On 19 April 2019, Émile Servan-Schreiber reshared Edmond-Claude Fréty’s account of a discussion organized by the association Cerveau Droit. Fréty described an audience including lawyers, magistrates, physicians and scientists. His recap records Servan-Schreiber speaking about collective intelligence, a group’s predictive performance and the possibility of measuring its intelligence.
The account also attributes to the talk a discussion of women’s contribution to creativity and freedom of expression within groups. Fréty recommended Supercollectif for readers wanting to learn more. These are the attendee’s descriptions of the subjects covered, rather than a transcript or a numerical result from the meeting.
What a measure of group intelligence means
One relevant research reference is Anita Williams Woolley and colleagues’ 2010 paper, Evidence for a collective intelligence factor in the performance of human groups. Across two studies involving 699 people in groups of two to five, the authors reported a common statistical factor associated with performance across different tasks.
That factor was not strongly correlated with the average or highest individual intelligence in each group. It was correlated with social sensitivity, a more equal distribution of conversational turns, and the proportion of women. These associations provide context for questions about participation; they do not establish that adding women necessarily causes any group to perform better.
A measure of performance across laboratory tasks differs from a score for predicting future events. A forecasting comparison needs defined questions, dated probabilities and resolved outcomes. Group-intelligence research instead asks whether a group that does well on one task also tends to do well on others. The two approaches can inform the same organisational discussion while measuring different things.
Participation and the quality of discussion
Fréty separately described Dr Zagury’s presentation on psychological subjection, using the Montflanquin case. Its inclusion shows the breadth of the evening without making it part of Servan-Schreiber’s forecasting argument. The lasting question from the latter’s appearance is how a group’s organization affects its performance, a theme developed in his later Institut Diderot lecture.
