Groupthink
Conformity at the expense of independent thinking
Issue No. 50 (We made it to 50. 🎉)
This post contains spoilers about the TV show Pluribus.
I watched a show called Pluribus about a virus that spreads to the entire human race, merging everyone’s minds into a shared consciousness and setting humanity on a path toward extinction. Fun times.
The afflicted appear blissful and at peace. The collective they’re a part of gives them instant capabilities on account of the access they now have to the entire body of human knowledge. It gives them moral clarity about what they can and can’t do (they can’t kill living things, for instance). And it has turned them into productivity machines because they no longer need to use lower fidelity means of communication like language to exchange ideas.
Near the end of the show, we’re taken to a remote village and meet a girl who is the only person around to have been immune to the virus. A plane flies overhead. She catches a glimpse of it, people around her comment on what a beautiful day it is. A day full of hope. She smiles.
The plane lands and a sealed container is ultimately delivered to the village. Evidently, the afflicted have figured out how to get around the girl’s immunity. But they can’t force the virus on her. It has to be her decision to join.
They sing to her in their local tongue to calm her nerves. They gather around her in a show of support. Will it hurt?, she asks. Not at all, they tell her. Before she knows it, she’ll have entered a state of unimaginable bliss. Happiness the likes of which she has never experienced before.
She nods. The sealed container is opened, she breathes in its contents, goes into a fit, and becomes one with the others. And just like that, the singing, the care, the curiosity, the empathy, all of that stops. It was just a charade—theater—to convince her to join. Once the deed is done, the villagers get on with their days like the emotionally detached, efficient automata they are.
From fiction to real life
In fiction, that sort of behavior is sometimes called a hive mind, and it denotes collective intelligence that subsumes individual intelligence, either physically or in effect, and can serve as a trope for something scary and threatening. Something either inhuman or superhuman.
In insects, where the term “hive mind” originally comes from, it denotes collective intelligence that emerges from a decentralized group, where an ant or a bee retains its own intelligence, and then also puts it in service of a bigger purpose.
In our everyday lives, which is what I’m interested in, a flavor of that metaphor is sometimes called groupthink.
What’s groupthink?
Groupthink denotes a group whose members have willingly outsourced their independent judgment in exchange for perceived virtues like harmony, efficiency, and certainty.
While such groups of people may appear intelligent from the outside, what defines them isn’t collective intelligence, but assimilation through the gradual surrender of independent judgment.
Some examples of where groupthink appears in real life:
Corporate cultures, where “this is how we’ve always done things” ends all debate or a looming deadline suppresses lone dissenting voices about a decision.
Financial bubbles, where skeptics are dismissed as out-of-touch.
Online communities, where mods impose a definition of allowed discourse that surviving members then adhere to and propagate.
War rooms, where cabinet members quickly reach a consensus that they’re under an imminent existential threat.
Political parties, where a member’s questioning of policies is seen as betrayal.
Norms take hold, authority figures become gatekeepers, and the system sustains itself over time.
The term was introduced by Irving Janis in the early 1970s to explain why highly cohesive groups sometimes make horrible decisions. He aimed to show that when groups are under pressure and value things like agreement and loyalty, they can begin to prioritize unanimity over accuracy. Dissent is muted and warnings are rationalized away.
One of the most common norms appears to be that of remaining loyal to the group by sticking with the policies to which the group has already committed itself, even when those policies are obviously working out badly and have unintended consequences that disturb the conscience of each member. This is one of the key characteristics of groupthink.
—Irving Janis, “Groupthink”1
How to know if we’re in one?
We imitate what’s rewarded and avoid what’s punished. We’ll do the things we see others being rewarded for. It may be a way of speaking, a way of socializing, a way of thinking. We’ll be more focused on conforming to how things are instead of vocalizing how things ought to be. We’ll avoid disagreements because we realize disagreements are conflated with being wrong.
We rationalize away warnings. Feedback that would have us reconsider an assumption or a decision are rationalized away. For instance, someone says, What if such and such were to happen? and the group decides, Well, what if it doesn’t? Rationalizations are framed as collective conclusions and we adopt a language of consensus (“We have decided,” or “We believe”) even when we hold reservations in private.2
We self-censor. We’ll find ourselves tempering our criticisms or suppressing our critical thoughts if ever we find them clashing with the group’s norms. We become more inclined to give the benefit of the doubt to proposals we have qualms about because the appearance of consensus signals correctness.
Why is it appealing?
It offers safety in belonging. We’re granted membership in a group that’s seemingly bigger, better, stronger, smarter, happier than we can ever be on our own. We may be fully bought in, which makes joining a breeze; we may secretly want to dissent at times, but choose not to for fear of losing out; or we might initially feel unease about the compromises we’re making, but rationalize them so much that we forget they ever bothered us to begin with.
We feel invincible. A cohesive group can begin to feel like it doesn’t need to pause to consider alternatives. Consensus feels effortless, its members are aligned, its vision is unified. No wonder some communities describe themselves as rocket ships (can you imagine if a rocket ship had to stop every few miles to reconsider its path?) So the group blazes forward with all the confidence in the world. It feels great.
Why is it dangerous?
It leads to bad decisions. Groupthink leads to irrational and dysfunctional decision-making. Groups that don’t suppress dissent have the ability to self-correct when they’re wrong about something. Think academic and scientific communities, where adversarial processes like peer reviews help maintain alignment between understanding and truth. With groupthink, unity is incentivized, which is how otherwise intelligent people can end up making bad decisions.
It leads to a gradual loss in agency that’s hard to stop. One would think that when we’re new to a group, we’d show a heightened desire to conform, and then become more willing to speak our mind once we’ve been accepted into it. But what the data shows is that conformity continues to increase as group cohesiveness increases. We become forever stuck with that tendency as it gnaws itself deeper into our minds.3
It lead to a loss of accountability. Who do you blame when “a group” or “a committee” or “a process” decided something? A downstream risk of groupthink is that it leads to a diffusion of responsibility when things go wrong. If everyone is responsible then in a sense no one is.
What can we do about it?
Here are a few ideas, some of which are adapted from the closing section in Irving’s paper.
Establish a culture whereby members of the group are encouraged to openly question and doubt each other’s or the leader’s decisions.
Adopt language that’s objective and separates the person from the issue at hand, so that disagreements become disagreements about issues not egos.
Intentionally foster disagreement by having multiple people or teams work on the same problems in isolation and then share their solutions with each other.
Have people from outside the group rotate into the group, observe how things are done, maybe shadow someone, and then finally present their reflections.
Final thought
If we’re ever on the verge of self-censoring ourselves when in a group, it’s useful to ask: Was I about to do that because I was worried I’d risk being seen as disloyal rather than wrong? If so, that could be a sign we’re in a place that’s susceptible to groupthink. Then again, it’s not a death sentence. Self-awareness is often the first step to changing behaviors.
The first principle is that you must not fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool.
—Richard P. Feynman
Until next time.
Be well,
Ali
P.S. I’m genuinely excited we made it to 50 issues. Thank you, all.
P.P.S. Some past issues to read through in case you missed them.
https://agcommtheory.pbworks.com/f/GroupThink.pdf
In Pluribus, the afflicted never refer to themselves as I, only as we. Their whole identity has been absorbed by the collective. That was one of the fiction-to-real-life links I thought was most interesting after watching the show.
That was a bit dramatic. Sorry.
Still only a few episodes in but besides the group think aspect in some ways it felt like A.I to me. A whole lot of collective knowledge, and also always trying to please the immune characters. Even sometimes giving them dangerous things or information just to please them.
It also reminded me of the Rick and Morty episode where everyone on the planet is the same person. 😂
A reader shared with me a different reading of the Pluribus scene: "Throughout the program the collective consistently express their love of the 13 survivors, and this is manifested in what appears to be genuine compassion, care and an imperative to meet the survivors’ needs and desires (until it becomes incompatible with their own survival, at which point they abandon the main character). When I watched the episode you referred to, I found myself wondering why they were bothering to maintain the remote Amazonian community and rituals when is was so clearly inefficient to do so, until I realised it was to provide familiar comforts to the girl. I don’t think it was a cynical facade as you’ve suggested, I think it was out of a sincere intention to meet her desires which then became unnecessary when her desires changed.
I’m not sure they are emotionally detached either: there is a scene where the main character discusses with her ‘chaperone’ how they do feel emotions on an individual level. Going back to the Amazonian scene, if it really was a charade then there would be no reason for them to carry on acting happy once the girl transforms, and yet they do continue smiling as they go about their business."