Quotes About Groupthink

One can often recognize herd animals by their tendency to carry bibles.

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 have a tendency to form stereotypical views of outsiders.

churchgoing, as I saw it, was primarily social. It showed that you conformed to the norm of religious worship, which means that you accept groupthink. You define God secondhand, through revelations given to prophets and teachers many centuries ago. Spirituality is firsthand experience. It takes you on an inner journey from hope and faith to real knowledge that no one else has spoon-fed you.

the connection between the escape from an ineffectual self and a responsiveness to mass movements is very clear. The slipping author, artist, scientist—slipping because of a drying-up of the creative flow within—drifts sooner or later into the camps of ardent patriots, race mongers, uplift promoters and champions of holy causes. Perhaps the sexually impotent are subject to the same impulse. (The

First, we seem to assume that if a lot of people are doing the same thing, they must know something we don't.

frequently the crowd is mistaken because they are not acting on the basis of any superior information but are reacting, themselves, to the principle of social proof.

Most people go along with the crowd. They do things because everybody else does it.

Like so many other animals, we have an often-frantic need to conform, belong, and obey. Such conformity can be markedly maladaptive, as we forgo better solutions in the name of the foolishness of the crowd.

the individual must blind himself from seeing that which his group claims does not exist, or accept as truth that which the majority says is true, even if his own eyes could convince him that it is false. The herd is so vitally important for the individual that their views, beliefs, feelings, constitute reality for him, more so than what his senses and his reason tell him.

the wisdom of crowds is sometimes overwhelmed by the madness of mobs.

Where all men think alike, no one thinks very much.

But what is equally important, and sobering, is how often we fool ourselves. And we fool ourselves not only individually but en masse. The tendency of a group of human beings to quickly come to believe something that its individual members will later see as obviously false is truly amazing. Some of the worst tragedies of the last century happened because well-meaning people fell for easy solutions proposed by bad leaders.

Mindlessness and moral idiocy are not characteristically human attributes; they are symptoms of herd-poisoning.

The 'wisdom of the crowds' is the most ridiculous statement I've heard in my life. Crowds are dumb.

When one person sees or hears something that isn't there, it's called a delusion. When a small group of people have the same experience, it's a cult. Millions of people? Religion.

One of the most incomprehensible features of a crowd is the tenacity with which the members adhere to erroneous assumptions despite mounting evidence to challenge them.

But emotionalism (i.e., decision making based on emotions) is bad, can be controlled, and should be avoided. So instead of examining each of the many individual emotions, this chapter will focus on the entity that epitomizes emotionalism: the crowd.

TWO PSYCHOLOGICAL CROWD MODELS Delusion Model

In crowds it is stupidity and not mother wit that is accumulated." Gustave Le Bon

The herd instinct among forecasters makes sheep look like independent thinkers.

If we understand the mechanism and motives of the group mind, it is now possible to control and regiment the masses according to our will without them knowing it.

If all those around you believe some particular thing, you will soon be tempted to share in that belief.

People are sheep—cowardly, deplorable sheep.

The herd instinct among forecasters makes sheep look like independent thinkers.