The Idiocy of Crowds


	The Idiocy of Crowds

lguinn

9-8-2006 7:32 PM

446 views

tags:

teams, teamwork

lguinn says:

Sure, I love to work in teams. But consensus is often a poor goal, and teams aren't smarter or more productive than individuals. Plus, this article supports my personal concern that we are drowning our individual viewpoints by adopting politically correct groupthink.

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As far back as 1972, in his now classic book, <EM>Victims of Groupthink</EM>, 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."
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