When Collaboration Beats Ability: Mixed-Ability Teams Can Outperform High-Ability Teams Under Coordination Demands

Collective intelligence describes the capacity of groups to achieve levels of performance that cannot be explained by the abilities of their individuals. The existence of collective intelligence implies that groups composed of mixed-ability members may outperform groups of high ability. Here, we examine when such benefits emerge in humans and whether it is driven by collaboration. We designed a collaborative multiplayer online game and manipulated team composition (mixed-ability vs. high-ability) and coordination demands by exposing teams to two different task environments that varied in how much they encouraged collaboration.We collected data from 280 teams of two human players (70 per condition), totaling 560 participants.We found that mixed-ability teams outperformed high-ability teams in environments designed to encourage collaboration. This performance advantage was due to more collaborative actions and more frequent division of labor. These results show that collaboration emerges selectively as a function of group composition and coordination demands.