Кен Робинсон - The Element

Children get their ideas of how to behave by identifying with the group and taking on its attitudes, behaviors, speech, and styles of dress and adornment. “Most of them do this automatically and willingly. They want to be like their peers, but just in case they have any funny ideas, their peers are quick to remind them of the penalties of being different.… The nail that sticks up gets hammered down.”

Since breaking the rules is a sure way to find ourselves out of the group, we may deny our deepest passions to stay connected with our peers. At school, we disguise an interest in physics because our circle finds it uncool. We spend afternoons playing basketball when what we really want to do is master the five mother sauces. We never mention our fascination with hip‐hop because the people we travel with consider something so “street” to be beneath them. Being in your Element may depend on stepping out of the circle.

Shawn Carter was born in the housing projects in Brooklyn, New York. Now known as Jay‐Z, he is one of the most successful musicians and businesspeople of his generation, and an icon to millions of people around the world. To become all of that, he first had to confront the disapproval and the skepticism of the friends and peers he grew up with on the Brooklyn streets. “When I left the block, everyone was saying I was crazy,” he has said of his early success. “I was doing well for myself on the streets, and cats around me were like, ‘These rappers are hos. They just record, tour, and get separated from their families, while some white person takes all their money.’ I was determined to do it differently.”

His role model was the music entrepreneur Russell Simmons, and like him, Jay‐Z now heads a diverse business empire that’s rooted in his success as a musician but goes beyond it to include a clothing line and a record label. All of this has generated a huge personal fortune for Jay‐Z and the renewed respect of many of the friends in Brooklyn he had to move aside to make his way.

In extreme cases, peer groups can become trapped in what psychologist Irving Janis has called “groupthink,” 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.” The prevailing belief here is that the group knows best, that a decision or a direction that seems to represent the majority of the group stands beyond careful examination— even when your instincts suggest otherwise.

There are several famous—and sometime infamous—studies of the effects of groupthink, including the Solomon Asch conformity experiments. In 1951, psychologist Asch brought together college students in groups of eight to ten, telling them he was studying visual perception. All but one of the students were “plants.” They knew the nature of the experiment, and Asch had instructed them to give incorrect answers the majority of the time. The real subject—the only one who Asch had not prepared ahead of time—answered each question only after hearing most of the other answers in the group.

Asch showed the students a card with a line on it. He then held up another card with three lines of different lengths and asked them to say which one was the same length as the line on the other card. One was an obvious match but the planted students had been instructed by Asch to say that the match was one of the other lines. When it was time for the subject to answer, the effects of groupthink kicked in. In a majority of cases, the subject answered with the group, and against clear visual evidence, at least once during the session.

When interviewed later, most of the subjects said they knew they were giving the wrong answers but did so because they didn’t want to be singled out. “The tendency to conformity in our society is so strong,” Asch wrote, “that reasonably intelligent and well‐meaning young people are willing to call white black. This is a matter of concern. It raises questions about our ways of education and about the values that guide our conduct.”

Management writer Jerry B. Harvey gives another famous example, known as the Abilene Paradox: On a hot afternoon in Coleman, Texas, the story goes, a family is comfortably playing dominoes on a porch, until the father‐in‐law suggests they take a trip to Abilene, fifty‐three miles north, for dinner. As Harvey describes it, “The wife says, ‘Sounds like a great idea.’ The husband, despite having reservations because the drive is long and hot, thinks that his preferences must be out of step with the group and says, ‘Sounds good to me. I just hope your mother wants to go.’ The mother‐in‐law then says, ‘Of course I want to go. I haven’t been to Abilene in a long time.’ The drive is hot, dusty, and long. When they arrive at the cafeteria, the food is as bad. They arrive back home four hours later, exhausted. One of them dishonestly says, ‘It was a great trip, wasn’t it.’

“The mother‐in‐law says that, actually, she would rather have stayed home, but went along since the other three were so enthusiastic. The husband says, ‘I didn’t want to go. I only went to satisfy the rest of you.’ The wife says, ‘I just went along to keep you happy. I would have to be crazy to want to go out in the heat like that.’ The father‐in‐law says that he only suggested it because he thought the others might be bored.

“The group sits back, perplexed that they together decided to take a trip which none of them wanted. They each would have preferred to sit comfortably, but did not admit to it when they still had time to enjoy the afternoon.”

This is a benign but dramatic illustration of the consequences of groupthink. Every member of the group agreed to do something they didn’t want to do because they thought the others were committed to doing it. The result was that no one came away happy.

Allowing groupthink to inform our decisions about our futures can lead to equally unpleasant—and much more consequential— results. Accepting the group opinion that physics is not cool, playing basketball is better than learning to be a chef, and hiphop is beneath you is counterproductive not only to the individual but to the group. Perhaps, like those in the Abilene Paradox, others in the circle secretly disagree too but are afraid to stand alone against the group. Groupthink can diminish the group as a whole.

The major obstacles to finding the Element often emerge in school. This is partly because of the hierarchy of subjects, which means that many students never discover their true interests and talents. But within the general culture of education, different social groups form distinctive subcultures. For some groups the code is that it’s just not cool to study. If you’re doing science, you’re a geek; if you’re doing art or dance, you’re effete. For other groups, doing these things is absolutely essential.

The power of groups is that they validate the common interests of their members. The danger of groupthink is that it dulls their individual judgment. The group thinks in unison and behaves en masse. In this respect, schools of people are like schools of fish.

A Single Ant Can’t Ruin a Picnic

You’ve probably seen images of huge schools of fish swimming in tight formation that instantly move in a new direction like a single organism. Perhaps you’ve seen swarms of insects crossing the sky that spontaneously swoop and swirl like an orchestrated cloud. It’s an impressive display that seems like controlled and intelligent behavior. But the individual herrings or mosquitoes are not acting on free will, as we think of it in humans. We don’t know what may be on their minds as they go along with the crowd, but we do know that when they do it, they act almost as a single creature. Researchers are now understanding more about how this happens.