“Intuitively, we still attribute too much to individuals and not enough to groups. Part of that may just be that it’s simpler; it’s simpler to say the success of a company depended on the CEO for good or bad, but in reality the success of a company depends on a whole lot more,” said Thomas W. Malone, director of the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence and senior author of the recent study, published in the journal Science. “Essentially what’s happening as our society becomes more advanced and more developed is that more things are done by groups of people than by individuals. In a certain sense, our intuitions about how that works haven’t caught up with the reality of modern life.”

The interest is fueled in part by the Internet, which provides an unprecedented opportunity for people to join and leave groups, unbounded by geography. In the digital age, interactions between people are also creating a huge stream of data, giving scientists new ways to glean precise insights about how complex, aggregated behaviors arise. What they are finding is that groups, as entities, have characteristics that are more than just a summing up or averaging of those of its members.

The new work is part of a growing body of research that focuses on understanding collective behavior and intelligence — an increasingly relevant topic of research in an age where everything from scientific progress to entrepreneurial success hinges on collaboration. Embedded in a century’s worth of Broadway shows, the interactions of online communities, or the path a ball travels between soccer players, researchers are finding hints about how individual people contribute to make a group creative and successful.

But separating the spectacularly bright from the merely average may not be quite as important as everyone believes. A striking study led by an MIT Sloan School of Management professor shows that teams of people display a collective intelligence that has surprisingly little to do with the intelligence of the team’s individual members. Group intelligence, the researchers discovered, is not strongly tied to either the average intelligence of the members or the team’s smartest member. And this collective intelligence was more than just an arbitrary score: When the group grappled with a complex task, the researchers found it was an excellent predictor of how well the team performed.

For a century, people have been devising tests that aim to capture a person’s mental abilities in a score, whether it is an IQ test or the SAT. In just an hour or an afternoon, a slate of multiple choice questions or visual puzzles helps sift out the superstars — people whose critical thinking skills suggest they have potent intellectual abilities that could one day help solve real-world problems.

As the mechanics of how groups work emerge, such insights are forming the basis of a scientific approach to engineering better groups, with experiments already unfolding in sports arenas and scientific laboratories. The best-selling book “Moneyball” told the story of how the Oakland Athletics used an unconventional statistical approach to build a winning baseball team without a big budget. The new research suggests it may one day be possible to give a test to a sales team and predict how well it will sell in the following year, or to pick a management team with a good sense of exactly how it is likely to respond to an array of challenges.

“It’s kind of staggering, it’s 2010 and we’re only beginning to realize what look in this paper to be very strong effects,” said Iain Couzin, an assistant professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at Princeton University who studies collective behavior in animals. “I run a relatively large lab, and I was thinking reading this paper about how I could make my lab more effective.”

People have been studying group dynamics for decades, seeing crowds variously as sources of madness and wisdom. Theories have arisen about people acting in plural, from the “groupthink” decision-making in the Bay of Pigs invasion to the “collective mind” of the flight operations on an aircraft carrier. But despite that long history, Malone and colleagues could not find an example in which people had asked the relatively simple question of whether groups had intelligence, the same way individual people do.

The field of measuring and ranking people’s mental aptitudes has been rife with controversy, but the finding that something called “general intelligence” exists has persevered. By giving people a set of tests, researchers can calculate a factor that predicts how a person will perform on a variety of cognitive tasks — as well as their performance in school and work. The MIT and Carnegie Mellon University researchers decided to see if the same concept applied to groups. While people have measured group performance on specific tasks, what Malone sought to understand was whether there was such a thing as general group intelligence.

In two studies, researchers divided 699 people into groups of two to five people. They measured each team member’s intelligence individually, but then gave the teams intelligence-testing tasks to solve — figuring out the next pattern in a sequence, brainstorming the different potential uses of a brick. Then, the group performed a more complex “criterion” task, such as playing checkers against a computer or completing a complicated architectural task with Legos, which was used to understand whether the collective intelligence researchers measured in the initial tasks correctly predicted the group’s abilities.