Quotes About Groupthink

Open source is characteristically about herd behavior and local hill climbing. There is such a thing as the wisdom of crowds, but it is an inherently conservative wisdom. A crowd can tread a meandering cowpath into a highway. What it will never do, however, is decide to dig a tunnel through the mountain to shorten the path, or to leave the mountain altogether for a better one. THE

members of any small cohesive group tend to maintain esprit de corps by unconsciously developing a number of shared illusions and related norms that interfere with critical thinking and reality testing.

In his 1972 classic, Victims of Groupthink, the psychologist Irving Janis—one of my PhD advisers at Yale long ago—explored the decision making that went into both the Bay of Pigs invasion and the Cuban missile crisis.

His idea was that humans totally lose control of their behavior in a crowd.

Fame or perceived success - it all comes from groupthink.

Fools go in throngs.

The premortem has two main advantages: it overcomes the groupthink that affects many teams once a decision appears to have been made, and it unleashes the imagination of knowledgeable individuals in a much-needed direction.

Belonging to groups often generates a kind of narcosis that gives us the illusion of sharing something missing from all the members of the group as individuals: completeness. Our main fear—fear of dissolution, of being nothing—keeps us from realizing that when we think we are one particular thing, and therefore isolated, we indeed become only that thing and lose the rest.

I mean, not wanting to be flip about it, but even within a corporation, you get sort of cult-like behaviors sometimes.

decision by consensus is inherently conservative.

You cannot make a man by standing a sheep on its hind-legs. But by standing a flock of sheep in that position you can make a crowd of men.

In crowds it is stupidity and not mother wit that is accumulated.

I enjoy being a lemming, we line up to do everything together.

A committee can make a decision that is dumber than any of its members.

We are discreet sheep; we wait to see how the drove is going, and then go with the drove.

The problem with popular thinking is that it doesn't require you to think at all.

Polarization (is) a tendency for groups to form judgments that are more extreme than individuals' personal opinions.

I know many people on the left are suspicious of words like Americanization. To them, it can sound like a cover for white privilege and warmongering. It suggests arrogance and groupthink. But these connotations are not fixed. It is in our power to reshape them by recalling the best of America.

It really works very well, but the trouble is that it feels so godly that much, if not most, religion is a belonging system more than a search for intimacy with God. Jesus was not into tribal religion, groupthink, and loyalty tests. Much of the institutional church is into them, however, and always has been. It works too well to call it into question. It holds us together and that feels like salvation, even if it is a very deteriorated form.

compared to individuals, groups tend to be more dogmatic, better able to justify irrational actions, more likely to see their actions as highly moral, and more apt to form stereotypical views of outsiders.

A crowd always thinks with its sympathy, never with its reason.

Like lemmings voting for steeper cliff faces

regimes that self-destruct through collective blindness.

8. Follow the herd instead of your head