Toward a Quantitative Understanding of Teamwork and Collective Intelligence

Teamwork and collective intelligence drive the production of goods and knowledge in our society and are an integral part of our increasingly networked lives. However, we are still far from understanding the causal mechanisms that underlie effective organization and communication in teams, and the study of human factors in many fields of computer science has tended toward abstractions of behavior over the understanding of fundamental social processes. I argue that the rapid growth of socio-technical systems on the Internet presents both an impetus and an opportunity for a more causal approach to understanding teamwork and collective intelligence. We can approach this goal through broader deployment of experiments, fostering closer ties between theory and empirical work, and by bridging the gap across different disciplines.