by David Robson
Whether or not you are interested in the IVA’s educational model, that’s a pretty good checklist for the kinds of mental qualities that are essential for individuals to avoid the intelligence trap.
The children are taught about these concepts explicitly with a weekly ‘advisory’ session, led by teachers and parents. During my visit, for instance, the advisory sessions explored ‘effective listening’, in which the children were encouraged to reflect on the way they talk with others. They were asked to consider the benefits of some of the virtues, such as intellectual humility or curiosity, during conversation and, crucially, the kinds of situations where they may also be inappropriate. At the end of the session, the class listened to an episode from the This American Life podcast, about the real-life story of a young girl, Rosie, who struggled to communicate with her workaholic father, a physicist – a relatable exercise in perspective taking. The aim, in all this, is to get the children to be more analytical and reflective about their own thinking.
Besides these explicit lessons, the virtues are also incorporated into the teaching of traditional academic subjects. After the advisory session, for instance, I attended a seventh-grade (consisting of twelve- to thirteen-year-olds) lesson led by Cari Noble. The students there were learning about the ways to calculate the interior angles of the polygon, and rather than teaching the principles outright, the class had to struggle through the logic of coming up with the formula themselves – a strategy that reminded me a lot of Stigler’s accounts of the Japanese classroom. Later on, I saw an English class in which the students discuss music appreciation, which included a TED talk by the conductor Benjamin Zander, in which he discusses his own difficulties with learning the piano – again promoting the idea that intellectual struggle is essential for progress.
Throughout the day, the teachers also ‘modelled’ the virtues themselves, making sure to admit their own ignorance if they didn’t immediately know an answer – an expression of intellectual humility – or their own curiosity if something suddenly led their interest in a new direction. As Dweck, Engel and Langer have all shown, such subtle signals really can prime a child’s own thinking.
I only visited the school for one day, but my impression from my conversations with the staff was that its strategy faithfully builds on robust psychological research to ensure that more sophisticated reasoning is incorporated into every subject, and that this doesn’t sacrifice any of their academic rigour. As the principal, Jacquie Bryant, told me: ‘Students couldn’t practise the intellectual virtues if they were not up against a challenging and complex curriculum. And we can’t gauge the depth of their understanding unless we have the writing and feedback. The two go together.’
The children’s metacognition – their awareness of potential thinking errors and their capacity to correct them – appeared, from my observations, to be incredibly advanced compared to the average teenager.
Their parents certainly seem to be impressed. ‘This is great. A lot of us don’t learn this until adulthood – if we ever learn it,’ Natasha Hunter, one of the parent advisors, told me during the advisory lesson. Hunter also teaches at a local college, and she was excited to see the children’s sophisticated reasoning at such a young age. ‘I think that critical thinking has to happen at this level. Because when they get to me, after public school education, they aren’t thinking at the level at which we need them to think.’
The students’ academic results speak for themselves. In its first year the IVA was scored as one of the top three schools in the Long Beach Unified School District. And in a state-wide academic achievement test for the 2016?17 school year, more than 70 per cent of its students achieved the expected standards in English, compared to a 50 per cent average across California.25
We have to be wary of reading too much into this success. The IVA is only one school with highly motivated staff who are all dedicated to maintaining its vision, and many of the psychologists I’ve spoken to point out that it can be difficult to encourage effective, widespread educational reform.
Even so, the IVA offered me a taste of the way that Western education could begin to cultivate those other thinking styles that are so important for effective reasoning in adult life – producing a whole new generation of wiser thinkers.
Part 4
The folly and wisdom of the crowd: How teams and organisations can avoid the intelligence trap
9
The makings of a ‘dream team’: How to build a supergroup
According to most pundits, Iceland should have had no place at the Euro 2016 men’s football tournament. Just four years previously, they had ranked 131st in the world.1 How could they ever hope to compete as one of the top twenty-four teams entering the championships?
The first shock came during the qualifying rounds in 2014 and 2015, when they knocked out the Netherlands to become the smallest nation ever to reach the championships. Then came their surprise draw with Portugal at the Saint-Etienne stadium in the first round. Their unexpected success was enough to rattle Portugal’s star player, Cristiano Ronaldo, who sulked about the tactics. ‘It was a lucky night for them,’ he told reporters after the match. ‘When they don’t try to play and just defend, defend, defend, this in my opinion shows a small mentality and they are not going to do anything in the competition.’
The Icelanders were undeterred. They drew their next match with Hungary, and beat Austria 2–1. Commentators were sure that the tiny nation’s luck would soon run out. Yet they did it again – this time against England, a team composed almost entirely of players from the world’s top-twenty elite football clubs. The UK’s TV commentators were rendered literally speechless by the final goal;2 the Guardian described the match as one of the most ‘humiliating defeats in England’s history’.3
Iceland’s dream ended when they finally succumbed to the home team in the quarter-finals, but football pundits from across the globe were nevertheless gobsmacked by their success. As one of Time’s sportswriters, Kim Wall, put it: ‘Iceland’s very presence at the Championships came against all the odds. A volcanic island blanketed by year-round glaciers, the nation has the world’s shortest soccer season: even the national stadium’s designer pitch grass, handpicked to withstand Arctic winds and snow, occasionally froze to death.’4 And with a population of 330,000, they had a smaller pool of potential players than many London boroughs; one of their coaches still worked part time as a dentist.5 In many people’s eyes, they were the true heroes of the tournament, not Portugal, the ultimate winner.
At the time of writing (in 2018) Iceland remained at around twenty in the world rankings, and had become the smallest country ever to qualify for the World Cup; contrary to Ronaldo’s criticisms, their success was not a mere fluke after all. How had this tiny nation managed to beat countries that were more than twenty times its size, their teams composed of some of the sport’s greatest superstars?
Is it possible that their unexpected success came because – and not in spite – of the fact that they had so few star players?
The history of sport is full of surprising twists of fate. Perhaps the most famous upset of all is the ‘Miracle on Ice’ – when a team of American college students beat the accomplished Soviet hockey team at the 1980 Winter Olympics. More recently, there was Argentina’s surprise gold medal in basketball at the 2004 Olympics, where they thrashed the USA – the firm favourites. In each case, the underdogs had less established players, yet somehow their combined talent was greater than the sum of their parts. But in terms of the sheer audacity of their challenge – and the teamwork that allowed them to punch so far above their weight – Iceland’s success is perhaps the most instructive.
Sporting talent is very different from the kinds of intelligence we have been exploring so far, but the lessons from such unexpected successes may stretch beyond the football pitch. Many organisations employ highly intelligent, qualified people in the assumption that they will automatically combine their collective brainpower to produce magical
results. Inexplicably, however, such groups often fail to cash in on their talents, with poor creativity, lost efficiency, and sometimes overly risky decision making.
In the past eight chapters, we have seen how greater intelligence and expertise can sometimes backfire for the individual, but the very same issues can also afflict teams, as certain traits, valued in high-performing individuals, may damage the group as a whole. You really can have ‘too much talent’ in a team.
This is the intelligence trap of not one brain, but many, and the same dynamics that allowed Iceland to beat England can also help us to understand workplace politics in any organisation.
Before we look specifically at the dynamics that link the England football team to the corporate boardroom, let’s first consider some more general intuitions about group thinking.6
One popular idea has been the ‘wisdom of the crowd’ – the idea that many brains, working together, can correct for each other’s errors in judgements; we make each other better.* Some good evidence of this view comes from an analysis of scientists’ journal articles, which finds that collaborative efforts are far more likely to be cited and applied than papers with just one author. Contrary to the notion of a lone genius, conversations and the exchange of ideas bring out the best in the team members; their combined brainpower allows them to see connections that had been invisible previously.7 Yet there are also plenty of notorious examples where team thinking fails, sometimes at great cost. Opposing voices like to point to the phenomenon of ‘groupthink’, first described in detail by the Yale University psychologist Irving Janis. Inspired by the Bay of Pigs disaster in 1961, he explored the reasons why the Kennedy administration decided to invade Cuba. He concluded that Kennedy’s advisors had been too eager to reach a consensus decision and too anxious about questioning each other’s judgements. Instead, they reinforced their existing biases – exacerbating each other’s motivated reasoning. The individuals’ intelligence didn’t matter very much once the desire to conform had blinded their judgement.
* An argument for the wisdom of the crowds can also be traced back to Charles Darwin’s cousin, Francis Galton. For an article published in Nature journal in 1907, he asked passers-by at a country fair to estimate the weight of an ox. The median estimate came in at 1,198 lb – just 9 lb (or 0.8 per cent) off the correct value. And more than 50 per cent of the estimates were within around 4 per cent either side of the true value. Building on this finding, some commentators have argued that reaching a group consensus is often the best way to increase the accuracy of our judgements – and you’re probably going to be guaranteed greater success by recruiting as many talented individuals as possible.
Sceptics of collective reasoning may also point to the many times that groups simply fail to agree on any decision at all, reaching an impasse, or they may overly complicate a problem by incorporating all the points of view. This impasse is really the opposite of the more single-minded groupthink, but it can nonetheless be very damaging for a team’s productivity. You want to avoid ‘design by committee’.
The latest research helps us to reconcile all these views, offering some clever new tools to determine whether a group of talented people can tap into their combined ability or whether they will fall victim to groupthink.
Anita Williams Woolley has been at the forefront of these new findings, with the invention of a ‘collective intelligence’ test that promises to revolutionise our understanding of group dynamics. I met her in her lab at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, where she was conducting the latest round of experiments.
Designing the test was a Herculean task. One of the biggest challenges was designing a test that captured the full range of thinking that a group has to engage with: brainstorming, for instance, involves a kind of ‘divergent’ thinking that is very different from the more restrained, critical thinking you may need to come to a decision. Her team eventually settled on a large battery of tasks – lasting five hours in total – that together tested four different kinds of thinking: generating new ideas; choosing a solution based on sound judgement; negotiating to reach compromise; and finally, general ability at task execution (such as coordinating movements and activities).
Unlike an individual intelligence test, many of the tasks were practical in nature. In a test of negotiation skills, for instance, the groups had to imagine that they were housemates sharing a car on a trip into town, each with a list of groceries – and they had to plan their trip to get the best bargains with the least driving time. In a test of moral reasoning, meanwhile, the subjects played the role of a jury, describing how they would judge a basketball player who had bribed his instructor. And to test their overall execution, the team members were each sat in front of a separate computer and asked to enter words into a shared online document – a deceptively simple challenge that tested how well they could coordinate their activities to avoid repeating words or writing over each other’s contributions.8 The participants were also asked to perform some verbal or abstract reasoning tasks that might be included in a traditional IQ test – but they answered as a group, rather than individually.
The first exciting finding was that each team’s score on one of the constituent tasks correlated with its score on the other tasks. In other words, there appeared to be an underlying factor (rather like the ‘mental energy’ that is meant to be reflected in our general intelligence) that meant that some teams consistently performed better than others.
Crucially, and in line with much of the work we have already seen on individual creativity, decision making and learning – a group’s success appeared to only modestly reflect the members’ average IQ (which could explain just 2.25 per cent of the variation in collective intelligence). Nor could it be strongly linked to the highest IQ within the group (which accounted for 3.6 per cent of the variation in collective intelligence). The teams weren’t simply relying on the smartest member to do all the thinking.
Since they published that first paper in Science in 2010, Woolley’s team has verified their test in many different contexts, showing that it can predict the success of many real-world projects. Some were conveniently close to home. They studied students completing a two-month group project in a university management course, for instance. Sure enough, the collective intelligence score predicted the team’s performance on various assignments. Intriguingly, teams with a higher collective intelligence kept on building on their advantage during this project: not only were they better initially; they also improved the most over the eight weeks.
Woolley has also applied her test in the army, in a bank, in teams of computer programmers, and at a large financial services company, which ironically had one of the lowest collective intelligence scores she had ever come across. Disappointingly, she wasn’t asked back; a symptom, perhaps, of their poor groupthink.
The test is much more than a diagnostic tool, however. It has also allowed Woolley to investigate the underlying reasons why some teams have higher or lower collective intelligence – and the ways those dynamics might be improved.
One of the strongest and most consistent predictors is the team members’ social sensitivity. To measure this quality, Woolley used a classic measure of emotional perception, in which participants are given photos of an actor’s eyes and asked to determine what emotion that person is supposed to be feeling – whether they are happy, sad, angry or scared, with the participants’ average score strongly predicting how well they would perform on the group tasks. Remarkably, the very same dynamics can determine the fate of teams working together remotely, across the internet.9 Even though they aren’t meeting face to face, greater social sensitivity still allows them to read between the lines of direct messages and better coordinate their actions.
Beyond the ‘reading the mind in the eyes’ test, Woolley has also probed the specific interactions that can elevate or destroy a team’s thinking. Companies may value someone who is willing to take charge when a group lacks a hierarchy, for instance – the kind of perso
n who may think of themselves as a ‘natural leader’. Yet when Woolley’s team measured how often each member spoke, they found that the better groups tend to allow each member to participate equally; the worst groups, in contrast, tended to be dominated by just one or two people.
Those more domineering people don’t have to be excessively loud or rude, but if they give the impression that they know everything already, other team members will feel they have nothing to contribute, which deprives the group of valuable information and alternative points of view.10 Untempered enthusiasm can be a vice.
The most destructive dynamic, Woolley has found, is when team members start competing against each other. This was the problem with the financial services company and their broader corporate culture. Each year, the company would only promote a fixed number of individuals based on their performance reviews – meaning that each employee would feel threatened by the others, and group work suffered as a result.
Since Woolley published those first results, her research has garnered particular interest for its insights into sexism in the workplace. The irritating habits of some men to ‘mansplain’, interrupt and appropriate women’s ideas has been noted by many commentators in recent years. By shutting down a conversation and preventing women from sharing their knowledge, those are exactly the kinds of behaviours that sabotage group performance.
Sure enough, Woolley has shown that – at least in her experiments in the USA – teams with a greater proportion of women have a higher collective intelligence, and that this can be linked to their higher, overall, social sensitivity, compared to groups consisting of a larger proportion of men.11 This was equally true when Woolley tested the collective intelligence of online teams playing the League of Legends computer game, when the players’ gender was obscured by their avatar: it wasn’t simply that the men were acting differently when they knew a woman was present.12
