Intelligence is not just something that happens inside individual minds. It also arises within groups of individuals and this phenomenon can be quite powerful. [...] The widely accepted definition states that collective intelligence is the ability of a group of people to be collectively smarter than the smartest individuals in the group if they acted alone. This has been happening for a very long time in the natural world. The advent of the Internet however, has allowed for collective intelligence to be much more easily implemented, and is allowing people from many different regions and backgrounds to connect. This has led the MIT centre for collective intelligence to pose the question: how can people and computers be connected so that – collectively – they act more intelligently than any person, group or computer has ever done before?

It turns out three factors make the difference between the emergence of collective intelligence and groupthink:

1. Average social perceptiveness of group members. Basically, how empathetic are the people in the group? People that score higher in this area tend to work well in groups. The more people with high social perceptiveness, the higher the intelligence of the group

2.Evenness of conversational turn taking. Are the group members giving everyone an equal opportunity to speak and are the group members taking these opportunities?

1. Percentage of women in the group. The researchers found that the level of intelligence the group displayed was positively correlated to the number of women – to the point that groups of all women actually displayed the highest levels of collective intelligence emerging. This is related to social perceptiveness as women generally score higher than men in this area.