A Team of Champions

Fair warning:  I just read “Quiet: The power of introverts in a world that can’t stop talking” by Susan Cain and this blog post is heavily influenced by that.  She did some spectacular research and presented it in a manner that went down very well with me.  She even used some specific software studies as examples.

One of the rallying cries of a (somewhat) local sports team is “A champion team will always beat a team of champions”.  This clever play on words makes us feel warm inside thinking that if we’re connected to the mass, that all of us is somehow better than each of us.  We are indeed social animals.  The main point of the opening chapters is that actually, studies suggest that while we feel like we do better in a group situation, we actually do better alone.  And more worryingly, that if we’re in a group situation, we don’t just go along with the more vocal person for the social acceptance, believing deep down that we’d chose a different answer if it were up to us, but that the social pressure actually changes our perception entirely.  So I’d like to pick at my previous post a little, with this new information.

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