The Collective Edge

Chapter 1

The Myth of the Lone Genius

The Allure of Individualism in a Group-Based World

Geneticist James Watson received perhaps the highest honor a scientist can get in today's society: In the BBC biopic about his life, The Race for the Double Helix, he was portrayed by Jeff Goldblum (you know, the actor who played the scientist in Jurassic Park and The Fly). Oh, and Watson also won the Nobel Prize.

The Race for the Double Helix (known as Life Story in the UK) dramatizes the duel between two teams to discover the structure of DNA. On one side was the dynamic duo of Watson, the brash American Batman, and his reserved British Robin, biophysicist Francis Crick. On the other side were boring, methodical, British stick-in-the-mud scientists Maurice Wilkins and Rosalind Franklin.

According to Watson's memoir, on which the film is based, Wilkins and Franklin were sitting on the data needed to crack the case. But they lacked the imagination to see it. The critical data were contained in Franklin's new X-ray image of DNA, known as "Photograph 51." Watson tells us that he secretly gained access to Photograph 51 and the accompanying data files over the objections of Franklin, Wilkins's surly subordinate. "Clearly Rosy had to go or be put in her place," Watson wrote, disregarding that no one called her "Rosy," and she wasn't Wilkins's subordinate. "There was no denying she had a good brain. If only she could keep her emotions under control." Watson told the world he had his eureka moment after one look at the ill-gotten image, seeing what Franklin and Wilkins could not-the "secret to life."

There's only one problem with all this: It isn't true. (Okay, there are other problems, like the toxic sexism.) There was no race between the two teams-Franklin shared the data willingly, viewing it as a collaboration between her team and Watson and Crick's. Watson and Crick biographers Matthew Cobb and Nathaniel Comfort recently found new evidence clarifying Franklin's role in the Nobel-winning discovery. As they told Science News:

We found a program of a Royal Society exhibition. . . . [that includes] a brief summary of the structure of DNA signed by everybody, presented by Franklin. It was like a school science fair. She's standing there in front of a model explaining it to everybody, and all their names are on it [Franklin, Wilkins, Watson, and Crick]. So, this isn't a race that's been won by Watson and Crick. I mean, they did get there first, don't get us wrong. But it wasn't seen that way at the time. They could not have done it without the data from Franklin and Wilkins. And everybody-at least at this stage in 1953-is accepting that and seems okay with it. We're moving away from the Hollywood thriller that Watson wrote, where [Watson] sneaked some data. That version is really exciting. It's just not true. [We're moving] to something that's much more collaborative.

That's right, the discovery of the secret to life wasn't Watson's heroic genius, as implied in the book. Nor was it the duo of Watson and Crick from the movie. This discovery required a collective.

Why did we need a group to crack the structure of DNA? Like a lot of science, you need deep expertise to even understand what questions to ask and how to answer them. Neither Watson nor Crick could have produced Photograph 51 or collected the data about what it depicted. Franklin and Wilkins, however, were world leaders in X-ray crystallography and its application to DNA.

But Franklin and Wilkins were missing two things Watson and Crick brought-Crick's expertise in wet, living structures and Watson's talent for creating theoretical models without data. DNA looks quite different when wet, which is when it is in its active, double-helix form. Wilkins, who had the idea to use X-ray crystallography on DNA and hired Franklin, knew that Franklin's expertise was in interpreting the dry form. And Franklin herself didn't think much of theoretical modeling, preferring to wait for data. The DNA structure problem was too complicated for any one person to deal with. You couldn't just add up their expertise; you needed to multiply contributions from all four people.

Why, then, don't quizmasters credit the whole super-team of Franklin, Wilkins, Watson, and Crick? Partially because Watson was a bit of an attention-hogging asshole. Even Crick and Wilkins (who shared the 1962 Nobel with Watson) protested Watson's based-on-a-true-story book, leading Harvard University Press to cut ties with him. In his later life, Watson made a hobby of advancing racist, sexist, and anti-Semitic theories. As late as 2018, he continued to insist on genetic race- and sex-based differences in intelligence, with no evidence. The scientific community ostracized him; biologist Edward O. Wilson called him "the most unpleasant human being I had ever met." Even the lab he directed stripped him of his titles because he wouldn't stop spewing hatred.

Of course, it wasn't just Watson's fault that Franklin didn't get the credit she deserved. Because they shared Watson's sexism, many people were unwilling to recognize her contribution to the discovery. Rosalind Franklin died of ovarian cancer in 1958, before Watson's book and the Nobel Prize committee overlooked her; she didn't get a chance to tell her own version of the story. It has long been public knowledge that Watson's account glorified himself and demeaned Franklin's contribution in overtly sexist ways. Yet in 2012, the US Library of Congress named The Double Helix one of eighty-eight "Books That Shaped America." Among science enthusiasts, Watson and Crick are household names; Wilkins, Franklin, and others involved in the discovery still don't get their due.


We’re suckers for stories of individual greatness-”Great Man” theories of genius and innovation. History books attribute almost every human accomplishment to an individual (usually a man) like Watson. But like The Double Helix, these stories only scratch the surface. If we dig, we usually find a group doing the actual work. The lone genius is more myth than reality. Groups make the world go round.

In one of my favorite studies, titled "The Increasing Dominance of Teams in Production of Knowledge," Northwestern University researchers Stefan Wuchty, Benjamin F. Jones, and Brian Uzzi investigated whether groups produce more knowledge than individuals. They looked at all the discoveries from 1955 to 2000 that they could get their hands on-19.8 million research articles and 2.1 million patents. The share of team (relative to individual) discoveries grew in every STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) field. And the teams themselves also grew. "In the sciences," the authors wrote, "team size has grown steadily each year and nearly doubled from 1.9 to 3.5 authors per paper over 45 years." Team discoveries were far more likely to be influential breakthroughs that future scientists, inventors, and entrepreneurs built upon. "For example, a team-authored paper in science and engineering is currently 6.3 times more likely than a solo-authored paper to receive at least 1,000 citations," they added. That's the academic equivalent of a blockbuster; most papers receive fewer than ten.

It wasn't always like this. In the 1950s, solo scientists and inventors were more likely to fail but also more likely to make breakthrough discoveries. But the odds that working alone is a winning strategy have gotten worse as the years have passed.

We can only speculate why teams appear to have gotten better-or individuals have gotten worse-at discovery and invention. Many scientists believe that the world is simply more complicated than it used to be. The discoveries you can make alone by getting into the bathtub or sitting under an apple tree are long since made. It takes a lifetime just to master one tiny, specialized slice of the universe. There's also evidence that this is right-science, education, and work are all getting more specialized. You can be an expert in mitochondrial phylogenetics, but not all of biology. And the problems that need solving demand expertise from multiple domains, which now means you have to work with a team. The days of Renaissance polymaths like Leonardo da Vinci and Maria Sibylla Merian, a German illustrator and entomologist who taught the world about metamorphosis, might be over.

But to explain the increasing advantage of teams in producing knowledge, I think two other factors are more important than a specialized, complex world. First, humans have simply gotten better at collaboration-we are constantly improving our ability to communicate and collaborate across time and space. (Although it may not seem like it if you are stuck in a pointless work meeting.) Second, individuals may not have been doing much of the science and inventing in the first place. Like Watson, some individuals were just better at taking the credit for themselves. For instance, who invented the light bulb? If you said Thomas Edison, you'd be wrong. Incandescent light bulbs were invented before Edison was born. Edison was building on the work of many others when he filed his patent for a commercially viable, mass-market light bulb. But even that version of the light bulb was a group effort: He worked with his group of "Muckers," whose names are mostly forgotten, to create it. But Edison put his name on the patent and took the credit, and the rest is history.

We are accustomed to heroic stories from the history of human accomplishment-some brilliant, underappreciated genius toiling alone, overcoming rejection and failure. A general with a clever plan, leading the troops to an unlikely victory. We remember the individual but forget the group.

Our struggle to discern the role of groups in our lives is part of one of the most important discoveries of social psychology: the "fundamental attribution error." Attribution refers to explaining why a person has behaved as they have. Why was Mike late for that meeting? And the error is too much individualism-we default to personality as our core explanation. In our heads, we think Mike was late because he's flakey. We don't consider that, as he was about to leave for the meeting, his ailing mother might have called him for help.

The same is true on the positive side of the coin. When someone founds a billion-dollar business, it's because they're a genius. We don't consider the advantages they may have had in their lives. When trying to understand others' behavior, we don't give enough credence to the groups and situations that helped or hurt them along the way.

We have similar problems when thinking about how we contribute to groups. You (yes, you, too) are prone to "egocentric biases"-our brain's tendency to artificially inflate our own importance and contributions. A famous example is The Lake Wobegon Effect, named for the fictional town in A Prairie Home Companion where "all the children are above average." A 2018 study, for instance, found that 65 percent of Americans believe they have above-average intelligence. Average should be exactly 50 percent, so at least 15 percent of us are overestimating ourselves.

These individualistic fallacies get concentrated in groups, such that everyone becomes a bit James Watson-y and overclaims credit for the groups' accomplishments. One representative study asked members to estimate their percent contribution to their groups' performance. If everyone was perfectly accurate, the sum would be 100 percent. But because most people overestimated their value to the group, the total was much, much more than that. In one experiment, members' estimates added up to 235 percent!

Together, egocentrism and individualism lead us to misunderstand both success and failure-we overestimate our own role in success, overlooking the groups that helped us get there. And whether a group succeeds or fails, we look for the one person who should get all the praise or blame.

In other words, taking a collective perspective is hard. Our brains struggle to "see" the influence of groups that are all around us. We prefer individualistic explanations to collective ones, especially when things go wrong.

Even understanding what a group is can be tricky. After all, we can't credit or blame groups appropriately if we don't understand what they are. So to get it right, we first need to understand: What is a group anyway?

Scenes from a Jam Session

On Thursday evenings, I sling my trumpet case over my shoulder and head out to a club in East London called Grow. When I arrive, the house band, Stratos, is already going strong. The band is playing a kind of modern jazz that evokes the 1960s music of saxophonists Wayne Shorter and Joe Henderson. Stratos is a quartet, led by bassist Rio and tenor saxophonist Dom and flanked by a drummer and guitarist. Standing in a pack of around forty twenty- and thirtysomethings, with a drink in hand, I take in the music. The musicians are rising stars of the London scene; playing at Grow is an opportunity for them to stretch themselves without the constraints of a "function gig" like a wedding reception, fancy office party, or jazz brunch.

In the second song of the second set, Rio calls me to the stage and asks what I want to play. The first song was up-tempo, so I call for the more spacey and relaxed "Beatrice" by Sam Rivers. Jam sessions like this one allow attending musicians to jump in and out of performing on stage. After that song, other musicians come up and join us. Dom goes to have a drink, leaving me as the only horn player on stage, so I front the band for the rest of the evening (although he returns for the last song of the night).

After the set, a few people crowd around the stage, asking questions. "How did you become part of the band?" "Where are you all playing next?" "How did you all meet?"

I'm not a member of the group, I explain.

The question is: Why am I not part of the group? Outside observers clearly perceived me to be. Objectively, I played just as much, or perhaps more, of the second set than some of the musicians who were paid to be there. Yet neither I nor the other musicians believe I'm part of Stratos. In fact, we know I'm not part of the group-I'm just sitting in.

So how do we know who is part of a group, if not by their objective behavior or others' perceptions? Well, it comes down to the fact that Stratos and I all agree that I'm not in the group-that the group has clear boundaries.

The dividing lines between groups aren't always so clear-cut, however. Group can refer to a spectrum of collections of individuals, from broad social categories to small teams. What Liverpudlians, spelunkers, and the cast of Friends have in common is (a) they are composed of multiple individuals (most studies suggest you need at least three people to be considered a group) and (b) it's possible to distinguish who's included from who isn't. But groups vary widely in size, function, and how long they stay together-as well as how clear it is who is a member and who is not. Can we really think of a group like The Beatles in the same way we think of a broad social category like Americans? Well, sort of . . .