Preamble
Collective intelligence, broadly defined, refers to the adaptive behavior achieved by groups (of human and non-human organisms, maybe even artificial) through the interactions of their members, often involving phenomena such as consensus building, cooperation, and competition. The field is broad and interdisciplinary, spanning many academic disciplines including biology, social science, computer science, philosophy and many more. This interdisciplinary nature can make it hard to get started in this field as key papers and core ideas may appear in different journals and conferences. We reached out to the community to curate a Virtual Special Issue, pointing to exciting papers published in various outlets over the years. These articles cover a broad range of topics, including the emergence of social norms, cultural evolution, human and animal groups, and the wisdom of crowds. They also reflect a range of methodologies and approaches, showcasing the vibrancy and diversity of our field.
Acknowledgements
The list was contributed by (in alphabetical order) Joshua Becker, Rob Goldstone, John Horton, Joe Lambke, Tom Malone, Jacob Taylor, Georg Theiner, Perron Tollefsen, Serguei Saavedra, and. And curated by Christoph Riedl. Email me, if you have additional contributions.
Books
Classics
Collective Intelligence in Human Groups
Computational Modeling
Philosophy
Animal Groups and Biology
Active Inference
Cognitive Science
Wisdom of Crowds
Collective Problem Solving
Spread of Misinformation
Collective intelligence, broadly defined, refers to the adaptive behavior achieved by groups (of human and non-human organisms, maybe even artificial) through the interactions of their members, often involving phenomena such as consensus building, cooperation, and competition. The field is broad and interdisciplinary, spanning many academic disciplines including biology, social science, computer science, philosophy and many more. This interdisciplinary nature can make it hard to get started in this field as key papers and core ideas may appear in different journals and conferences. We reached out to the community to curate a Virtual Special Issue, pointing to exciting papers published in various outlets over the years. These articles cover a broad range of topics, including the emergence of social norms, cultural evolution, human and animal groups, and the wisdom of crowds. They also reflect a range of methodologies and approaches, showcasing the vibrancy and diversity of our field.
Acknowledgements
The list was contributed by (in alphabetical order) Joshua Becker, Rob Goldstone, John Horton, Joe Lambke, Tom Malone, Jacob Taylor, Georg Theiner, Perron Tollefsen, Serguei Saavedra, and. And curated by Christoph Riedl. Email me, if you have additional contributions.
Books
- Malone, T. W., and Bernstein, M. S. (Eds.) Handbook of Collective Intelligence. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2015.
- Baltzersen, R.K. Cultural-Historical Perspectives on Collective Intelligence: Patterns in Problem Solving and Innovation. Cambridge University Press, 2022.
- Kornberger, M. Strategies for Distributed and Collective Action: Connecting the Dots. Oxford University Press, 2022.
- Mulgan, G. Big Mind: How Collective Intelligence Can Change Our World. Princeton University Press, 2017.
- Malone, T. W. Superminds: The surprising power of people and computers thinking together. New York: Little Brown, 2018.
Classics
- Hayek, F. A. (1945). The use of knowledge in society. American Economic Review, 35(4), 519-530.
This paper is the basis for the idea that markets are information-processing systems that can be considered a form of collective intelligence. The first paper in economics that got economists to focus on prices as a kind of mechanism for creating collective intelligence about relative scarcity - the "" that I think had never really been explicated. - Tolstoy, L. (1867). Second Epilogue in War & Peace. (Recommended English translation: Peaver and Volokhonsky).
Collective Intelligence in Human Groups
- Woolley, A. W., Chabris, C. F., Pentland, A., Hashmi, N., & Malone, T. W. (2010). Evidence for a collective intelligence factor in the performance of human groups. Science, 330(6004), 686-688.
There is also a related meta analysis which expands the evidence for a collective intelligence factor and offers extensions regarding group diversity and the role of group processes: - Riedl, C., Kim, Y. J., Gupta, P., Malone, T. W., & Woolley, A. W. (2021). Quantifying collective intelligence in human groups. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 118(21), e2005737118.
- David Sloan Wilson, Elinor Ostrom, Michael E. Cox (2013). Generalizing the core design principles for the efficacy of groups, Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Volume 90, Supplement, S21-S32. (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0167268112002697)
Connects work on managing common-pool resources with evolutionary work on group selection. - Rodriguez, M. A., & Steinbock, D. J. (2004, June). Societal-scale decision making using social networks. In North American Association for Computational Social and Organizational Science Conference proceedings.
- Tomasello, M., Melis, A. P., Tennie, C., Wyman, E., & Herrmann, E. (2012). Two key steps in the evolution of human cooperation: The interdependence hypothesis. Current Anthropology, 53(6), 673–692.
- Stahl, G. (2006). Group Cognition, In: Computer Support for Building Collaborative Knowledge.
Computational Modeling
- Epstein, J. M. (1999). Agent‐based computational models and generative social science. Complexity, 4(5), 41-60.
- Lazer, D., Pentland, A., Adamic, L., Aral, S., Barabási, A.-L., Brewer, D., Christakis, N., Contractor, N., Fowler, J., Gutmann, M., Jebara, T., King, G., Macy, M., Roy, D., & Van Alstyne, M. (2009). Computational Social Science. Science, 323(5915), 721–723.
Philosophy
- Theiner, G., Allen, C., & Goldstone, R. L. (2010). Recognizing group cognition. Cognitive Systems Research, 11(4), 378-395.
- Smart, P. R. (2018). Mandevillian Intelligence: From Individual Vice to Collective Virtue. In A. J. Carter, A. Clark, J. Kallestrup, O. S. Palermos & D. Pritchard (Eds.), Socially-Extended Epistemology. Oxford University Press, Oxford, UK.
- Tollefsen, D. P. (2009). Wikipedia and the Epistemology of Testimony. Episteme, 6(1), 8-24.
- Solomon, M. (2006). Groupthink versus the wisdom of crowds: The social epistemology of deliberation and dissent. Southern Journal of Philosophy, 44(S1), 28-42.
- Fontana, W., Wagner, G., & Buss, L. W. (1993). Beyond digital naturalism. Artificial Life, 1(1_2), 211-227.
Animal Groups and Biology
- Couzin, I. D. (2009). Collective cognition in animal groups. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 13(1), 36–43.
- Marshall, J. A., Bogacz, R., Dornhaus, A., Planqué, R., Kovacs, T., & Franks, N. R. (2009). On optimal decision-making in brains and social insect colonies. Journal of the Royal Society Interface, 6(40), 1065-1074.
- Power, D. A., Watson, R. A., Szathmáry, E., Mills, R., Powers, S. T., Doncaster, C. P., & Czapp, B. (2015). What can ecosystems learn? Expanding evolutionary ecology with learning theory. Biology direct, 10, 1-24.
- Lenton, T. M., Kohler, T. A., Marquet, P. A., Boyle, R. A., Crucifix, M., Wilkinson, D. M., & Scheffer, M. (2021). Survival of the systems. Trends in Ecology & Evolution, 36(4), 333-344.
- Leonard, N. E., & Levin, S. A. (2022). Collective intelligence as a public good. Collective Intelligence, 1(1), 26339137221083293.
Active Inference
- McMillen, P., & Levin, M. (2024). Collective intelligence: A unifying concept for integrating biology across scales and substrates. Communications Biology, 7(1), 378.
- Kaufmann, R., Gupta, P., & Taylor, J. (2021). An active inference model of collective intelligence. Entropy, 23(7), 830.
- Westby, S., & Riedl, C. (2023). Collective intelligence in human-AI teams: A Bayesian theory of mind approach. In Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (Vol. 37, No. 5, pp. 6119-6127).
Cognitive Science
- Hawkins, R. X. D., Goodman, N. D., & Goldstone, R. L. (2019). The emergence of social norms and conventions. Trends in Cognitive Science, 23, 158-169.
- Galesic, M., Barkoczi, D., Berdahl, A., Biro, D., Giannoccaro, I., Goldstone, R., Gonzalez, C., Kandler, A., Kao, A., Kendal, R., Kline, M., Lee, E., Massari, G. F., Mesoudi, A., Olsson, H., Pescetelli, N., Sloman, S., Smaldino, P. E., & Stein, D. L. (2023). Beyond collective intelligence: Collective adaptation. Journal of the Royal Society Interface, 20(200): 20220736.
- Thompson, B., van Opheusden, B., Sumers, T., & Griffiths, T. L. (2022). Complex cognitive algorithms preserved by selective social learning in experimental populations. Science, 376(6588), 95–98.
Wisdom of Crowds
- Becker, J., Brackbill, D., & Centola, D. (2017). Network dynamics of social influence in the wisdom of crowds. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 114(26), E5070-E5076.
- Almaatouq, A., Noriega-Campero, A., Alotaibi, A., Krafft, P. M., Moussaid, M., & Pentland, A. (2020). Adaptive social networks promote the wisdom of crowds. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 117(21), 11379–11386.
Collective Problem Solving
- Lazer, D., & Friedman, A. (2007). The network structure of exploration and exploitation. Administrative Science Quarterly, 52(4), 667-694.
Spread of Misinformation
- Vosoughi, S., Roy, D., & Aral, S. (2018). The spread of true and false news online. Science, 359(6380), 1146–1151.
- Lorenz-Spreen, P., Lewandowsky, S., Sunstein, C.R. et al. How behavioural sciences can promote truth, autonomy and democratic discourse online. Nature Human Behavior, 4, 1102–1109 (2020).
- Pennycook, G., & Rand, D. G. (2019). Lazy, not biased: Susceptibility to partisan fake news is better explained by lack of reasoning than by motivated reasoning. Cognition, 188, 39-50.