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  3. If you lock a bunch of high-IQ people in a room and tell them to get on with a task, what will they emerge with? Lower IQs, for

If you lock a bunch of high-IQ people in a room and tell them to get on with a task, what will they emerge with? Lower IQs, for

admin2012-07-06  6
问题     If you lock a bunch of high-IQ people in a room and tell them to get on with a task, what will they emerge with? Lower IQs, for one thing. A study done by Virginia Tech tried to replicate how people think under social pressure. Subjects with an average IQ of 126 were clustered into problem-solving groups and exposed to judgments about their work. A pecking order formed. The low performers showed high responses in the part of the brain that regulates fear. The scientists concluded that " individuals express diminished cognitive capacity in groups, an effect that is worsened by perceived lower status".
    This is the first ill word any scientist has had for the way groups think in a very long time. Over the past decade or two, story after story has spoken glowingly of "hive mind" and the "wisdom of crowds". Are these profound new insights or are they a cognitive-science trend on which the tide is now receding?
    They are both. There is certainly something measurable that can be called collective intelligence. A fascinating study of its operation was published in the magazine Science two years ago. They asked small groups to do a variety of mental tests and then play a game of draughts. A collective equivalent of general intelligence is just what they found. Moreover, it was not just an artefact of the individual intelligences that made up the groups. The correlation of group thinking with the average intelligence of the group, or with the intelligence of the group’s smartest member, was weak. Strong correlations were with the "average social sensitivity of group members and the equality in distribution of conversation turn-taking". Office bullies and those who can’t shut up drive down productivity.
    These two findings—that there is such a thing as collective intelligence and that working in groups makes individuals a bit duller—are not necessarily contradictory. A human being probably loses a bit of thinking capacity in subordinating himself to a group, no matter what feats the collective is able to carry out. Whether this trade-off is worthwhile depends on what the groups are doing. If western culture as it existed until two decades ago stood for any one thing, it was the defence of the individual against the herd. Individuals produced King Lear and the Discourse on the Method. The "wisdom of crowds" produces a few retail fads at best, book-burnings and pogroms at worst.
    Our own time thinks itself different. It is marked by integration of markets and innovations in networking and sales. Crowd-sourced Wikipedia (flawed, quick and free) helped drive Britannica (authoritative, labour-intensive and dear) out of the paper encyclopedia business. No one has the time to read King Lear, let alone write it. Anybody who can spark a retail fad is acclaimed a genius. The wisdom of crowds, in fact, may be just an updated version of the age-old wisdom of retail; when it comes to what the crowd wants, the crowd is all-knowing. [494 words]
The first paragraph intends to tell us that______.
选项 A、IQ is not a reliable indicator of one’s ability
B、high IQ people tend to possess less self-confidence
C、people tend to lose some thinking ability when working in groups
D、several high IQ individuals does not necessarily produce a highly cognitive group
答案C
解析 本题考查段落主旨+写作目的。
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