今天看到一篇HBR的文章，讲研究者在比较了个体贡献者的IQ和由他们组成的小组的IQ后发现了一个不同寻常的相关性：小组中女性的比例越高，小组的集体IQ就越高。他们认为在研究中这些女性将更多的协作技能带入测试中。
挑选几段译文如下:
许多研究都表明，在社交敏感度测试中，女性往往比男性得分更高。所以，真正重要的是高社交敏感度的人，不论他们是男是女。
关于伟大团队，你听闻过哪些说法？不是每个成员都要很聪明，但是他们要互相倾听。他们有建设性地分享批评。他们思想开放。他们不专制。而在我们的研究中，我们也清楚地看到，那些由聪明的人主导对话的团队，并不是有智慧的团队。
证据表明，在组织层面上同样存在群体智慧。一些擅长扫描环境并制定目标的公司，在内部运营管理和指导雇员成长方面同样也很出色，而且财务表现也更优异。不同功能模块之间的一致表现说明了组织的群体智慧，可以以此来预测公司的表现。
家庭、公司甚至城市都存在着群体智慧。但是随着面对面团队的不断壮大，愈发难以充分发挥每个团队成员的效用，这意味着团队规模有可能削弱这种群体智慧。但是我们猜测，不论团队是从10人发展成50人、500人还是5000人，技术都可以使团队变得更聪明。比如Google对知识的收获，以及像维基百科这样的高质量产品，几乎完全没有集中控制——这些仅仅只是开端。现在我们要问的是，怎样才能提升这种公司的、国家的乃至整个世界的群体智慧呢？
全文如下：
The finding: There’s little correlation between a group’s collective intelligence and the IQs of its individual members. But if a group includes more women, its collective intelligence rises.
The research: Professors Woolley and Malone, along with Christopher Chabris, Sandy Pentland, and Nada Hashmi, gave subjects aged 18 to 60 standard intelligence tests and assigned them randomly to teams. Each team was asked to complete several tasks—including brainstorming, decision making, and visual puzzles—and to solve one complex problem. Teams were given intelligence scores based on their performance. Though the teams that had members with higher IQs didn’t earn much higher scores, those that had more women did.
The challenge: Are brainy people overrated? Are women the true key to success?Professors Woolley and Malone, defend your research.
Woolley: We’ve replicated the findings twice now. Many of the factors you might think would be predictive of group performance were not. Things like group satisfaction, group cohesion, group motivation—none were correlated with collective intelligence. And, of course, individual intelligence wasn’t highly correlated, either.
Many factors you might think would be predictive of group performance were not. Group intelligence had little to do with individual intelligence.
Malone: Before we did the research, we were afraid that collective intelligence would be just the average of all the individual IQs in a group. So we were surprised but intrigued to find that group intelligence had relatively little to do with individual intelligence.
HBR: But gender does play a role?
Malone: It’s a preliminary finding—and not a conventional one. The standard argument is that diversity is good and you should have both men and women in a group. But so far, the data show the more women, the better.
Woolley: We have early evidence that performance may flatten out at the extreme end—that there should be a little gender diversity rather than all women.
You realize you’re saying that groups of women are smarter than groups of men.
Woolley: Yes. And you can tell I’m hesitating a little. It’s not that I don’t trust the data. I do. It’s just that part of that finding can be explained by differences in social sensitivity, which we found is also important to group performance. Many studies have shown that women tend to score higher on tests of social sensitivity than men do. So what is really important is to have people who are high in social sensitivity, whether they are men or women.
So you didn’t see a negative correlation with individual IQs—just a very weak positive correlation. In theory, the 10 smartest people could still make a great group, right?
Woolley: In theory, yes, the 10 smartest people could make the smartest group, but it wouldn’t be just because they were the most intelligent individuals. What do you hear about great groups? Not that the members are all really smart but that they listen to each other. They share criticism constructively. They have open minds. They’re not autocratic. And in our study, we saw pretty clearly that groups that had smart people dominating the conversation were not very intelligent groups.
Can teams be too-group oriented? Everyone is so socially sensitive that there’s no leader?
Woolley: Anecdotally, we know that groups can become too internally focused. Our ongoing research suggests that teams need a moderate level of cognitive diversity for effectiveness. Extremely homogeneous or extremely diverse groups aren’t as intelligent.
In some ways, your findings seem blindingly obvious: that teams are more than just a collection of the best talent.
Malone: Sure. This is well-known in sports. Our study shows it with intellectual tasks. We realized that intelligence tests are a way to predict individuals’ performance on a range of tasks, but no one had thought of using the same approach to predict group performance.
Woolley: There was a step change in psychology once the field had an empirical method of measuring individual intelligence through IQ tests. We’re hopeful that this work can create a similar seismic shift in how we study groups.
Can we design teams to perform better?
Malone: We hope to look at that in the future. Though you can change an individual’s intelligence only so much, we think it’s completely possible to markedly change a group’s intelligence. You could increase it by changing members or incentives for collaboration, for instance.
Woolley: There is some evidence to suggest that collective intelligence exists at the organizational level, too. Some companies that do well at scanning the environment and setting targets also excel at managing internal operations and mentoring employees—and have better financial performance. Consistent performance across disparate areas of functioning suggests an organizational collective intelligence, which could be used to predict company performance.
So this phenomenon could extend beyond the small groups you studied?
Malone: Families, companies, and cities all have a collective intelligence. But as face-to-face groups get bigger, they’re less able to take advantage of their members. That suggests size could diminish group intelligence. But we suspect that technology may allow a group to get smarter as it goes from 10 people to 50 to 500 or even 5,000. Google’s harvesting of knowledge, Wikipedia’s high-quality product with almost no centralized control—these are just the beginning. What we’re starting to ask is, How can you increase the collective intelligence of companies, or countries, or the whole world?
写在后面：
在刚刚过去的2017全球女性创新峰会暨TECH HER她科技盛典上，ThoughtWorks中国区COO王效珅有这样的分享：
我特别希望说的一句话，就是“技术为善”（Technology for good）。说这句话是想去呼吁一下，作为科技女性，我们都有责任利用互联网技术，来传递榜样的力量，去鼓励更多对于技术感兴趣的女性走到这个行业里面来，不应该去设置一些界限说你进来只做运营，如果你对技术感兴趣，就应该更向前一步，因为编程本身的难度并没有我们想象那么大。所有人都应该正视技术在推动社会进步中发挥的力量，能够秉着“技术为善”的精神，让更多的女性参与到这个潮流中来。
本文作者万学凡，ThoughtWorks首席咨询师，武汉。作者保留本文一切权利，未经许可请勿转载。