Groupthink, Group Sex and Mob Rule

Now Obama is President; I love cute Americans and their thought provoking videos again.

A group of people can, sometimes, behave like a pack of dogs controlled by barks and bites. Today’s democracies all face the danger of becoming mob rule; when the majority acts without thought against those who are different, with the politicians’ bark and the police’s bite to keep them conforming.

The scientific word for this is groupthink (see definition from Wikipedia below).

Peer pressure controls our actions. When I was eleven, the boys in my class decided that Maria Mohamed (later changed name to Maria Stevens and became a model and won Miss Great Britain) was the most beautiful/hot girl in school. When I said Julie Gamason was the cutest I was teased and picked on mercilessly.

In the pub, if everyone orders a pint of larger or beer, I find it very hard to stick with my first thought of having a cranberry juice.

Groups tend to reinforce and re-invent norms of behaviour, even for sex. It used to be two’s a couple and three’s a crowd, now it’s three’s group sex!

Groupthink is a type of thought exhibited by group members who try to minimize conflict and reach consensus without critically testing, analyzing, and evaluating ideas.

Individual creativity, uniqueness, and independent thinking are lost in the pursuit of group cohesiveness, as are the advantages of reasonable balance in choice and thought that might normally be obtained by making decisions as a group.

During groupthink, members of the group avoid promoting viewpoints outside the comfort zone of consensus thinking.

A variety of motives for this may exist such as a desire to avoid being seen as foolish, or a desire to avoid embarrassing or angering other members of the group. Groupthink may cause groups to make hasty, irrational decisions, where individual doubts are set aside, for fear of upsetting the group’s balance.

The term is frequently used pejoratively, with hindsight
Original source http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Groupthink

Posted 11:59 AM on Tue Feb 10 2009

By FishDinner

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