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What Longhorn crazy ants can teach us about groupthink
There is a reason we often fail to accomplish anything in staff meetings, or settle on a less effective solution.
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A longhorn crazy ant. Individual ants have no idea how puzzles work, and intelligence emerges on the group level.
PHOTO: UNIVERSITI SAINS MALAYSIA
F.D. Flam
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When scientists constructed a puzzle-solving task and pitted teams of people against teams of ants, the insects sometimes proved to be the smarter species. That is not to denigrate human intelligence – ants are smart, and their feats of coordinated activity are rare in nature.
Still, it is fair to say the results were humbling and that ants have something important to teach us. There is a lesson in why we sometimes fail to accomplish anything in staff meetings, and why committees sometimes settle on a less effective solution to a problem than individual people could have provided.
