this is no surprise though if you look at the insights of contemporary psychology. it turns out that we can't even be in a group of people without instinctively mirroring, mimicking their opinions. even about seemingly personal and visceral things like who you're attracted to, you will start aping the beliefs of the people around you without even realizing that that's what you're doing.
and groups famously follow the opinions of the most dominant or charismatic person in the room, even though there's zero correlation between being the best talker and having the best ideas -- i mean zero. so ... (laughter) you might be following the person with the best ideas, but you might not. and do you really want to leave it up to chance? much better for everybody to go off by themselves, generate their own ideas freed from the distortions of group dynamics, and then come together as a team to talk them through in a well-managed environment and take it from there.
now if all this is true, then why are we getting it so wrong? why are we setting up our schools this way and our workplaces? and why are we making these introverts feel so guilty about wanting to just go off by themselves some of the time? one answer lies deep in our cultural history. western societies, and in particular the u.s., have always favored the man of action over the man of contemplation and “man“ of contemplation. but in america's early days, we lived in what historians call a culture of character, where we still, at that point, valued people for their inner selves and their moral rectitude. and if you look at the self-help books from this era, they all had titles with things like “character, the grandest thing in the world.“ and they featured role models like abraham lincoln who was praised for being modest and unassuming. ralph waldo emerson called him “a man who does not offend by superiority.“
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