Current Directions in Psychological

Science
2015, Vol. 24(6) 420–
424
© The Author(s) 2015
Reprints and permissions:
sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav
DOI: 10.1177/0963721415599543
cdps.sagepub.com
Why do some groups perform better than others? One
clearly important factor is the skills of the group members.
But even groups with comparably skilled members
can have radically different levels of performance.
Considerable work in fields such as social psychology,
organizational behavior, and industrial psychology has
focused on the various factors that predict group performance
(Hackman, 1987; Ilgen, Hollenbeck, Johnson, &
Jundt, 2005; Larson, 2010). In almost all cases, however,
these studies have focused on a specific task and tried to
characterize what leads most groups to perform well on
that kind of task. In these studies, the differences among
groups within an experimental condition have usually
been treated as undesirable error.
Here, we focus instead on the general ability of a particular
group to perform well across a wide range of different
tasks. We call this ability the collective intelligence
of the group, since it is precisely analogous to intelligence
at the individual level. When individuals perform a
wide variety of different cognitive tasks, psychologists
have repeatedly found that a single statistical factor predicts
much of the variance in their performance (e.g.,
Deary, 2012; Spearman, 1904). This factor is often called
general intelligence, or g. But, perhaps surprisingly, until
recently none of the research on group performance had
systematically examined whether a similar kind of
“collective intelligence” exists for groups of people. Our
recent research sought to address this gap.
In our initial studies, we found converging evidence of
a general collective-intelligence factor that predicts a
group’s performance on a wide variety of tasks (Woolley,
Chabris, Pentland, Hashmi, & Malone, 2010). The groups
in our studies ranged in size from two to five members
and spent approximately 5 hours together in our laboratory,
working on a series of tasks that required a range of
qualitatively different collaboration processes (McGrath,
1984). The tasks included creative brainstorming problems,
puzzles involving verbal or mathematical reasoning,
negotiation tasks, and moral-reasoning problems. A
factor analysis of the groups’ scores on all of these tasks
revealed a single dominant factor explaining 43% of the
variance in performance. This is consistent with the 30%
to 50% of variance typically explained by the first factor
derived from the scores of individuals doing many different
cognitive tasks (Chabris, 2007). In individuals, this
factor is called intelligence. For groups, we call this factor
599543
research-art icle 2015
CDPXXX10.1177/0963721415599543Wool ley et al.Collective Inte llige nce and Group Performa nce

Corresponding Author:
Anita Williams Woolley, Tepper School of Business, Carnegie Mellon
University, 5000 Forbes Ave., Pittsburgh, PA 15217
E-mail: awoolley@cmu.edu

Collective Intelligence and

Group Performance
Anita Williams Woolley1, Ishani Aggarwal2, and
Thomas W. Malone3,4
1Tepper School of Business, Carnegie Mellon University; 2Brazilian School of Public and Business Administration,
Fundação Getulio Vargas; 3Sloan School of Management, Massachusetts Institute of Technology; and 4Center for
Collective Intelligence, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Abstract
We review recent research on collective intelligence, which we define as the ability of a group to perform a
wide
variety of tasks. We focus on two influences on a group’s collective intelligence: (a) group composition (e.g.,
the
members’ skills, diversity, and intelligence) and (b) group interaction (e.g., structures, processes, and norms).
We also
call for more research to investigate how social interventions and technological tools can be used to enhance
collective
intelligence.
Keywords
collective intelligence, group performance, group composition, group, process