'Socially sensitive’ teams with more women ‘are smarter’: Study

A team comprising more women is also more 'socially sensitive' and therefore more successful, a new study has revealed.

A group is more successful if it contains people who are more "socially sensitive" — in this case meaning that they are able to discern emotions from people's faces.

"Maybe that is why groups with more women were more likely to excel," said study leader Anita Williams Woolley, an expert in collective intelligence at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh.

"Particularly intelligent groups also had more people who took turns on speaking," she added.

"As our world becomes flatter and more interconnected, it's not as important to consider what an individual can do by themselves but what they can do collectively," National Geographic News quoted Woolley as saying.

Woolley and colleagues recruited 699 volunteers, and first measured each person's intelligence and social sensitivity using standard psychological tests.

Volunteers were then randomly split into groups of two to five and asked to do some simple tasks, such as solving a visual puzzle.

"The results revealed that certain groups were better in all types of tasks, which is the primary evidence for the notion of collective intelligence," Woolley said.

Next, the groups were each asked to perform more complex tasks like playing a video game against an imaginary opponent and solving a research-and-development problem.

"As suspected, the groups' collective intelligence scores from the first round of tests predicted how they would perform on the complex experiments," she said.

The study could offer guidance in real-life situations — especially as more decisions in fields such as business and the military are made in consensus-based settings.

Likewise, the findings could help people succeed in group therapy, according to Bonnie Jacobson, a clinical psychologist in New York City.

The study was published in the journal Science.