Understanding Collective Intelligence – A Literature Review From an Engineering Perspective

Abstract

As human beings are so tightly connected in social networks, and their evolution is so much determined by cultural factors, it can be argued that all the processes commonly called “intelligence” are in fact the result of social interactions. In other words, mind is a social phenomenon. Under these circumstances, the shallowness of the research on “collective intelligence” is quite surprising. Even the definition of the term seems affected by confusion and lack of consensus. This paper contains a brief review of the literature aimed to identify the relevant pieces of knowledge on collective intelligence and related concepts, with a special emphasis on the applications of the ICT for enabling and harnessing the wisdom of crowds. In the end, we propose a new definition of collective intelligence.