Quotes About Groupthink

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

This is how it starts, among the closed circles of the marooned, the shipwrecked, the besieged: jealousy, dissention, a breach in the groupthink walls. Then the entry of the foe, the murderer, the shadow slipping in through the door we forgot to lock because we were distracted by our darker selves: nursing our minor hatreds, indulging our petty resentments, yelling at one another, tossing the crockery.

according to the psychologist irving Janis, is that our sense of belonging (which makes us feel safe) blinds us to dangers and encourages greater risk-taking.

A philistine is a full-grown person whose interests are of a material and commonplace nature, and whose mentality is formed of the stock ideas and conventional ideals of his or her group and time.

When a person identifies himself with a group his critical faculties are diminished and his passions enhanced by a kind of emotive resonance. The individual is not a killer, the group is, and by identifying with it, the individual becomes one. This is the infernal dialect reflected in man's history.

The larger the group, the more toxic, the more of your beauty as an individual you have to surrender for the sake of group thought. And when you suspend your individual beauty you also give up a lot of your humanity. You will do things in the name of a group that you would never do on your own. Injuring, hurting, killing, drinking are all part of it, because you've lost your identity, because you now owe your allegiance to this thing that's bigger than you are and that controls you.

Societal peer pressure to conform runs strong, but as more of us continue to think and act for ourselves, rather than be under the influence of group-think, we begin to make more effective choices.

What do Hitler's inner circle, Nixon's close advisers, and NASA administrators have in common, aside from the fact that they made terrible decisions? Each was a relatively cohesive group isolated from dissenting points of view.

Always yell with the crowd, that's what I say. It's the only way to be safe.

Was die Herde am meisten hasst, ist derjenige, der anders denkt; es ist nicht so sehr die Meinung selbst, sondern die Kühnheit, selbst denken zu wollen.

Both the physical and the electronic isolation from people we disagree with allow the forces of confirmation bias, groupthink, and tribalism to push us still further apart.

viewpoint diversity is necessary for the development of critical thinking, while viewpoint homogeneity (whether on the left or the right) leaves a community vulnerable to groupthink and orthodoxy.

It may sound depressing to think that our righteous minds are basically tribal minds, but consider the alternative. Our tribal minds make it easy to divide us

Most of us are 'ultraconformists' when it comes to who we are most likely to follow... to socialise with, or even who we are most likely to hire.

We do our worst when we're surrounded by a lot of people who agree with us.

their foolish insistence that any problem can be solved by the proper amount of applied group-think.

People very rarely think in groups; they talk together, they exchange information, they adjudicate, they make compromises. But they do not think; they do not create.

how the incrementalism and decorum, the endless positioning for the next election, and the groupthink of cable news panels all conspired to chip away at your best instincts and wear down your independence, until whatever you once believed was utterly lost.

He could not even kid himself that everything had not been up front, because it had been. And he hadn't even done it alone. There were currently ninety-five other fools in this parade.

Running with the herd means we are quick to embrace the status quo, slow to change our minds, and happy to delegate our thinking.

But running with the herd means we are quick to embrace the status quo, slow to change our minds, and happy to delegate our thinking.

While we've painted the guardians of the pale in a somewhat reactionary light, let's give the gatekeepers their due. What lies beyond the pale isn't always safe and secure. Outside the fence of state-sanctioned consciousness, there are, to be sure, peaks of profound insight and inspiration. But there are also the swamps of addiction, superstition, and groupthink, where the unprepared can get stuck.

The psychological components of war have not gone away—dominance, vengeance, callousness, tribalism, groupthink, self-deception

There is a maddening phenomenon of social dynamics variously called pluralistic ignorance, the spiral of silence, and the Abilene paradox, after an anecdote in which a Texan family takes an unpleasant trip to Abilene one hot afternoon because each member thinks the others want to go.274 People may endorse a practice or opinion they deplore because they mistakenly think that everyone else favors it.