We Knew It! For a Smart Group, Add Women.

A new study co-authored by MIT, Carnegie Mellon University, and Union College researchers found that the way to boost the collective IQ of a group working on a problem is to add a few females. According to a story in the Albany Times Union: The intelligence of individual members of the group plays a small […]
Women Make a Group More Intelligent

A new study co-authored by MIT, Carnegie Mellon University, and Union College researchers found that the way to boost the collective IQ of a group working on a problem is to add a few females. According to a story in the Albany Times Union:

The intelligence of individual members of the group plays a small part, said Christopher F. Chabris, a cognitive psychologist and co-director of the neuroscience program at Union.

Three things mattered more: the ability to read other people's emotions, giving everyone a chance to talk and the number of women in the group.

"The more women in the group, the more intelligent the group," Chabris said. "The reason for that likely had something to do with the fact that women tend to do better on the social perception tests."

The results were not what the researchers expected, as one told Science Daily:

Only when analyzing the data did the co-authors suspect that the number of women in a group had significant predictive power. "We didn't design this study to focus on the gender effect," Malone says. "That was a surprise to us."

The study was published September 30 in the online edition of Science.