Quotes About Groupthink

As I would later discover in my own career, there are a lot of C-minus brains in the journalism business. A kind of groupthink is developed that permeates the upper levels of media organizations, and they send unconscious signals down the ranks.

Groupthink is the term Irving Janis coined for this phenomenon: the kind of flawed group dynamics that lets bad ideas go unchallenged by questions and disagreement and that can sometimes yield disastrous outcomes.

Such is the psychology of crowds that the majority will follow whoever appeared to be in power...

All these people - both the Japanese and the Koreans - are fucked because they keep thinking about the group. But here's the truth: There's no such thing as a benevolent leader.

I'm a businessman. And I wat you to be a businessman. And whenever you go to these meetings, I want you to think for yourself, and I want you to think about promoting your own interests no matter what. All these people both the Japanese and the Koreans - are fucked because they keep thinking about the group. But here's the truth: There's no such thing as a benevolent leader. I protect you because you work for me.

Charles Mackay argued that people "go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one.

In his classic work Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, published in 1841, Scottish journalist Charles Mackay argued that people "go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one."1 People in crowds often act in thoughtless ways—shouting profanities, destroying property, throwing bricks, threatening others.

Groupthink encourages conformity and this consistently leads back to trusting and following the leader, for it is through him or her that their cause will be achieved.

There's a whiff of the lynch mob or the lemming migration about any over-large concentration of like-minded individuals, no matter how virtuous their cause.

Groupthink stifles the possibility of suspending one's assumptions. In fact, its whole purpose is to elevate and protect those assumptions from any assault by logic. Creative and synergistic communication is doomed within groups infected with the symptoms of groupthink. Any new or unusual notions quickly fall victim to the group's terminal sense of certainty.

When groupthink occurs, the group isolates itself from the outside world and the information it contains.