Evidence for a Collective Intelligence Factor in the Performance of Human Groups

Published Online September 30, 2010
Science DOI: 10.1126/science.1193147
Abstract

Psychologists have repeatedly shown that a single statistical factor—often called “general intelligence”—emerges from the correlations among people’s performance on a wide variety of cognitive tasks. But no one has systematically examined whether a similar kind of “collective intelligence” exists for groups of people. In two studies with 699 individuals, working in groups of two to five, we find converging evidence of a general collective intelligence factor that explains a group’s performance on a wide variety of tasks. This “c factor” is not strongly correlated with the average or maximum individual intelligence of group members but is correlated with the average social sensitivity of group members, the equality in distribution of conversational turn-taking, and the proportion of females in the group.

Per chi non è abbonato a Science, c’è un’intervista qui a uno degli autori, Tom Malone. Un estratto:

the co-authors “definitely intend to continue research on this topic,” including studies on the ways groups interact online”

Un pò di “patriottismo”…

Su ScientificAmerican.com è stato pubblicato un articolo in cui si fa riferimento al lavoro di tre fisici italiani dell’Università La Sapienza di Roma che utilizzando dei modelli statistici hanno cercato di individuare nell’approccio di classificazione un pò “caotico” consosciuto come Collaborative Tagging dei pattern riconoscibili nell’utilizzo di determinati tag, ossia ciò che nell’articolo chiamano “semiotic dynamics”.

qui un estratto:

A team of physicists from the University of Rome “La Sapienza” sought to determine the underlying statistical properties of this new information paradigm by studying the behaviors of tags—single words used to describe the content of a linked article or photo—on the social bookmarking/collaborative tagging sites del.icio.us and Connotea. [Editor’s Note: Scientific American and Connotea are owned by the same holding company.]

“The idea was to try and see if we could apply complex systems science methods to modeling a system which is an IT system, but exposing, in a very explicit and complex way, the social component—the activity of people,” first author Ciro Cattuto says. “In this system, the linguistic element—the word, the symbol—is a dynamical entity and plays the role of a particle in statistical mechanics.”

L’articolo dei tre fisici è reperibile qui
e inoltre altre info sono disponibili sul sito del progetto Tagora che coinvolge tra gli altri i creatori di Bibsonomy
Infine… uno studio analogo precedente sulle dinamiche e i patterns riconoscibili in del.icio.us è disponibile qui