This comment brought to you by my #lesswrong IRC logs. http://hbr.org/2011/06/defend-your-research-what-makes-a-team-smarter-more-women/ar/3#comment-238026281

"...First, what is reflected in their paper need not mean what they say in the article. And it seems like 'broken telephone' has occurred.

The main point of the paper they produced was that group intelligence was more accurately predicted by a 'c' factor much like individual intelligence is predicted by a 'g' factor.

Wolley states in the article:

"Things like group satisfaction, group cohesion, group motivation—none were correlated with collective intelligence. And, of course, individual intelligence wasn’t highly correlated, either."

According to the paper the 'c' factor correlated stronger with max individual intelligence and avg individual intelligence than any other factor including %women, social sensitivity except for speaking turn variance. So this statement is highly misleading.

Wolley also states in the article:

"And in our study we saw pretty clearly that groups that had smart people dominating the conversation were not very intelligent groups."

From the paper, there is no such indication of this. The methodology as explained in the paper for speaking turn variance did not measure how much smart people dominated the conversation, it showed how much a minority dominated the conversation. That is a very big difference from what Wolley said in the article. It may be that people who dominated the conversation were not the brightest but simply the most charismatic, essentially interfering the signal from their most valuable members. Either way more study has to be done here, and Wolley should be careful as to attribute conversation dominance with intelligence.

Finally, another very important question to ask is whether groups performed better than their max intelligence member within their group in regards to the intelligence testing portions of the test. My hunch is that groups do poorer than their max intelligent member in the intelligence tasks. Just to illustrate the point - I don't think a really good group of low intelligent folk could come up with general relativity (an extreme case I know!)

However, if a team environment is necessary, the goal may be to allow for the most intelligent to get the most attention rather than the most charismatic. Unfortunately, how you would do this i have no clue, and so the best alternative may be to force speaking turn variance.

Also drawing a straight line through a bunch of points is weak science (and even the authors are reluctant to draw too much from this especially in the case %women factor - a correlation of 0.23 makes me ambivalent especially if the factor is subsumed by speaking turn variance and social sensitivity factors)."