VOSS: Collaborative Research: Is Larger Smarter? Investigating the Effect of Group Size on Collective Intelligence

从维基百科到Linux再到世界各地的科学和商业工作组，在线和离线小组正在成为现代生活中无处不在的一部分。因此，了解如何提高这些群体的表现变得越来越重要。这里提出的工作将使用一种新的衡量广义群体效率的方法——称为“集体智慧”——来帮助实现这一目标。在研究人员先前工作的基础上，该项目将首先开发一个集体智慧的在线测试。然后，它会将在线和面对面小组参加新测试的结果与之前参加线下版本测试的小组的结果进行比较。这将有助于澄清在线和离线小组在广泛的不同任务上的总体有效性差异的程度。接下来，该项目将使用该测试系统地测量2到20人规模的在线群体的集体智力。这将为探索更大的在线小组是否可以利用更多的人带来的增加的资源奠定基础，而不会遭受通常伴随着面对面小组规模增加的过程损失。最后，该项目将系统地测量不同比例的女性在线群体的集体智慧。在此过程中，该项目还将测试一种特别有希望的解释，即性别对群体表现的影响：女性越多的群体，人际间的竞争就越少，而这种较低的群体内部竞争会导致更高的集体智慧。虽然对影响团队表现的因素进行了数十年的研究，但几乎所有这些研究都集中在一个单一的任务上。因此，严格地说，从以前的工作中吸取的教训仅限于所研究的具体任务。这里提出的工作使用集体智慧的视角来调查，不仅仅是一个群体执行单一任务的能力，而是这个群体执行广泛任务的总体能力。由于许多现实世界的群体必须应对各种各样的问题，因此可能需要这样的视角来系统地预测他们的表现。此外，这里开发的方法可以在评估提高在线群体有效性的潜在方法方面提供显著的经济效益。研究人员不需要在许多不同的特定任务上测试干预措施，而是可以用这种一般措施对干预措施进行一次测试，然后就有了预测干预措施对许多其他任务影响的一些基础。通过为其他研究人员提供集体智慧的在线测试，该项目将有助于推进这一领域的科学实践。更一般地说，通过为衡量和改善群体表现提供更坚实的科学基础，该项目可以帮助我们的社会更有效地解决许多最重要的问题。例如，使用合适的协作工具，在线小组可能会比面对面的小组更有效，利用更多的人同时努力，而不会出现在大型小组中通常出现的协调损失。了解性别多样性的动态可能有助于改善男女共同工作的团队之间的合作，让每个人最好的想法都有更好的机会被听到。也许，有一天，这将有助于创造出比以往任何群体都更聪明的群体。

From Wikipedia to Linux to scientific and business work-groups all over the world, both online and off-line groups are becoming a pervasive part of modern life. It is becoming increasingly important, therefore, to understand how to improve the performance of these groups. The work proposed here will use a new measure of generalized group effectiveness -- called "collective intelligence" -- to help do this. Building on previous work by the investigators, the project will first develop an online test for collective intelligence. Then it will compare the results of online and face-to-face groups taking this new test with previous results for groups taking an offline version of the test. This will help clarify the degree to which online and off-line groups differ in their general effectiveness on a wide range of different tasks. Next the project will use this test to systematically measure the collective intelligence of online groups that range in size from 2 to 20 people. This will lay the foundation for exploring whether larger online groups can take advantage of the increased resources that more people bring, without suffering as much from the process losses that usually accompany increased group size in face-to-face groups. Finally, the project will systematically measure the collective intelligence of online groups with varying proportions of women. In doing so, the project will also test one particularly promising explanation for a gender effect on group performance: that groups with more women are less interpersonally competitive, and that this lower intra-group competitiveness leads to higher collective intelligence. While there have been decades of research on factors that affect the performance of groups, almost all these studies have each focused on a single task. Thus, strictly speaking, the lessons to be learned from this previous work are limited to the specific tasks studied. The work proposed here uses the perspective of collective intelligence to investigate, not just the ability of a group to perform a single task, but the group's general ability to perform a wide range of tasks. Since many real-world groups must cope with a wide range of problems, just such a perspective may be needed to systematically predict their performance. In addition, the approach developed here can provide a significant economy of effort in evaluating potential ways of improving online group effectiveness. Instead of testing interventions on many different specific tasks, researchers will be able to test the interventions once with this general measure, and then have some basis for predicting the effects of the intervention on many other tasks. By making an online test of collective intelligence available to other researchers, the project will help advance scientific practice in this area. More generally, by providing a firmer scientific foundation for measuring and improving the performance of groups, the project may help our society address many of its most important problems more effectively. For instance, with the right kinds of collaboration tools, online groups may be able to be much more effective than face-to-face groups, taking advantage of the simultaneous efforts of far more people without the coordination losses that usually occur in larger groups. And understanding the dynamics of gender diversity may help to improve the collaboration of the groups in which both men and women work, by giving everyone's best ideas a better chance to be heard. And perhaps, someday, this will help create groups that are more collectively intelligent than any groups have ever been before.