What Makes a Strong Team? Collective Intelligence Predicts Team Performance in League of Legends

Recent research has demonstrated that (a) groups can be characterized by a collective intelligence (CI) factor that measures their ability to perform well together on a wide range of different tasks, and (b) this factor can predict groups’ performance on other tasks in the future. The current study examines whether these results translate from the lab into the world of teams in competitive online video games where time-pressured, intense collaboration occurs purely online. In this study of teams playing the online game League of Legends, we find that CI does, indeed, predict the competitive performance of teams. We also find that CI is positively correlated with the presence of a female team member and with the team members’ average social perceptiveness.