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Learn more at Stripe.com. Welcome to Rationally Speaking, the podcast where we explore the borderlands between reason and nonsense.

I'm your host, Julia Galef, and I'm here today with Christopher Chabree.

Chris is a cognitive psychologist

and professor at Geisinger Health System in Pennsylvania. He writes about social science for

publications like the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, and he's the author of the book,

The Invisible Gorilla, How Our Intuitions Deceive Us. Chris, welcome to rationally speaking.

Thanks for having me. It's great to talk to you.

I have a bunch of things lined up that I want to ask you about. Maybe let's start with some of your

recent research on collective intelligence. Can you tell us how you define collective intelligence

and how do we know it's a thing and it matters? Sure. So this work I'm going to talk about is all done in collaboration with Tom Malone from MIT

and Anita Woolley from Carnegie Mellon.

I should say that right off the bat.

And the second thing I should say is that as a researcher, I try not to get hung up on defining concepts, because I find that sort of defining

them precisely, even though that's generally a good idea, can often sort of get us hung up on

whether we agree on the definition and distract us from the empirical phenomenon. So I'm going to

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