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The Rise Of The New Groupthink Analysis

Decent Essays

In her article titled 'the rise of the new groupthink’. Susan Cain, an alumna of Princeton and Harvard Law and former corporate attorney addresses a commonly held belief in society today that when people work as a unit they are more productive than when they work as individuals. While acknowledging the need for people to work as a unit, the Writer strongly disagrees with this assertion and puts forward a comprehensive argument based on research and her personal opinion. Although the writer puts forward a convincing case against collaboration; seclusion is often discouraged in almost all aspects of modern society be it in workplaces, schools and worship institutions where there is an emphasis on establishing both collaborative relationships …show more content…

And it depends on the type of creativity you are considering. An artist or writer spends a lot of time alone. Some don’t function well in social situations. Others use social interaction as a break from solitary work; they refuel through social interaction. The reason I tend to agree with Cain is not because of any scientific studies, but my own discomfort with forced group activities. There is never “equal participation” when groups are formed artificially, which in my opinion classroom groups always are. I feel uncomfortable when thrown into a group to work on a project that will then be graded based on results that may not agree with the ideas I would like to put forward.Given that, you also need stimulus from the outside world to keep feeding this creativity going and developing and get some new energy going. Collaborating on art projects is fantastic as you get to mix and mash plenty of ideas together and you also get great feedback on what you are …show more content…

But there’s an important exception to this research: if the problems are complex, or if they are visual or spatial, then groups usually outperform solo workers. And in most real-world organizations, problems are pretty complex–not the simple word-generation tasks used in brainstorming experiments. There’s a grain of truth to Cain’s claim: Psychologists who study creativity know that it requires both solitude and collaboration. Exceptional creativity involves a lot of hard work, and that often happens in solitude. But Cain misses the big picture: Researchers have found that breakthrough ideas are largely due to exchange and interaction, and that’s because breakthrough ideas always involve combinations of very different ideas Cain has read a broad range of important research, and she gets some things right. And she’s smart enough to realize that the more defensible position is that you need both solitude and collaboration. But in her desire to elevate the role of solitude, Cain’s article misrepresents the

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