Collective Intelligence refers to the enhanced capacity that emerges when groups of people, communities, or even networks of machines and humans work together to solve problems, make decisions, or generate knowledge. It emphasizes the potential of “many minds” to achieve outcomes that surpass what any individual could manage alone.
By contrast, Group Think is the pejorative term for Collective Intelligence. It describes the risk that a group, rather than achieving greater wisdom, suppresses dissenting voices and converges prematurely on shallow consensus. Where Collective Intelligence values diversity of input, Group Think erases it.
The distinction often lies in how the group organizes itself. Open dialogue, multiple perspectives, and mechanisms for weighing evidence support collective intelligence. Pressure to conform, fear of conflict, or over-confidence in authority figures lead toward Group Think.
Examples of Collective Intelligence can be found in citizen science projects, open-source software development, and Wikipedia itself. Each shows how distributed participants, loosely coordinated, can achieve outcomes of remarkable quality and scale.
Writers such as Pierre Lévy have explored the concept in depth, describing it as “universally distributed intelligence” that can be mobilized in real time. See also collective intelligence on wikipedia 
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