Individuals Have Brains, Groups Do Not
Here’s an excellent article on the failure of collective thinking.
Is there anyone more loathed in office culture than the autocratic decision maker who ignores the opinion of the group? It’s Business 101: Get lots of input, put your heads together, reach a consensus. The primacy of groups and teamwork is so ingrained that we seldom stop to think about it anymore. Now in the age of instant messaging, wikis, social networking sites, and videoconferencing on cell phones, collaboration and consensus are gaining yet more currency. We can, and often do, get everyone to weigh in, all the time, whether it’s by cell phone, e-mail, or instant message. As James Surowiecki nicely puts it in the title of his best-selling book, it’s “the wisdom of crowds,” and it’s a glorious thing.
Or it would be, if it weren’t for just one little problem: The effectiveness of groups, teamwork, collaboration, and consensus is largely a myth. In many cases, individuals do much better on their own. Our bias toward groups is counterproductive. And the technology of ubiquitous connectedness is making the problem worse.
I’ll understand if you demand to see the study on that one. But it’s silly to quote a single study on the failure of groups because there are so many–dozens of them, going back decades–that there’s no good way to pick one out.
As far back as 1972, in his now classic book, Victims of Groupthink, Yale psychology researcher Irving Janis theorizes that groups often breed a false confidence that leads to unsound decisions none of the individuals in the group would have made on their own. In the 1990s, research by Purdue psychology researcher Kip Williams shed light on “social loafing”–that is, the tendency of people in groups simply to not try as hard as individuals. In fact, the notion that individuals outthink and outdecide groups is so well established among experts that they don’t bother to study it anymore. Instead, the hot question among psychologists and organizational behaviorists is why the rest of us persist in keeping this wrong-headed notion alive. “We’ve been trying to find out what seduces us into thinking teams are so wonderful,” says Natalie Allen, a psychologist at the University of Western Ontario who has studied what she calls “the romance of teams.”
Going along with the crowd allows us to avoid responsibility for our actions. If I get agreement ahead of time from the group that “we” all should make a certain decision or behave in a certain way, they can’t come back later and say that I screwed up without admitting they screwed up as well.
Succeeding as an individual will win you little more than contempt when others are failing as a group. They feel better when everybody fails together and how dare you prove so many others wrong!
As I discussed in my book, Reality and the Taboo Against Truth, groups are not equipped biologically to think. Groups are nothing more than a collection of individuals. They do not possess the characteristics of the individual–to believe they do is a fallacy of composition. The group does not possess a brain, for example, anymore than it possesses a collective digestive system.
A brick or a concrete block can’t think because it doesn’t have a brain. A group doesn’t have a brain. You wouldn’t want a brick to think for you because it can’t. Why would you want a group to think for you?
Does it make sense to base an entire political and social system like democracy on such a fallacy? Of course not. Yet every election day, we allow a group to make our decisions for us.
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September 19th, 2006 at 5:31 am
[...] The words It was when I started cataloging the content of the posts about Freedman’s article that a pattern emerged. The pattern? In a word: Rants. Freedman’s article seems to have unleashed passions, resulting in several rant-like posts against teamwork and collaboration. Here is a sampling of the posts I categorized as agreeing with Freedman’s views. A myth that needs to be flushed down. A brick or a concrete block can’t think because it doesn’t have a brain. A group doesn’t have a brain. You wouldn’t want a brick to think for you because it can’t. Why would you want a group to think for you? Does it make sense to base an entire political and social system like democracy on such a fallacy? Of course not. Yet every election day, we allow a group to make our decisions for us. Meetings populated by yes-men and time-wasting boardroom jockeys. [...]