Research recently published by scientists from MIT, Carnegie Mellon and Union College has nearly broken the internet in the past few days. Its headline assertion is that groups can become ‘smarter’ simply by the addition of women to the group and that the more women involved the smarter the group.
Women are more ‘intelligent’ than men
The research indicates that in the same way that some individuals are more intelligent than others some groups are more intelligent than others in terms of performing tasks, brainstorming and so on. In fact, it is not the collective intelligence level of the group that indicates which will succeed but the “average social sensitivity” of the group.
“In two studies with 699 people, 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.”
– Evidence for a Collective Intelligence Factor in the Performance of Human Groups
This is why adding women to a group tends to improve performance, because women are across the board better at reading visual cues from others, reading between the lines and reading the mind of others. Men simply do not compete in this area. It is also interesting to see that the more people contributing, in terms of conversational turn-taking, has a positive impact on the groups’ performance. It indicates that there is no reason to shy away from larger work groups provided everyone is included sufficiently.
Mind reading test
“The Reading the Mind in the Eyes (RME test) scores of group members were a strong predictor of how well the groups could perform a wide range of tasks together, even when participants were only collaborating online via text chat and could not see each other’s eyes or facial expressions at all.”
If you want to take the test to see how good you are at reading minds you can access it here –
RME.
Of course, if the skills or intelligence to solve a problem are not contained in an individual in the group no amount of average social sensitivity is going to be able to come up with, say, the HTML code for an app or the how to fix a broken carburettor.
I don’t think anyone is too surprised by these findings. It should be obvious that the ability to understand each other would help a group perform well. It is surprising though to see a piece of research being so damning of one genders contribution to group performance.
How to improve your team
Try GoContractor For Free Today
So what can we learn from this research and how it might impact our business performance?
- Well firstly, this X factor for groups is one that should be borne in mind when your next hiring round takes place. I don’t want to say you should only hire women from now on but it would be good to ensure a mix of talent in your organisation and include RME testing as part of the hiring process. If you want further insights on good hiring practice click here.
- Secondly, there are valuable takeaways here for when you are assembling a group for a specific task. It can be seen that individual members of the group need to be included and given equal talk time for the group to perform effectively. This can be facilitated easily by the group leader.
- Knowing what we now know it should be easier to assemble an effective group, no more separating groups into boys and girls – unless you want a serious mismatch.
- Finally, remember that adding some people to a group can be beneficial but also that taking some out of a group might have a positive impact, especially if they tend to dominate conversation in the group
If you would like to learn more about training and goal setting in your business have a look at our
blog.
