COGNITION AND COLLECTIVE INTELLIGENCE

Cognitive and psychological research provides useful theoretical perspectives for understanding what is happening inside the mind of an individual in tasks such as memory recall, judgment and decision making, and problem solving – including meta-cognitive tasks, when an individual is reflecting on their own or other people’s performance. Understanding these processes within individuals can help us understand under what conditions collective intelligence might form for a group and how we might optimize that group’s collective performance. Each of these components alone, or in concert, can be understood to form the basic building blocks of group collective intelligence. Consider the classic estimation task where a group of individuals must determine the number of marbles in jar. In the simplest conceptualization of this task, each individual independently provides an estimate and a statistical average of the estimates is taken as the crowd’s answer. The statistical aggregate over individuals can often lead to a better answer than that of most of the individuals. This has come to be known as the wisdom of crowds effect (Ariely et al, 2000; Davis-Stober, Budescu, & Broomell, in press; Surowiecki, 2004; Wallsten, Budescu, Erev, & Diederich, 1997). Given simple, idealized tasks, it would appear that extracting the collective intelligence from a group of individuals merely requires choosing a suitable statistical aggregation procedure – no psychology or understanding of the underlying cognitiv