Collective intelligence and collective stupidity

Over the last few years I’ve become interested in the question of collective intelligence: how do large groups, societies or nations mobilise their intelligence to make the most of opportunities or avoid threats.

There has been a vast literature on individual intelligence – whether it is one thing or many, how much it is inherited or cultivated and so on. But there are few concepts, theories or data on intelligence as something collective. There a few intriguing texts that are ostensibly about collective intelligence, but none that really integrates different disciplines. Instead there are a series of different arguments and disciplines that rarely talk to each other. These include:

• A small field in computer science (which uses the term collective intelligence) that is essentially about how groups can work on developing software.
• Advocates of democracy who claim that it is the best way of tapping the good sense of the public – though these rarely go very far in exploring how it can do that best.
• Advocates of markets who describe them as good ways to aggregate the intelligence of consumers and entrepreneurs (from Smith to Hayek and beyond).
• Advocates of permanent civil services as good ways to identify and solve collective problems (though it turns out that few pay much attention to their own corporate memories).
• Advocates of academia as the site for free thought
• Advocates of civil society as the best way to spot new needs or demands and innovate solutions.

There is also the knowledge about how large groups think or decide (the wisdom or folly of crowds). But we know much less about how these fit together, and there is no metatheory of collective intelligence. A simple measure of collective intelligence could be how well a society makes use of its assets and starting points. We can then look at how the different sectors link together – how the society thinks about the future; how it makes sense of the present and past; how it makes important decisions, from the personal to the commercial to the political; and how it innovates to cope with change. Much of its intelligence would turn out to be embedded in the sub-systems mentioned above, each with its own rules, concepts, power structures and economic base:

- academia, which carries out research, develops new concepts and subjects them to testing and scrutiny: here the critical issue is both whether universities have the capacity to do these things well, whether the systems of peer review achieve the right balance of rigour and creativity, and whether the conclusions reached are then spread out more widely
- the economy can be a powerful device for spotting new needs and adapting solutions to them, but it can also be blind and destructive
- the political system can be highly intelligent at its best, with informed, searching debate on big issues; or it can be stupid, oriented to presentation rather than results, or pandering to shallow motives
- civil society can be richly pluralistic, full of invention and argument, or it can be sanitised and safe
- the media can at their best provide information, challenge, a space for dialogue, or can dumb down, deliberately obscure difficult issues
- And the linkages between these sectors can be broad, with many cross connections and cross-cutting debates, or narrow

As will already be clear this framework provides a starting point for judging the contribution of different sectors to collective intelligence. The media, for example, can be judged by whether users have a better understanding of the real choices facing them, or of the facts. The political system and individual leaders can be judged by whether they mobilise and enhance the intelligence around them or divert them.

From these starting points a range of new ways of organising thought can be developed:

- Collaborative working building on social networks
- Open processes of deliberation for example around public policy
- Business models that tap into consumer knowledge
- Public service models that make use of expert patients, parents, pupils and citizens
- Event models that help groups to think – from open space to unconferences
- Roles that synthesise knowledge and make it available back to a community

Our hunch is that collective intelligence is a critical factor distinguishing different societies; that some may have it and lose it (this may be particularly a risk for great powers); that some may not have it yet, but could gain it (thanks to outstanding leaders or civic movements); and that most make far too little of what they already have. We can analyse the cultures with which intelligence is organised – some hierarchical with fixed authority, others more open and fluid. We can see how much individual thinkers and writers are really better understood as vehicles for shared ideas – the best are sensitive to messages that lie beyond them rather than being their source.

This is a very quick sketch of what could become an important field for theory and inquiry. It would very much not be seeking a collective version of IQ – since the intelligence concerned would be more dynamic than a ‘quotient’ could ever be. But it could provide a powerful way to diagnose real living societies and how they could work better.

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Collective intelligence and collective stupidity