The Nexus of 2024

Collective intelligence, diversity, and social networks

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by

jon
in

Originally published as “Hold that thought”
(Part 5 of “TechCrunch, disrupted”)

The day after TechCrunch Disrupt ended, a fascinating study on “collective intelligence” led by Anita Woolley of Carnegie Mellon University appeared in Science.   The researchers found that a group’s success in solving problems wasn’t correlated to the average intelligence of the group, or the IQ of the smartest person.  Instead, it was related to “social sensitivity”, whether everybody got to participate in the discussions, and the number of women in the group.

The article’s behind a paywall, but Malicia Rogue’s On savvy and groups discusses it in detail and provides a lot of background.  There’s an excellent discussion on GeekFeminism, a podcast on CBC, and good articles in National Geographic, NPR, Science Daily, and The Globe and Mail.

Nobody mentioned it in the press coverage, but these results also align with Scott Page’s underlying model of the value of cognitive diversity in problem solving. Diversity = Productivity summarizes Scott’s work showing why diverse teams perform better than individual experts or even teams of experts — if they can work together effectively, that is.*   So while there’s a lot more to discuss about this study, for now let’s just accept its results at face value and hypothesize that they apply to larger teams as well.

Now consider a group that we’ll call “TechCrunch and friends”.  How effective would we expect them to be at problem solving?

  • They’re not known for their social sensitivity
  • A few people do a disproportionate share of the talking and a lot of others don’t get to speak much
  • There aren’t a lot of women involved

Hmm, in fact now that I think of it, the same could be said for the whole Silicon Valley, VC/angel, and tech blogosphere worlds.**

Hold that thought.

Speaking of socially-insensitive environments where there aren’t a lot of women involved, CV Harquail has a pair of intriguing posts on Authentic Organizations:

With women as the majority of Facebook users, a movie portraying their CEO as a sexist asshole, a track record of privacy invasions, you’d think that the entrepreneurial world would be all over this opportunity — especially with Dreamwidth as an example of an alternative path.  And who knows, maybe I just am out of the loop and there are in fact a bunch of startups who have gotten funding to go after it and for some reason none of them demoed at Disrupt.

Then again, maybe something’s keeping TechCrunch and the Silicon Valley, VC/angel, and tech blogosphere worlds from seeing the opportunity.

Their loss.

jon

* Scott’s book The Difference goes into a lot more detail on the value of diversity and when and why crowds are wise.  Adam Shostack has a short review on Emergent Chaos

** and YCombinator, Quora, Microsoft and Diaspora too. But I digress.

image via Authentic Organizations

Earlier posts in the “TechCrunch, disrupted” series: Fretting, asking, and begging isn’t a plan,  Collusion is sooo hot right now,
The third wave meets the anatomy of awesome, Changing the ratio,
A public service announcement, and A celebration of disruptive women

Comments

8 responses to “Collective intelligence, diversity, and social networks”

  1. Karen G. Anderson Avatar
    Karen G. Anderson

    Jon,
    I’d want to know more about the types of problems the groups were solving, and the pressures (time, risk) and contexts involved. I’d also have wanted to see all-male, mixed-gender, and all-female groups compared.
    My observations, from my own experience in technology and research companies and on boards, is that women-led groups tend to come up with more robust solutions that are more likely to succeed (and be accepted by users) when implemented, but that they often do so at a much slower pace — which means the solution is often not made available in a timely manner. I’d also note that the women-led solutions tend to require greater subsequent involvement of the members of the group (they are not solutions that get handed off to others to implement). I’m not quite sure what that means, but it’s definitely a difference…
    Karen

    Reply
  2. jon Avatar
    jon

    Thanks for the comment, Karen. Not sure about the details of the problem-solving, but tasks included brainstorming to come up with possible uses for a brick, “solving Raven’s Advanced Progressive Matrices” (whatever the heck that means), and also real-world ones such as planning a shopping trip for a group of people sharing the same car.

    From my experiences, diverse teams tend to come up with better solutions … and yeah it usually takes longer to come up with something that’s accepted by users than something that isn’t (or for that matter to get everybody’s input as opposed to letting a couple of people dominate the conversation). Also it can be take a while for diverse teams of people to learn to work together effectively. Of course these are all things that are very hard to test in studies like this.

    Interesting point about how you’ve been women-led solutions tending to require long-term involvement … like you, I’m not sure what it implies.

    jon

    Reply
  3. jon Avatar
    jon

    Don’t understand what the product is? Ask a Woman, on physorg, describes another interesting study, this one from researchers at the University of Western Ontario.

    The researchers examined consumer reactions to innovative products, like a car without visible wheels or a soft drink packaged in a strange way. In their experiments, some participants viewed advertisements for normal-looking products, whereas others saw extremely unusual products. Sometimes the ads for the unusual items were alongside similar products and other times they were alongside completely unrelated products.

    “Our results show that women are better than men at figuring out an extremely unusual product, as long as the product is promoted among competing products,” the authors write. For example, female participants understood that a car without visible wheels was a car if the ad appeared in a magazine with other car ads, while men had trouble.

    Reply
  4. jon Avatar
    jon

    Aaron Saenz’ MIT Unravels the Secrets Behind Collective Intelligence – Hint: IQ Not So Important on Singularity Hub discusses Woolley et. al.’s research in more detail, and includes a video hosted by NSF:

    Reply
  5. jon Avatar
    jon

    From the New York Times, Why Some Teams Are Smarter Than Others summarizes Woolsey et. al.’s research, including a new paper in PLOS One that looks at collective intelligence online as well as in person. Here’s how she summarizes the 2010 paper:

    Instead, the smartest teams were distinguished by three characteristics.

    First, their members contributed more equally to the team’s discussions, rather than letting one or two people dominate the group.

    Second, their members scored higher on a test called 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.

    Finally, teams with more women outperformed teams with more men. Indeed, it appeared that it was not “diversity” (having equal numbers of men and women) that mattered for a team’s intelligence, but simply having more women. This last effect, however, was partly explained by the fact that women, on average, were better at “mindreading” than men.

    The new study also looks at the differences between face-to-face and online problem solving.

    We randomly assigned each of 68 teams to complete our collective intelligence test in one of two conditions. Half of the teams worked face to face, like the teams in our earlier studies. The other half worked online, with no ability to see any of their teammates. Online collaboration is on the rise, with tools like Skype, Google Drive and old-fashioned email enabling groups that never meet to execute complex projects. We wanted to see whether groups that worked online would still demonstrate collective intelligence, and whether social ability would matter as much when people communicated purely by typing messages into a browser.

    And the answer was yes on all fronts. Collective intelligence can emerge even with textual online communications; and the same three ingredients correlated with success: lots of communication with equal participation; good emotion-reading skills; and the majority of the team being women.

    Reply
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