by F.D. Flam / © 2025, Bloomberg Opinion. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
When scientists constructed a puzzle-solving task and pitted teams of people against teams of ants, the insects sometimes proved to be the smarter species. That’s not to denigrate human intelligence—ants are smart, and their feats of coordinated activity are rare in nature.
Still, it is fair to say the results were humbling and that ants have something important to teach us. There’s a lesson in why we sometimes fail to accomplish anything in staff meetings and why committees sometimes settle on a less effective solution to a problem than individual people could have provided.
Putting group smarts to the test
The experiment used two versions of the same maze—one ant-sized and the other scaled to the size of a tennis court. Both species had to transport a T-shaped object—something bulky compared with their bodies—through a tricky series of openings. It was a bit like moving an awkwardly large couch through a narrow hallway or stairwell. The object had to be in just the right orientation to pass through the first opening and then rotate to pass through the second.
In videos that recently went viral, the ants—called longhorn crazy ants (Paratrechina longicornis)—danced through the exercise with such grace that even ant experts were amazed. The groups of humans appeared to bumble clumsily through the task. Some teams of ants solved the puzzle faster than some teams of humans.
Individual humans still always beat individual ants, said Ofer Feinerman, one of the authors of the research, which was published in the journal PNAS. But their performance vastly improved when they teamed up. [The] humans’ performance did not.
Yet humans have accomplished incredible feats of cooperation—we landed on the moon and built supercomputers and space telescopes as groups. Sometimes, we soar beyond what an individual could achieve, and, sometimes, we get mired in groupthink. Good leadership can help, but it isn’t the whole answer.
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