  The main intreest of this study was to investigate the phenomenon of
collective intelligence in an anonymous virtual environment developed for this
purpose. In particular, we were interested in studiyng how dividing a fixed
community in different group size, which, in different phases of the
experiment, works to solve tasks of different complexity, influences the social
problem solving process. The experiments, which have involved 216 university
students, showed that the cooperative behaviour is stronger in small groups
facing complex tasks: the cooperation probability negatively correlated with
both the group size and easiness of task. Individuals seem to activate a
collective intelligence heuristics when the problem is too complex. Some
psychosocial variables were considered in order to check how they affect the
cooperative behaviour of participants, but they do not seem to have a
significant impact on individual cooperation probability, supporting the idea
that a partial de-individualization operates in virtual environments.
