Philosophical Transactions B recently published a theme issue on ‘’. In this blog, Guest Editors of the issue, Cathal O’Madagain, Sarah Alami, Monique Borgerhoff Mulder, Edmond Seabright, José Segovia Martin, James Winters and Andrew Whiten tell us how this issue came about, and about some of the important research highlighted in this issue.
Tell us about the idea behind this theme issue and how it came about?
Sarah
The idea came out of a workshop we organized at the School of Collective Intelligence at UM6P Rabat, which brought together people from very different backgrounds: evolutionary anthropologists, cognitive scientists, computer scientists, and people connected to industry and policy. For me at least, the same gap kept coming up. Fields like behavioural ecology and evolutionary anthropology have been studying collective behaviour, cooperation, and cumulative cultural evolution for decades but this work has developed almost entirely in parallel with mainstream Collective Intelligence (CI) research rather than in conversation with it. The idea for the theme issue is an attempt to bridge that gap.
Monique
For me the exciting aspects of CI lie in offering a potentially better understanding of the evolutionary success of our species. We talk a lot about cumulative cultural evolution, and the division of knowledge across minds, but how this actually works is still largely a black box. As such we were keen to turn to perspectives and toolkits from other fields. Furthermore, the better we understand the dynamics of CI, the stronger position we’ll be in for addressing contemporary social and environmental challenges that call for the design of more inclusive institutions that draw on a wider slice of wisdom and experience.
What do you think is the most exciting/novel idea discussed in the papers?
Ed
I think the papers really highlight the importance of understanding emergent group processes (deliberate or not) when studying what makes a species or a society successful, however that might be defined. We often focus on markers of individual cognition: IQ, tool use, symbolic complexity, etc. - even fundamentally social skills like communication or manipulation tend to be studied at the level of individual outcomes. What the papers in this issue really emphasise is that it’s crucial to expand the unit of analysis to the collective, both because many outcomes are collective but also because collective processes tend to be greater than the sum of their parts.
Jose
What makes the issue especially interesting is that it offers not one but several original ideas. Among these, one especially striking theme is the idea that collective intelligence may have evolved through the progressive construction of shared material and cultural scaffolds that allowed groups to coordinate, learn, and think more effectively over time. This also speaks directly to the present, as comparisons between human judgement and large language models shed new light on how collective problem-solving may work in the future. Taken together, these ideas make the issue especially exciting, because they connect deep evolutionary questions with emerging forms of collective intelligence today.
How do you see the field developing in the next few years?
Cathal
What’s particularly interesting about this field is that it has emerged from the intersection of several others, only fairly recently. At a conference on Collective Intelligence in UM6P Rabat in 2024, many of the authors in the current issue presented. One day we put the question to the audience: ‘what does the scientific discipline of CI consist in?’ Here we converged on the answer ‘the study of how groups make decisions’. This already brings in computer science (where platforms are created for allowing many people to come together and vote on a question, or where simulations of group decisions can shed light on how they operate), psychology and anthropology (where human behaviour and its motives are the focus) and also studies in organizational science and leadership (where a major focus is on how to organize groups in such a way that they can make decisions most efficiently, how leadership emerges and functions effectively, etc.). Whether we were entirely satisfied with this answer or not, there was at least a consensus that there is indeed a coherent discipline emerging. Interestingly, we are seeing collective intelligence emerging as a field of education in many universities - there are now master programs either entirely or partly focused on collective intelligence, often in combination with computer science, psychology, or organizational science, in universities in Finland, France, the UK, the US - and of course in the department that several of the current editors belong to, namely the School of Collective Intelligence in Rabat, Morocco. And the field has exploded in interest in publishing too, with collective intelligence as a topic appearing in more than 300 papers a year now (according to SCOPUS), compared to less than 10 a year in 2000, while a new journal called ‘Collective Intelligence’ was founded in 2022. All this points to the emergence of a genuinely new academic discipline, much as cognitive science emerged first in the 1970s as now is a well-recognized discipline available for study in many universities.
How was your experience of being a Guest Editor on Phil Trans B?
Andy
I love Phil Trans B! The number and diversity of contributions it accommodates, built around a central theme, is just right. Along all the steps of editing, the first one is crucial - inviting an ‘A Team’ to first author the articles. Because of the distinguished status of this flagship journal of the Royal Society, its format and impact, you can typically rely on attracting an excellent set of contributors who can be relied on to submit a high-grade manuscript. Probably you already had most of this team in place in order to make a successful bid to edit an issue. Later, knowing the deadline for submissions, a Guest Editor can set up reviewers in advance and so streamline the review process. The submission website is very helpful and the commissioning editor and her team are outstanding in their efficiency and willingness to offer guidance whenever necessary. I strongly recommend Guest Editing a theme issue if you have an exciting topic in mind. Nowadays most of the articles can be Open Access and after 12 months, the whole issue is free to read in any case.
Read the theme issue ‘’. All articles are free to read.
Visit our website to from Philosophical Transactions B, or to find out how you can for the journal.
