Collective intelligence is a form of intelligence
that emerges from the collaboration and competition of many
individuals. Collective intelligence appears in a wide variety of forms
of consensus decision making in bacteria, animals, humans, and computers. The study of collective intelligence may properly be considered a subfield of sociology, of business, of computer science, and of mass behavior
— a field that studies collective behavior from the level of quarks to
the level of bacterial, plant, animal, and human societies.
From Wikipedia