Quotes About Groupthink

Collective fear stimulates herd instinct, and tends to produce ferocity toward those who are not regarded as members of the herd.

The wisdom of crowds fails when the components of the crowd are not diverse enough.

I believe people think as a group more often than we might realize or care to admit. We like to believe that we act as individuals and nothing more, but time and again - in corporations and business, in politics and religion, in fashion and culture, and in friendships and social circles - we think and do as one.

The crowd may be influenced easily, largely because it is a crowd.

It is important to know what the group thinks, but that is not the same as believing or reinforcing what the group thinks. In a time of rapid change in particular, then, it is important to be willing to be the lone voice. Be the person who never conforms to patently wrong statements in order to fit in with the crowd. Be Asch-Negative.

The larger the number of people involved, the easier it was for them to delude themselves that what they were doing must be smart.

Taking pleasure in someone else's failings, even if that person is someone we really dislike, can violate our values and lead to feelings of guilt and shame. But, make no mistake, it's seductive, especially when we're sucked into groupthink.

Not enough people are taking smart risks or creating and sharing bold ideas to meet changing demands and the insatiable need for innovation. When people are afraid of being put down or ridiculed for trying something and failing, or even for putting forward a radical new idea, the best you can expect is status quo and groupthink.

Sometimes even a smart crowd will make a mistake.

keep your mouth shut and your skirt long, be modest and don't have any fucking opinions except those of the majority groupthink in that moment. The reputation economy is another instance of the blanding of our society, even though the enforcement of groupthink in social media has only increased anxiety and paranoia, because those who eagerly approve of the reputation economy are, of course, also the most scared.

the IQ of a mob is the IQ of its most stupid member divided by the number of mobsters

Humans are social animals, highly susceptible to emotional contagion. Training, logic, and intelligence are often no match for the power of groupthink.

La folla è una creatura lenta e un po' idiota, di gran lunga meno intelligente degli individui che la compongono.

when like-minded people get together, they often end up thinking a more extreme version of what they thought before they started to talk to one another.

Janis believed that groups are especially likely to suffer from groupthink if they are cohesive, have highly directive leadership, and are insulated from experts.

I think a lot of the best ideas come from the grassroots; I'm someone who does not like a bunker mentality and does not like groupthink.

The ignorance, prejudices, and groupthink of an educated elite are still ignorance, prejudice, and groupthink—and for those with one percent of the knowledge in a society to be guiding or controlling those with the other 99 percent is as perilous as it is absurd.

The power of groups is that they validate the common interests of their members. The danger of groupthink is that it dulls their individual judgment. The group thinks in unison and behaves en masse.

In crowds it is stupidity and not mother-wit that is accumulated," Gustave Le Bon noted in his 1895 classic on crowd psychology.

The ordinary lunatic is generally a harmless, isolated case; since everyone sees that something is wrong with him, he is quickly taken care of. But the unconscious infections of groups of so-called normal people are more subtle and far more dangerous.

Crimes the individual alone could never stand are freely committed by the group.

The mob has many heads but no brains.

Demands for solidarity can quickly turn into demands for groupthink, making it difficult to express nuance.

Veteran trader Marty O'Connell calls this the firehouse effect. He had observed that firemen with much downtime who talk to each other for too long come to agree on many things that an outside, impartial observer would find ludicrous (they develop political ideas that are very similar). Psychologists give it a fancier name, but my friend Marty has no training in behavioral sciences.