In today’s society, working in groups or in collaboration with others is a highly valued method.  Groupthink is widely employed by the workplace and in schools.  It is believed that by sharing thoughts and thinking aloud would increase creative flow, to keep each other motivated, encourage communication, etc.  As a manager, I would think that this is very important in a workplace because it would help build relationships among coworkers and help build a culture for the organization.

However, upon reading Susan Cain’s Quiet, a book about introverts, I learned that Groupthink is a method made specifically for extroverts and that it is not applicable to all kinds of temperaments in society.  In fact, this form of collaboration can be detrimental.  A psychologist named Solomon Asch’s experiment demonstrated this astutely.  He had a group of students take a vision test in which 95% of the group answered correctly.  Later, he had an actor join the group to state a wrong answer and 75% of the group went along with the actor’s incorrect answer.  This experiment was conducted again in 2005 by Gregory Burns-- this time with fMRI’s to scan the brain while the group answered similar questions.  When the group answered individually, only 13.8% of the questions were incorrect; when they were asked to work together to come up with one answer, 41% of the questions were wrong. 

Interestingly, the fMRI’s showed that there was an actual change in the brain’s activity during the group work.  It showed that the people who went along with the group showed less activity in the frontal lobe but more in the areas of the brain associated with perception.  This meant that the conformist’s change in answer was not because he or she wanted to fit in with the group and be well-liked but because he or she actually thought that the wrong answer was correct. 

This fascinating experiment reminded me that as a manager I would need to find a balance in what time of work methods I would like to employ.  When working with so many different types of personalities with different temperaments, it is important to understand what kind of working environment one is comfortable working in and to refrain from any rigid form management approach.  While techniques like groupthink is popular and widely used, it is not, as Asch and Burns show us, always the best way to improve performance.