This was demonstrated to me in a team building game. Each person in the team read to themselves a paragraph concerning a crime. Everyone also got a list of ten questions (with yes/no answers) about the reading. The questions were very difficult to answer.
In round one, each person wrote the answer to the questions on their own — no consulting with the team. In round two, the team would discuss and debate each question, but each individual team member recorded their own answers. In the third round, the team had to come up with a consensus for each answer.
The answers were progressively more correct with each round. The reason for this was that individually, we know what we know, but we don’t know everything. It is through collaboration with people with different experiences that we end up as a group knowing more. The second round shows that simply hearing all the opinions doesn’t make us more knowledgeable, but consensus does. Consensus-making forces us to go against our egos for the greater good.
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