Text 1
The advertising executive Alex Osborn popularized brainstorming as a cure for timid thinking. In a proper session, he urged, participants should chase quantity over quality and withhold all criticism, so that each half-formed suggestion sparks another. Working together this way, Osborn believed, a group generates more ideas than its members ever could on their own, because one person’s remark becomes the launching point for the next. Many organizations embraced the method, treating the lively group session as the natural home of invention.
Text 2
Researchers have repeatedly compared interacting groups with “nominal” groups—people who sit in the same room but write ideas separately before their lists are pooled. The nominal groups usually win, producing more ideas, and a wider range of them, than the groups that talk it out. One likely reason is “production blocking”: in a live discussion only one person can speak at a time, so the others wait, and while they wait they forget or quietly discard what they had. The moral researchers draw is not that collaboration fails, but that generating ideas alone and combining them afterward can beat the open session.
Based on the texts, how would the author of Text 2 most likely respond to Osborn’s claim in Text 1 that a group working together generates more ideas than its members could on their own?
