The Smartest Person in the Room is the Room

“Reasoning is biased in favor of the reasoner.”

David McRaney dropped that gem in How Minds Change: The Surprising Science of Belief, Opinion, and Persuasion, and it’s one of those lines that just won’t leave me alone. It’s clever, sure. But it also nails something fundamentally true about how humans think—and why we’re better off thinking together.

When we reason on our own, our brains aren’t wired for objectivity. They’re wired for advocacy. We argue for our own perspectives with built-in bias and barely notice we’re doing it. 

Our brains are also lazy. Or, to be more charitable, efficient. Reasoning takes effort. So we delegate that cognitive load to others. It’s why the best thinking happens in groups—especially diverse groups—where we can distribute the mental workload, challenge each other’s assumptions, and sharpen each other’s thinking.

But the brilliance of group collaboration doesn’t happen by accident. It takes intention. You don’t magically get better ideas just by putting a bunch of people in a room. You get them when you pull out different points of view. When you invite disagreement. When you create space for the people who don’t normally speak first.

We all like the idea of collaboration. But too often, we’re collaborating with people who think just like us. And that’s not productive collaboration—that’s comfort.

Meaningful collaboration often gets uncomfortable. It means actively seeking out perspectives that don’t align with your own. It means resisting the urge to smooth over disagreements and instead digging into them. It means creating a process where different views get listened to, tested, and even prioritized.

Because that’s where the real value lives.

One person sees a path others missed. Another notices the risk no one else did. Someone else throws out a naïve idea that turns out to be genius.

The group wins because it refines ideas through tension and triangulation. And in that process, we get smarter than we ever could alone.

So yeah—reasoning is biased, and our brains are lazy. But in a group, that’s not a problem. It’s an advantage.

Save your mental calories. Let the group do the heavy lifting. Just make sure the group you’re building is as diverse—and as curious—as possible.