The construct of collective intelligence assumes that groups have a better capacity than individuals to deal with complex, poorly defined problems. The digital domain allows us to analyze this premise under circumstances different from those in the physical environment: we can gather an elevated number of participants and generate a large quantity of data.
This study adopted an emotional perspective to analyze the interactions among 794 adolescents dealing with a sexting case on an online interaction platform designed to generate group answers resulting from a certain degree of achieved consensus.
Our results show that emotional responses evolve over time in several phases of interaction. From the onset, the emotional dimension predicts how individual responses will evolve, particularly in the final consensus phase.
Responses gradually become more emotionally complex; participants tend to identify themselves with the victim in the test case while increasingly rejecting the aggressors.