The Illusion of Group Effectivity

The illusion of group effectivity refers to the belief, persistent despite contradictory empirical evidence, that groups can stimulate creativity. This article uses unpublished data from the authors' research on brainstorming to illustrate the illusion of group effectivity and then presents a theoretical interpretation of this illusion based on two assumptions: (a) People are motivated to view their own performance in a positive light. (b) People who generate ideas in groups have difficulty in differentiating between own and others' ideas. They are therefore more prone to this self-serving bias than persons who work individually. In an experiment conducted to test these hypotheses, subjects who had brainstormed either in groups or individually were presented with the set of ideas produced by their nominal or real groups and asked to identify the ideas they had suggested and those that had occurred to them. Results were generally consistent with the hypotheses.