she seems to have assumed her conclusion and built an experiment designed to confirm it as opposed to test it. And that is modern psychology in a nutshell. This brilliant work was made possible by public grants from the National Science Foundation and Army Research Office.
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Thursday October 19 2017, @04:09PM (1 child)
My wife plays video games with me. She usually starts out a bit on the horribly awful side for a game, but with practice and a bit of coaching from me. She usually ends up being a competent player. So, yeah, team work works.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 19 2017, @06:59PM
The question is not whether team work works, but whether the result of a team is substantially different than the sum of its parts. Imagine your skill can somehow be measured to be an 8 and your wife's a 6. Would you two then perform better than two 9s working together?
That is what "collective intelligence" is fundamentally asking. Is a team mostly just the sum of its parts, or can it somehow become radically different? Companies want to believe the latter as it justifies hiring low skill and low wage employees. Any problems can then be blamed not on you choosing to hire subpar individuals, but completely unpredictable and unfortunate lock that the subpar individuals you chose didn't mesh to create the correct "collective intelligence." Bring in some more and roll the dice again. You'll win, some day.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by krishnoid on Thursday October 19 2017, @08:46AM
But probably not for those reasons, particularly owing to the evolution and complexity of medical practice [newyorker.com].
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 19 2017, @08:46AM (2 children)
You would however ask the IT support guy to perform anything from high voltage electrical work to redecorating your office.
(Score: 2) by MostCynical on Thursday October 19 2017, @09:07AM
For free, while also complaining to everyone else how IT are so unhelpful, because they couldn't recover a document you'd over written, deleted, or never saved in the first place.
"I guess once you start doubting, there's no end to it." -Batou, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Thursday October 19 2017, @09:16AM
Because everybody knows the IT guy has a mind buzzing with multiple personalities therefore a collective intelligence.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0
(Score: 5, Interesting) by c0lo on Thursday October 19 2017, @09:12AM (5 children)
Collective intelligence - when none of us is as dumb as all of us.
It invariably happens when we have a manager.
ref [shopify.com]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0
(Score: 2, Interesting) by anubi on Thursday October 19 2017, @09:48AM (1 child)
My concern is when I am under orders to do it the wrong way.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 4, Insightful) by srobert on Thursday October 19 2017, @03:58PM
Happens to me frequently. I do it comforted by the knowledge that inefficiency is perpetuating the need for my employment.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 19 2017, @10:20AM
Dang! You beat me to the "none of us is as dumb as all of us" quote.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 19 2017, @11:26AM (1 child)
That would be a "series resistance/attenuation" topology of a group organization. Obviously, there are other topologies as well.
But, in worse case, yes, wrong type of organization would make all of us dumber more than any one of us, and given that there are tasks which are far too complex and large for any single one of us, that exactly is the reason to study and improve the collective intelligence of groups.
(Score: 1) by Ethanol-fueled on Thursday October 19 2017, @02:04PM
I always liked the quote:
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 19 2017, @10:04AM
In the USA you should not ask a cop to save lives. In the USA if you see someone about to commit suicide and actually want them alive, it's probably better for you to call firefighters than cops:
http://www.azcentral.com/story/news/local/southwest-valley/2017/07/26/avondale-police-fatally-shoot-man-during-suicide-call/512796001/ [azcentral.com]
http://edition.cnn.com/2017/05/11/us/wv-cop-fired-for-not-shooting--lawsuit/index.html [cnn.com]
http://www.palmbeachpost.com/news/update-suicidal-woman-shot-killed-florida-police-was-army-vet/IKhMX1WZ8XEElMyF3DCyIM/ [palmbeachpost.com]
In the USA if you want someone dead call the cops on them. US cops are trigger happy that's why SWATing is life threatening.
p.s. I know this isn't related, but if you look closer at the research the actual data or reality is not that related to the conclusion either. And at least my garbage may save lives.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Thursday October 19 2017, @12:24PM (2 children)
Decades of experience in school and corporate world indicates this means one dude on the team did all the work.
I've seen successful teams where multiple tasks were done successfully, completely separately with a common goal often confused as "one task" (for example, from a PHB perspective, whats so complicated about Y2K?). And note that commodity bulk labor is merely multiple tasks aka you are responsible for 6 feet of coal face now keep up with the other 500 miners of get fired. I've also seen plenty of individual success, especially where the team or team leader take all the credit.
On the downside the best stuff I've seen from teams working on the same task is taking the blame for previously made upper mgmt decisions, and platypus like designs.
Nothing is ever accomplished by teams. Teams are just a low productivity peer pressure algorithm.
There is a strong political component to "only teams can produce" and its very irrational / belief oriented, much like other mgmt fads like open offices and elimination of remote working.
So the specific problem reported is the one guy on the team doing all the work is not an expert in all areas. Or there exist problem spaces where a finite team does not have at least one expert on staff to do all the work. Well, no surprise.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 19 2017, @03:39PM
But in a large team, you've got a much better chance that there's at least one who can do that work. Of course if the team gets too large, the probability grows that there are at least two who could do it, which means they will start fighting each other, which brings down effectiveness. Therefore the best team size is the one that maximizes the probability that there is exactly one person in it who is able to do the work.
The job of the team manager is to identify that person, and keep the others busy to make sure they don't interfere with that one person's work.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 19 2017, @06:35PM
Yeah these and others were all done only by one dude on each team:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manhattan_Project#Organization [wikipedia.org]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_program [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 3, Interesting) by srobert on Thursday October 19 2017, @04:04PM
I don't even think we should ask firefighters to be EMT's, but we do. It's a requirement for every firefighter in many fire departments. It's probably good to have some EMT's in the fire department. But in my opinion we ought to let firefighters focus on fire fighting, and let the EMT's focus on emergency medical care. Every professional fire fighter I know agrees with this. And so do many EMT's. So with regard to teams, it may be more effective to allow each member to focus on their specialty and have only a general knowledge outside of their expertise.