MIT management professor Tom Malone on collective intelligence and the “genetic” structure of groups

By Megan Garber
Nieman Journalism Lab

Do groups have genetic structures? If so, can they be modified?

Those are two central questions for Thomas Malone, a professor of management and an expert in organizational structure and group intelligence at MIT’s Sloan School of Management. In a talk this week at IBM’s Center for Social Software, Malone explained the insights he’s gained through his research and as the director of the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence, which he launched in 2006 in part to determine how collective intelligence might be harnessed to tackle problems — climate change, poverty, crime — that are generally too complex to be solved by any one expert or group. In his talk, Malone discussed the “genetic” makeup of collective intelligence, teasing out the design differences between, as he put it, “individuals, collectively, and a collective of individuals.”

The smart group

First is the question of whether general cognitive ability — what we think of, when it comes to individuals, as “intelligence” — actually exists for groups. (Spoiler: it does.) Malone and his colleagues, fellow MIT researchers Sandy Pentland and Nada Hashmi, Carnegie Mellon’s Anita Williams Woolley, and Union College’s Christopher Chabris, assembled 192 groups — groups of two to five people each, with 699 subjects in all — and assigned to them various cognitive tasks: planning a shopping trip for a shared house, sharing typing assignments in Google Docs, tackling Raven’s Matrices as a group, brainstorming different uses for a brick. (For you social science nerds, the team chose those assignments based on Joe McGrath‘s taxonomy of group tasks.) Against the results of those assignments, the researchers compared the results of the participants’ individual intelligence tests, as well as the varying qualities of the group, from the easily quantifiable (participants’ gender) to the less so (participants’ general happiness).

And what they found is telling. “The average intelligence of the people in the group and the maximum intelligence of the people in the group doesn’t predict group intelligence,” Malone said. Which is to say: “Just getting a lot of smart people in a group does not necessarily make a smart group.” Furthermore, the researchers found, group intelligence is also only moderately correlated with qualities you’d think would be pretty crucial when it comes to group dynamics — things like group cohesion, satisfaction, “psychological safety,” and motivation. It’s not just that a happy group or a close-knit group or an enthusiastic group doesn’t necessarily equal a smart group; it’s also that those psychological elements have only some effect on groups’ ability to solve problems together.

So how do you engineer groups that can problem-solve effectively? First of all, seed them with, basically, caring people. Group intelligence is correlated, Malone and his colleagues found, with the average social sensitivity — the openness, and receptiveness, to others — of a group’s constituents. The emotional intelligence of group members, in other words, serves the cognitive intelligence of the group overall. And this means that — wait for it — groups with more women tend to be smarter than groups with more men. (As Malone put it: “More females, more intelligence.”) That’s largely mediated by the researchers’ social sensitivity findings: Women tend to be more socially sensitive than men — per Science! — which means that, overall, more women = more emotional intelligence = more group intelligence.

http://www.niemanlab.org/2011/05/mit-management-professor-tom-malone-on-collective-intelligence-and-the-genetic-structure-of-groups/

" and so, if you understand what makes groups smart, you can adjust their factors to make them even smarter. "

That's been long known in business circles, without the formalizations presented here. Basically there have always been these legendary consultants who can take a set of dysfunctional groups in a business and rearrange them so they make crack teams, by changing who's in each group based on harmony of personality traits. It shows how the accomplishments of groups are much different than the sum of parts.

This is MASSIVELY exciting for me. I see all these world problems and its incredibly frustrating because I KNOW we have the human resources to do anything, but our society hasn't figured out how to really utilize them. I also like the moral direction of this thinking: It doesn't present anybody as worthless or bad, or doesn't arrange people based on worth...Rather it accepts the challenge of finding a working group where the "bad" become good.

He's barely scratched the surface. I wonder how much smarter one of his groups would be if they added Michelle Bachman and Sharron Angle? More women, more......oops, didn't think of that. He needs to spend a lot more time observing instead of announcing results.

I'm taking your post as sarcastic, like you're saying adding Sarah Palin to a group wouldn't make it smarter, because she's not smart.

But the reason this work is interesting is because it answers the question, why are people who aren't classically intelligent often so powerful? If Sarah Palin is so dumb why does she have so much more power than so many "smarter" people? (This is backed by research, e.g. 0 correlation between intelligence and income) The answer is because there are clearly different kinds of intelligence, some which manifest emergently in social groups but are not as clear in the individual. These researchers are doing good work, because they are looking at intelligence as a social phenomenon, not something which exists in a vacuum, and I think that sort of thinking is going to be hugely fruitful.

After we got our resident psychopaths off the condo board, it's amazing what we've accomplished (most of them moved out--one we kicked off). It's been a most productive year, we all like each other, or at least respect each other, we work together, we get through our meetings on time and on budget and all that.

Since Palin is a classic psychopath, as are many of the GOP persuasion, it stands to reason that any group that tries to integrate with her will disintegrate.

PS: the group was either completely or mostly female. All the psychopaths were female.

true in psychotherapy groups and AA groups from my experience.

Without one or more of us in the group, the group isn't very productive.

It was an alternative school that tried these group seminars for education and whatnot, but there were always these gender conflicts. Men often wanted to work alone, but women functioned well in groups.

... who often tend to be idiots as individuals. Maybe it's because a lot of individuals' more extreme stupidities get averaged out by the group.

experience that if somebody has to be fired from their job, a woman will do it wholly without remorse.

Also, most divorces are instigated by women . . .

There's nothing like pregnancy and an infant to bring reality home.

You will be assimilated.

You don't have to be a genius to notice that groups composed entirely of narcissisists don't accomplish much, and you don't need an elaborate formal theory to use that knowledge effectively in practice. So I dunno that I exactly disagree with it, but it's based on things that are obvious and on some rather sweeping generalities and gender stereotypes, so I don't really think much of it either.

A party chok full of unempathetic people, control freaks and sociopaths--from the base up to the the leadership. And just plain stupid thrown in randomly when the other traits are not there. As my old boss used to say, give them unlimited funds and unlimited power, and they will still trip over their own dick.

it's likely to end up like the Lord of the Flies result.