Creativity is a much coveted asset for a very simple reason: an idea that transcends orthodoxy has the power to bring wealth, fame and status. Commercial, scientific, educational and artistic organisations, therefore, often talk about how they want to foster creativity.
Unfortunately groups only rarely foment great ideas because people in them are powerfully shaped by group norms: the unwritten rules which describe how individuals in a group 'are' and how they 'ought' to behave. Norms influence what people believe is right and wrong just as surely as real laws, but with none of the permanence or transparency of written regulations.
The enemy of creativity
These unwritten rules or 'groups norms' flow almost imperceptibly from one person to the next so that changes are difficult to spot unless they are carefully measured. A classic psychological study on group norms randomly allocated new university students to either conservative sororities or more liberal dormitories (Siegel & Siegel, 1957). Over time students assigned to the liberal dormitories became less conservative as the group's norms seeped into their consciousness.
Not only do norms spread like wildfire, groups don't even need to be that well-established, people will conform to others with only the slightest encouragement. In another classic social psychology study people thrown into a group of strangers denied their own senses to increase their conformity with others. When simply judging the length of a line, participants happily went along with the group despite clear evidence from their eyes that the group was wrong... [More]
From Psyblog