I like to think that the imaginary crowd has a similar salutary effect on more complex thoughts. The audience does more than just make me imagine I might be wrong. It invites me to consider, from the diverse perspective of the audience members, the multiple dimensions along which I might be wrong.
Phenomena like these mean that thinking is never really a solitary activity. It is fundamentally social. Even when we are talking to ourselves we are using the socially orientated mechanisms of language to externalise our thoughts and feed them back “into” our minds.
Someone should write a book about this idea that thinking is “fundamentally social”! Oh wait.