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We examined group-IQ in 3 independent studies.
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Gender balance and turn-taking were unrelated to group performance.
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Social sensitivity had no impact on latent group-IQ.
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Individual IQ emerged as the cause of group-IQ.
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Group-IQ almost exclusively reflects individual cognition.
What allows groups to behave intelligently? One suggestion is that groups exhibit a collective intelligence accounted for by number of women in the group, turn-taking and emotional empathizing, with group-IQ being only weakly-linked to individual IQ ( et al 2010).
Here we report tests of this model across 3 studies with 312 people.
Contrary to prediction, individual IQ accounted for around 80% of group-IQ differences. Hypotheses that group-IQ increases with number of women in the group and with turn-taking were not supported. ‘Reading the mind in the eyes’ (RME) performance was associated with individual IQ, and, in one study, with group-IQ factor scores. However, a well-fitting structural model combining data from studies 2 and 3 indicated that RME exerted no influence on the group-IQ latent factor (instead having a modest impact on a single group test).
The experiments instead showed that higher individual IQ enhances group performance such that individual IQ determined 100% of latent group-IQ. Implications for future work on group-based achievement are examined.
[Keywords: collective intelligence, group IQ, IQ, gender, communication, group psychology, administrative behavior]
