Group Ability Composition on World Knowledge Problems
This chapter examines group ability composition and social combination processes on world knowledge tasks. On difficult world knowledge tasks, high-ability persons performed better in cooperative groups with other high-ability members than they did alone, and this difference increased with group size. In contrast, low-ability persons did not perform better in cooperative groups with other low-ability members than they did alone, and there was little improvement as group size increased. Low-ability members contributed very little unique information to one another and virtually none to high-ability members. Medium-ability members displayed an intermediate pattern that was more like low-ability than high-ability members. Consequently, the performance of groups of mixed high-ability, medium-ability, and low-ability members was basically proportional to the number of high-ability members: the greater the proportion of high-ability members, the better the group performance.