Groupthink

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http://portal.wowway.net/video/?vendid= ... cid=wcvid1

Not a new concept but always great to see people discussing it; its a big problem.

That's so true in my own experiences especially when you have one group dominant over another.

We watched a video once of a teacher who did an experiment on her students by making them believe that people with blue eyes were better than people with brown eyes. The reactions from the students were astounding as they really bought into this!

Here is the first part of Jane Elliott's Experiment and then if you continue down... We had a similar experiment done with us in our school and the mentality of the dominant group was crazy!


[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J2673JGENN8[/youtube]

No crazier than thinking people with various skin colors were inferior. The general level of human intelligence is not encouraging.

get adevil advocate or critical thinker i there and that will get people to start quetioning others. Either that or they will ignore you and pretend you don;t exist

Hhahhaa, I remember this from my psych 111 class. The teacher gave us some word problem that involved simple math, yet was worded to be confusing. She then divided us into groups depending on what our answer was, and gave us a chance to change it. Nobody changed their answer, even with like 5 minutes of time given to change it with.

I can definitely identify with that .

I think humans have a lot of inherant traits that aren't that great... look what happened in the Milgram and Stanford Prison experiments. I think the important thing is, rather than saying "Oh I'm too different and smart to fall for these things", is to instead be mindful of what can happen. Always remind yourself that you are not above being human and making these human mistakes.

That's good advice in any area of life. When people assume infallibility on any level due to what they think of themselves its almost always a lack of perspective, they're working with a caricature of the dynamic, and they've put themselves at serious risk of falling for those things by their lack of humility or self-examination.

Groupthink has its uses. The extreme of groupthink, the Borg collective, is what I think you're referring to. But since human society is made of groups of people all with seperate objectives and interests, and since this is inevitable, what do you suggest?

Sometimes groupthink is preferable to unstructured chaos. It's called government.

Yeah, there's a very fine line between mirroring (which is polite, appropriate, peacemaking and trust-earning behavior) vs. falling into group-think patterns and letting the dynamic supercede quality of thought. My main argument is that the problem comes in where people aren't ultimately aware that they're doing it, when they are that's fine but they have to have their own scruples coming out on top to do themselves justice and of course go get the group thinking rather than letting the group think for them.

It seems to me this thread is grossly mislabeled. It should be "Group Not-think"
What attracted me to this site is that aspies and autistic people have unusual personal problems and faced with them, like any out group, they have to come up with unusual personal solutions to work out how to live in the world. People who conform to dogmas, to authorities, to social conventions live within those conventions and don't think about important problems that do not conform to norms. So.called "group think" is actually not thinking and an insult to an active searching mind seeking solutions to real problems with views conditioned by personal values and personal experiences.

If it wasn't for groupthink we wouldn't have the Mexican Wave.

If it weren't for groupthink we wouldn't have World of Warcraft.

Or anything else.

Human beings cooperate and think in groups. That's how we've succeeded as a species.

Unfortunately, no. People think as individuals and groups take up the thoughts or reject them. The tragedy of humanity is that great concepts are arrived at by individuals and then grabbed by uncreative people to enforce their social controls.

Nobel prizes are won by individuals.

Last edited by Sand on 17 Jan 2009, 9:55 am, edited 1 time in total.

I've seen groupthink in effect every time we have to work in groups at school. Someone comes up with a ridiculous idea, like to name our canal company (this was a history project about the industrial revolution) "Aquaducks", and everyone agrees just because that's what "the group" seems to want. Except me, because I point out that the name sounds like a kids' swimming club, and suggest something better and more professional. Only it doesn't occur to anyone that I may have some good ideas. It's ME, so naturally I must just be disagreeing to be a pain in the arse. So they tell me to shut up and get on with the stupid Aquaducks idea, which utterly did NOT get a good grade. Well, I won't say I told you so.