In the Politics, Aristotle wrote: "For each individual among the many has a share of excellence and practical wisdom, and when they meet together, just as they become in a manner one man, who has many feet, and hands, and senses, so too with regard to their character and thought." If a group is indeed "in a manner" like an individual, then collective intelligence may follow principles similar to those that have been discovered over the past one hundred years of research on individual intelligence. In this talk I will discuss parallels between several recent findings about the nature of collective intelligence in small groups and the mechanisms that explain individual differences in cognitive ability—such as information processing capacity, communications efficiency, and implicit learning. I will also argue that intelligence, in the psychometric sense of correlated variation in cognitive abilities, is a property of all types of complex information processing systems, whether they are individual humans, individual animals, or different human groups.

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