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

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 United States. 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.