ArticleRoyal Society open science2015
Self-organized flexible leadership promotes collective intelligence in human groups.
Article in Royal Society open science, 2015. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 19 papers.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
19 citing papers in PubMed, 51 citations in OpenAlex.
- Review
- Better and faster decisions by larger fish shoals in the wild.Science advances · 2025Article
- Individual differences in speed-accuracy trade-off influence social decision-making in dyads.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2025Article
- Article
- A Cognitive Computational Approach to Social and Collective Decision-Making.Perspectives on psychological science : a journal of the Association for Psychological Science · 2024Article
- Earlier social information has a stronger influence on judgments.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Majority rule can help solve difficult tasks even when confident members opt out to serve individual interests.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- Casting votes of antecedents play a key role in successful sequential decision-making.PloS one · 2023Article
- Building public trust and confidence in secondary use of health data for healthcare improvement and research: a qualitative study pre-protocol.HRB open research · 2023Article
- Avoiding costly mistakes in groups: The evolution of error management in collective decision making.PLoS computational biology · 2022Article
- Collective intelligence in teams: Contextualizing collective intelligent behavior over time.Frontiers in psychology · 2022Review
- Characterization and Comparison of the Utilization of Facebook Groups Between Public Medical Professionals and Technical Communities to Facilitate Idea Sharing and Crowdsourcing During the COVID-19 Pandemic: Cross-sectional Observational Study.JMIR formative research · 2021Article
- Follow the straggler: zebrafish use a simple heuristic for collective decision-making.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2020Article
- Wise or mad crowds? The cognitive mechanisms underlying information cascades.Science advances · 2020Article
- Multidisciplinary perspectives on medication-related decision-making for people with advanced dementia living in long-term care: a critical incident analysis.European journal of clinical pharmacology · 2020Article
- How Approaches to Animal Swarm Intelligence Can Improve the Study of Collective Intelligence in Human Teams.Journal of Intelligence · 2020Review
- Collective intelligence in medical decision-making: a systematic scoping review.BMC medical informatics and decision making · 2019Article
- Combining independent decisions increases diagnostic accuracy of reading lumbosacral radiographs and magnetic resonance imaging.PloS one · 2018Article
- Injury-mediated decrease in locomotor performance increases predation risk in schooling fish.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2017Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
4 authors at 3 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Collective intelligence refers to the ability of groups to outperform individual decision-makers. At present, relatively little is known about the mechanisms promoting collective intelligence in natural systems. We here test a novel mechanism generating collective intelligence: self-organization according to information quality. We tested this mechanism by performing simulated predator detection experiments using human groups. By continuously tracking the personal information of all members prior to collective decisions, we found that individuals adjusted their response time during collective decisions to the accuracy of their personal information. When individuals possessed accurate personal information, they decided quickly during collective decisions providing accurate information to the other group members. By contrast, when individuals had inaccurate personal information, they waited longer, allowing them to use social information before making a decision. Individuals deciding late during collective decisions had an increased probability of changing their decision leading to increased collective accuracy. Our results thus show that groups can self-organize according to the information accuracy of their members, thereby promoting collective intelligence. Interestingly, we find that individuals flexibly acted both as leader and as follower depending on the quality of their personal information at any particular point in time.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.