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Collective Intelligence in Computer-Mediated Collaboration Emerges in Different Contexts and Cultures

Published: 18 April 2015 Publication History

Abstract

Collective intelligence (CI) is a property of groups that emerges from the coordination and collaboration of members and predicts group performance on a wide range of tasks. Previous studies of CI have been conducted with lab-based groups in the USA. We introduce a new standardized online battery to measure CI and demonstrate consistent emergence of a CI factor across three different studies despite broad differences in (a) communication media (face-to-face vs online), (b) group contexts (short-term ad hoc groups vs long-term groups) and (c) cultural settings (US, Germany, and Japan). In two of the studies, we also show that CI is correlated with a group's performance on more complex tasks. Consequently, the CI metric provides a generalizable performance measure for groups that is robust to broad changes in media, context, and culture, making it useful for testing the effects of general-purpose collaboration technologies intended to improve group performance.

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    cover image ACM Conferences
    CHI '15: Proceedings of the 33rd Annual ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
    April 2015
    4290 pages
    ISBN:9781450331456
    DOI:10.1145/2702123
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    Published: 18 April 2015

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    Author Tags

    1. collective intelligence
    2. cross culture
    3. factor analysis
    4. group performance
    5. online collaboration
    6. outcome metrics

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    April 18 - 23, 2015
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