What longhorn crazy ants can teach us about groupthink
There’s a reason we often fail to accomplish anything in staff meetings or settle on a less- effective solution
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’s 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’s 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.
The experiment used two versions of the same maze – one ant-sized and the other scaled to the size of a tennis court. Both species had to transport a T-shaped object – something bulky compared with their bodies – through a tricky series of openings. It was a bit like moving an awkwardly large couch through a narrow hallway or stairwell. The object had to be in just the right orientation to pass through the first opening and then rotate to pass through the second.
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