Surprisingly, in a team an individual's smarts has little to do with success in thought-based tasks such as visual puzzles and negotiating over scarce resources, a battery of recent experiments found.

Instead, a group is more successful if it contains people who are more "socially sensitive"—in this case meaning they're better able to discern emotions from people's faces.

That also explains why groups with more women—who consistently score higher on tests of social sensitivity—were more likely to excel, said study leader Anita Williams Woolley, an expert in collective intelligence at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh.

Particularly intelligent groups also had more people who took turns speaking, according to the study, published tomorrow in the journal Science.

"There's such a focus on individual