We Think in Groups Not as Individuals
Human cognition is fundamentally distributed. No individual brain was designed to hold a comprehensive model of the world; we evolved to think as part of a community that pools knowledge across many minds.
"The human mind is not like a desktop computer, designed to hold reams of information. The mind is a flexible problem solver that evolved to extract only the most useful information to guide decisions in new situations. As a consequence, individuals store very little detailed information about the world in their heads." Sloman and Fernbach, The Knowledge Illusion
Sloman and Fernbach's central metaphor is the beehive: individual bees are limited, but the colony is intelligent. Human thought works the same way. We succeed not by each person knowing everything but by dividing cognitive labor storing knowledge in our bodies, in tools, in the environment, and above all in other people. Detectives have teams. Scientists have labs, colleagues, and entire fields of prior work setting the stage. "Once we start appreciating that knowledge isn't all in the head, that it's shared within a community, our heroes change. Instead of focusing on the individual, we begin to focus on a larger group."
Mercier and Sperber's work on reason converges on the same point from a different angle. Solitary reasoning is biased and lazy, but group argumentation works efficiently not just in Western debating cultures, but across all types of societies and even in young children. Reason evolved for social exchange, not private contemplation. It is better at evaluating arguments than producing them, which means it was designed to work in a division-of-labor arrangement: I produce arguments, you evaluate them, and together we get closer to the truth than either of us could alone.
This has direct implications for how we organize work and learning. Solo thinking feels productive but is systematically unreliable. Brainstorming alone before bringing ideas to the group, then subjecting them to genuine critique, leverages both the generative power of individual intuition and the corrective power of social reason.
Takeaway: If you want to think well, stop trying to be the solitary genius and instead build a network of people who will honestly challenge and extend your ideas.
See also: Reason Evolved for Argumentation Not Truth | The Knowledge Illusion We Know Less Than We Think | Ideas Spread Through Networks Not Arguments | Social Proof Spreads Errors as Efficiently as Truth