Y12W40WR Decision-making with others

Observational
The writing prompt

Observe a group you’re part of over two or three sessions and identify specifically where collective intelligence is being produced and where it’s being suppressed.

1Retrieval check

Q1.What does Woolley’s research identify as predictors of group performance?

  • AAverage IQ of members
  • BSocial sensitivity, equal turn-taking, proportion of women — not average IQ
  • CExperience and seniority
  • DPhysical size of the group

Q2.What did Google’s Project Aristotle identify as the strongest predictor of team effectiveness?

  • AExpertise
  • BPsychological safety — the ability to admit mistakes and challenge ideas without social cost
  • CTeam size
  • DMeeting frequency
Show answer key

Q1 → B. Social sensitivity, equal turn-taking, proportion of women — not average IQ.The ‘collective intelligence factor’ comes from process, not from stacking smart individuals.

Q2 → B. Psychological safety — the ability to admit mistakes and challenge ideas without social cost.Edmondson’s psychological-safety research is the core mechanism.

2Prompt deconstruction

Stimulus
Woolley’s collective intelligence; Aristotle / Edmondson on psychological safety.
Scope
A specific group (class, team, family, club); 2–3 sessions.
Method
Observe turn-taking, social sensitivity, who raises concerns, who reads the room, what is said vs. what is audibly suppressed.
Thinking
Where intelligence is being produced and where it’s being suppressed.
Output
A diagnosis of your group + what you’d want to change if you could.

3Pick nudge

Which group behaviours will show intelligence being produced or suppressed?

Turn-taking
Is participation roughly equal, dominated, or pattern-dependent?
Social sensitivity
Are members reading the room? Who’s good at it; who isn’t?
Psychological safety
Can people admit mistakes, disagree, raise bad news?
Suppression signals
Subject changes, humour-deflections, voices that go quiet.

4Planner — for each of your picks

Session
Collective intelligence produced / collective intelligence suppressed / specific moments
#1
#2
#3

5Sentence stems

  • I noticed that ___ when ___.
  • The specific moment it stood out was ___.
  • Before paying attention, I had been assuming ___.
  • [Researcher’s] finding that ___ captures what I saw, because ___.
  • The pattern across my cases is ___.
  • What this tells me about [wider topic] is ___.

6Exemplar paragraph (not about this article)

(1) I noticed that in our debate-club planning sessions, collective intelligence is produced whenever our coach asks ‘what am I missing?’ after proposing an approach, and suppressed whenever the most senior student opens with a confident recommendation. The specific moment it stood out was a planning session where the senior student spoke first for ninety seconds with a clear plan, and three ideas that had surfaced in a quieter earlier session disappeared from the conversation entirely. (2) Before paying attention, I had been assuming participation was roughly equal because no one was visibly cut off. (3) Woolley’s finding that turn-taking equality predicts group performance captures what I was missing: equality doesn’t mean no one is silenced; it means the structural conditions that make contributions possible. (4) The pattern across three sessions is that the sequence of speaking matters more than the formal invitation — once a confident statement is on the table, the group’s job silently shifts from generating ideas to evaluating that one. (5) What this tells me about our group’s collective intelligence is that we have enough technical smarts but not enough psychological-safety architecture: the coach’s ‘what am I missing?’ is the specific move that converts the room. (6) What I would want to change: the senior student speaks last in planning, or the coach asks the softer voices first before any confident statement is allowed.

What this paragraph does, move by move

  1. Names the specific moves that produce and suppress intelligence.
  2. Catches the false-equality assumption.
  3. Applies Woolley’s turn-taking finding precisely.
  4. Identifies the sequence-of-speaking mechanism that ‘polite invitation’ misses.
  5. Distinguishes technical smarts from safety architecture.
  6. Ends with two specific, testable changes.