Saturday, December 29

Anchoring & Brainstorming

From Quote of the week: Why brainstorming is a bad idea:


"To their surprise, the researchers found that virtual groups, where
people brainstormed individually, generated nearly twice as many
ideas as the real groups.

The result, it turned out, is not an anomaly. In a 1987 study,
researchers concluded that brainstorming groups have never
outperformed virtual groups.
Of the 25 reported experiments by psychologists all over
the world, real groups have never once been shown to be
more productive than virtual groups.
In fact, real groups that engage in brainstorming consistently
generate about half the number of ideas they would have
produced if the group's individuals had worked alone."




Fascinating stuff.
Could this be related to [Nobel laureate] Daniel Kanheman's work on the Anchoring bias, where [apparently individual] contributions during a brainstorming session overly rely (anchor) on each others' ideas?




Useful Links:
Tversky, A. & Kahneman, D. (1974). Judgment under uncertainty: Heuristics and biases
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Kahneman
http://www.princeton.edu/~kahneman/
The Medici Effect

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