group intelligence blog :: Studying Collective Intelligence

Studying Collective Intelligence

by Jon Kennedy on Fri 17 Nov 2006 11:28 AM PST | Permanent Link | Cosmos

It's worth taking a look at the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence.
They launched in October and will coordinate research and exchange of theories about what works and what doesn't in looking at collective intelligence. The directore of the center defines CI thus: groups of individuals doing things that seem intelligent. That includes everything from ant colonies, to wikipedia to the neurons in one brain.

They define their goals as follows:

While people have talked about collective intelligence for decades, new communication technologies —especially the Internet— now allow huge numbers of people all over the planet to work together in new ways. The recent successes of systems like...Wikipedia suggest...time is now ripe for many more such systems.

Our basic research question is: How can people and computers be connected so that —collectively— they act more intelligently than any individuals, groups, or computers have ever done before?

An adjunct to this site is their Handbook of Collective Intelligence, which is structured as a wiki. I found an interesting section there on issues which can hinder collective intelligence.

A final category of barriers to collective intelligence emerges from work on Dialogue by William Isaacs. He identified four failures of thinking that impede collective intelligence:

Abstraction/Fragmentation: The tendency to hold oneself separate or distant the world, e.g. by abstracting or compartmentalizing it.

Siloing is a symptom of this: “that’s an economics problem, not a psychology problem”; “that’s a marketing problem, not a manufacturing problem”; “Not invented here.”
“This is a unique case” instead of “this is a symptom of how the whole thing is working.”
Antidote = listening (to data, to people, to the “music behind the words”), principle of holographic participation – all things are whole, connected

Idolatry of Memory: The repeating of automatic routines, answers, stereotypes, and behavior patterns from memory.

“That’s just the way we’ve always done things around here”; “We solved that problem years ago”; “We have a human resources department, therefore we’re taking care of our people.”
Antidote = voicing what is actually new and emergent in one’s understanding and experience; principle of unfolding potential – universe is always unfolding and producing the new.

Certainty: The “knowledge” that one’s view is correct.

“That’s impossible”; “There’s no way that could be true.”
Antidote = suspending one’s assumptions and prejudices for personal and collective reflection; principle of proprioceptive awareness – learning to see and feel how your assumptions are affecting your thinking and actions.

Violence: The disrespect, repression, and destruction of alternative points of view in order to force acceptance of one’s own understanding.

“You’re an idiot for believing that”; “No educated person could hold that perspective”; “That’s all well and good, but…”
Antidote = respecting diversity of opinion, style, knowledge. Principle of differentiation – diversity is natural and valuable, and collective intelligence means fostering differentiation and integration.

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Re: Studying Collective Intelligence

by edward on Mon 18 Jun 2007 05:19 AM PDT | Profile | Permanent Link

"In order to answer that question, I think at least three types of research are needed. The first is just collecting examples or case studies. I think there are going to be a lot of natural experiments going on in the next few years, people trying lots of interesting things - with or without us. But I think that we can help the world learn from its experience with all these natural experiments by systematically describing and collecting examples of interesting cases of collective intelligence. For instance, Eric von Hippel, in the Sloan School, has done some very interesting case studies of how the collective body of users of a product is often a better source of innovation for a company’s products than the company’s own researchers. This kind of case study research is common in business schools, but it is certainly not the only kind of research we need to do. Another kind of research we need to do is something that is more typical in an engineering school. That is to create new examples of the phenomena we want to study. If you’re an aeronautical engineer, for instance, you wouldn’t just study birds and flying insects, you’d also want to create some flying machines and study how they work. In our case, that means we want to create some new examples of collective intelligence and study how they work. For instance, Mark Klein in the Center for Collective Intelligence is leading a group of people in a nascent project that hopes to harness the collective intelligence of thousands of people around the world to help deal with the problems of global climate change. We have some specific technical ideas about how to combine computer simulation techniques with online ways of representing issues and positions and arguments that we think may be helpful in this process.". This is how Prof. Thomas W. Malone answered the question "How can people and computers be connected so that collectively they act more intelligently than any individual, group, or computer has ever done before?".
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