Evolution for Everyone by David Sloan Wilson

Author:David Sloan Wilson
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780440336808
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2007-03-26T16:00:00+00:00

26

How Many Inventors Does It Take to Make a Lightbulb?

HOW MANY QUALITY MANAGERS does it take to change a lightbulb? We’ve formed a quality circle to study the problem of why lightbulbs burn out and determine the best thing we as managers can do to enable lightbulbs to work smarter, not harder.

Lightbulb jokes (there are thousands of them) are funny because they portray groups of people doing badly what a single person can do with ease. Oddly, much of the scientific literature on how people think in groups reads like a lightbulb joke. Take the concept of groupthink, a term coined by Irving Janis in the 1970s to describe groups as dysfunctional decision-making units. As he put it: “I use the term ‘groupthink’ as a quick and easy way to refer to a mode of thinking that people engage in when they are deeply involved in a cohesive in-group, when the members’ strivings for unanimity override their motivation to realistically appraise alternative courses of action. Groupthink refers to a deterioration of mental efficiency, reality testing and moral judgment that results from in-group pressures.” Janis interpreted a number of famous foreign-policy disasters as examples of groupthink. Evidently, crafting a foreign policy is like changing a lightbulb—something best done by individuals and botched by groups.

Or take the concept of brainstorming. In 1939, an advertising executive named Alex Osborne claimed that his employees generated more and better ideas in groups than alone. Psychologists conducted dozens of experiments to test this claim by comparing the performance of brainstorming groups with the performance of an equal number of individuals thinking by themselves (called nominal groups). The results were so uniformly negative that a 1991 review article concluded: “It appears to be particularly difficult to justify brainstorming techniques in terms of any performance outcomes, and the long-lived popularity of brainstorming techniques is unequivocally and substantively misguided.”

These seemingly authoritative results challenge the concept of mental teamwork that I have sketched in the last five chapters. I would have expected just the opposite. Honeybees think in groups so well that they merge into a single mind, as I showed in Chapter 20. If members of human groups merge their muscles in cooperative physical activities, shouldn’t they merge their minds as well? We have been living in groups for our entire history as a species and the higher the stakes—the more “deeply involved in a cohesive in-group”—the better our collective decision making should become. The idea of human evolution as one long lightbulb joke just doesn’t make any sense—yet it seems to be supported by an enormous body of scientific research.

I decided to resolve this issue for myself about ten years ago. You might be interested in how I approach a new subject such as this without any prior training. My first step was to type the keywords “group decision making” and “group problem solving” into PsychInfo, a computerized service specialized for searching the psychological literature. With the click of a button, I received the citations and abstracts of 495 articles, which I printed and placed in a large three-ring notebook.

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