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Groupthink Quotes

Browse 57 quotes about Groupthink.

Groupthink Quotes

“We have never observed or experienced anything objectively. We have always had some sort of outside influence or preconception. If nothing else, we had the impulses of our emotions that drove us and kept us from seeing reality as it really is. And we have always added unreality to our worldviews. That unreality came from our imaginations and became the fake inner reality each of us calls “our worldview.” As insane as it may be, some even call it their “own reality.”

TruthImaginationEmotionConflictLiesInsanityDivisionWorldviewDisagreementGroupthink
Author:Petros Scientia
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“Honesty is the rarest commodity in the 21st century. No one looks to the political class or journalists for truth these days. The average Joe seems to spend most of their time peddling a ludicrous, flawless Facebook version of their lives. The peer pressure of political correctness forgoes truth for the sake of groupthink. It seems that comedians and writers represent the last bastion of candour out there today.”

HonestyPoliticiansPolitical CorrectnessHonesty QuotesJournalistsGroupthinkLies PoliticsComedy WritingSpeaking Truth To PowerPolitical Class
Author:Stewart Stafford
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“Our individual attention is exceedingly powerful, no doubt about it. But when our attentions (plural) come together in an aligned group, we’re looking at the nuclear option, creative or destructive potential on a monumental scale.”

ImaginationAttentionCreativityManifestationMind ControlSocial EngineeringGroupthinkPower Of AttentionObserver EffectNuclear Option
Book:Get Out of Here Alive: Inner Alchemy & Immortality
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“History is a sad testament to the limitations of external change, or changing things from the outside. A dime a dozen and almost invariably overrated in hindsight, countless revolutions, insurgencies, wars, conflicts, struggles and social movements have stubbornly—and blindly—sought to create a better world. Yet true, lasting transformation remains elusive at the groupthink level. We grapple with the same issues, generation after generation, in this hamster wheel called ‘reality.’ Why is external change so damn challenging? Because, I contend, to echo Henry David Thoreau’s celebrated quote about the branches and roots of evil, pursuing external change only addresses symptoms, not the deeper cause.”

EvilChangeHistoryTransformationSocial ChangeSave The WorldSocial MovementsGroupthinkTransmutationThoreau
Book:Get Out of Here Alive: Inner Alchemy & Immortality
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“Each thinker will regard anything that clashes with his or her worldview to be insane and in conflict with reality. That’s because each thinker regards his or her worldview as reality itself and not as just an inner illusion. However, worldviews are just inner illusions. Making matters worse, people with similar worldviews tend to join with others who share major elements of their worldviews, and they tend to avoid those people who have worldviews that aren’t similar. This segregation results in confirmation bias among peers, making matters much worse.”

TruthConflictIllusionLiesDeceptionInsanityDivisionWorldviewDisagreementGroupthink
Book:Exposing the REAL Creation-Evolution Debate: The Absolute Proof of the Biblical Account
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“Certain emotional influences such as peer pressure or extreme fear can cause us to alter our worldviews and change what we accept as normal. That’s what the political technique of the Overton window is all about. Create a crisis and move the window of how much freedom people are willing to do without. That’s how governments, schools, and personal relationships become oppressive.”

TruthConflictIllusionLiesOppressionInsanityDivisionWorldviewDisagreementGroupthink
Book:Exposing the REAL Creation-Evolution Debate: The Absolute Proof of the Biblical Account
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“We filter what we observe and tend to explain away or ignore anything that doesn’t conform with what’s already in our worldviews. We interpret what we observe based on the assumptions and presuppositions that come out of our worldviews. If an observation or experience conflicts with our worldviews, we think it’s insane, unreal, or evil.”

TruthConflictIllusionLiesDeceptionInsanityDivisionWorldviewDisagreementGroupthink
Book:Exposing the REAL Creation-Evolution Debate: The Absolute Proof of the Biblical Account
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“Many things in this period have been hard to bear, or hard to take seriously. My own profession went into a protracted swoon during the Reagan-Bush-Thatcher decade, and shows scant sign of recovering a critical faculty—or indeed any faculty whatever, unless it is one of induced enthusiasm for a plausible consensus President. (We shall see whether it counts as progress for the same parrots to learn a new word.) And my own cohort, the left, shared in the general dispiriting move towards apolitical, atonal postmodernism. Regarding something magnificent, like the long-overdue and still endangered South African revolution (a jagged fit in the supposedly smooth pattern of axiomatic progress), one could see that Ariadne’s thread had a robust reddish tinge, and that potential citizens had not all deconstructed themselves into Xhosa, Zulu, Cape Coloured or ‘Eurocentric’; had in other words resisted the sectarian lesson that the masters of apartheid tried to teach them. Elsewhere, though, it seemed all at once as if competitive solipsism was the signifier of the ‘radical’; a stress on the salience not even of the individual, but of the trait, and from that atomization into the lump of the category. Surely one thing to be learned from the lapsed totalitarian system was the unwholesome relationship between the cult of the masses and the adoration of the supreme personality. Yet introspective voyaging seemed to coexist with dull group-think wherever one peered about among the formerly ‘committed’. Traditionally then, or tediously as some will think, I saw no reason to discard the Orwellian standard in considering modern literature. While a sort of etiolation, tricked out as playfulness, had its way among the non-judgemental, much good work was still done by those who weighed words as if they meant what they said. Some authors, indeed, stood by their works as if they had composed them in solitude and out of conviction. Of these, an encouraging number spoke for the ironic against the literal mind; for the generously interpreted interest of all against the renewal of what Orwell termed the ‘smelly little orthodoxies’—tribe and Faith, monotheist and polytheist, being most conspicuous among these new/old disfigurements. In the course of making a film about the decaffeinated hedonism of modern Los Angeles, I visited the house where Thomas Mann, in another time of torment, wrote Dr Faustus. My German friends were filling the streets of Munich and Berlin to combat the recrudescence of the same old shit as I read: This old, folkish layer survives in us all, and to speak as I really think, I do. not consider religion the most adequate means of keeping it under lock and key. For that, literature alone avails, humanistic science, the ideal of the free and beautiful human being. [italics mine] The path to this concept of enlightenment is not to be found in the pursuit of self-pity, or of self-love. Of course to be merely a political animal is to miss Mann’s point; while, as ever, to be an apolitical animal is to leave fellow-citizens at the mercy of Ideolo’. For the sake of argument, then, one must never let a euphemism or a false consolation pass uncontested. The truth seldom lies, but when it does lie it lies somewhere in between.”

TruthFilmScienceReligionFaithLiteraturePoliticsUnited StatesProgressAtheismSelf LoveEnlightenmentArgumentLiesHumanismConvictionRussiaSocialismJournalismCommunismIronyGermanyLos AngelesIndividualismSouth AfricaCold WarSoviet UnionTotalitarianismCritical ThinkingOrthodoxyBerlinSelf PityApartheidPostmodernismLiterary CriticismSectarianismTribalismPopulismEuphemismHedonismMonotheismGeorge OrwellMunichGroupthinkSolipsismPolytheismThomas MannPotusRonald ReaganRadical PoliticsMargaret ThatcherRight Wing PoliticsLeft Wing PoliticsApoliticismGeorge Hw BushBought PriesthoodXhosa PeopleZulu PeopleCape ColouredsEurocentricismGerman PeoplePersonality Politics
Book:For the Sake of Argument: Essays and Minority Reports
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“The thing about Mia's logic was that it was hard to argue with without sounding like the bad guy. Every objection had a counter. Every concern was a bias to examine. And maybe she was right. Maybe my fear was just conditioning. Maybe I was the problem. Or maybe a mail carrier got eaten on camera and everyone just decided not to talk about it.”

TruthPoliticsFearSocietySatireConformityGroupthink
Book:Devoured by Diversity: A Satire
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“Without their uniforms, they were probably nobodies, rejects. Give a man a uniform. Give him a few sparkly badges, a purpose, a gun ... and suddenly, he was no longer just another kid trying to make it through life without being ridiculed. Suddenly, he was a part of something. Something important. Something powerful. Something greater than he could ever be on his own. It was amazing how empowering the group could be.”

LifeWarLife LessonsEmpowermentConformitySoldiersGroupthinkGroup ThinkGroup DynamicsGroup MentalityConformity And AttitudeIn Group Politics
Book:If I Resist
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“Mob is not the plural of man, he said. We’re dealing with a different species, that has kaleidoscopes in the hollows of the eyes. Where projections of violence keep rotating at increasing velocity. Until the prisms shatter with their own frenzy, & the blinded creature collapses in the rubble it has created.”

HumansViolenceSocietyRageMobRiotsGroupthink
Book:The Autobiography of Cassandra, Princess & Prophetess of Troy
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“Groups have powerful self-reinforcing mechanisms at work. These can lead to group polarization—a tendency for members of the group to end up in a more extreme position than they started in because they have heard the views repeated frequently. At the extreme limit of group behavior is groupthink. This occurs when a group makes faulty decisions because group pressures lead to a deterioration of “mental efficiency, reality testing, and moral judgment.” The original work was conducted with reference to the Vietnam War and the Bay of Pigs fiasco. However, it rears its head again and again, whether it is in connection with the Challenger space shuttle disaster or the CIA intelligence failure over the WMD of Saddam Hussein. Groupthink tends to have eight symptoms: 1 . An illusion of invulnerability. This creates excessive optimism that encourages taking extreme risks. [...] 2. Collective rationalization. Members of the group discount warnings and do not reconsider their assumptions. [...] 3. Belief in inherent morality. Members believe in the rightness of their cause and therefore ignore the ethical or moral consequences of their decisions. 4. Stereotyped views of out-groups. Negative views of “enemy” make effective responses to conflict seem unnecessary. Remember how those who wouldn't go along with the dot-com bubble were dismissed as simply not getting it. 5. Direct pressure on dissenters. Members are under pressure not to express arguments against any of the group’s views. 6. Self-censorship. Doubts and deviations from the perceived group consensus are not expressed. 7. Illusion of unanimity. The majority view and judgments are assumed to be unanimous. 8. "Mind guards" are appointed. Members protect the group and the leader from information that is problematic or contradictory to the group's cohesiveness, view, and/or decisions. This is confirmatory bias writ large.”

PsychologyBiasesBehavioral EconomicsGroupthinkBehavioral FinanceBehavioral ScienceComformism
Book:The Little Book of Behavioral Investing: How not to be your own worst enemy
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“Most of you,' he went on, 'already know how I have been able to limit the area of investigation in a first approximation. But one or two of you are not yet in formed. For you, and to refresh everyone's memory, I'll go over my calculations again.' At that point he gave me a roguish and forceful look demanding my complicity in this adroit falsehood. For naturally everyone was still in the dark. But by this simple ruse, each person had the impression of belonging to a minority, of being among 'one or two not yet in formed', felt himself surrounded by a convinced majority, and was eager to be quickly convinced himself.”

ParticipationAcquiescenceGroupthinkAssent
Book:Mount Analogue
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“There's nothing wrong with being part of a group. Humans are social, so it's no surprise that people band together. In fact, many important human achievements, like the civil rights movement, are inspired by groups. But group behavior can also create a sense of division.”

GroupthinkGroup ThinkGroup DynamicsGroup MentalityGroups Of PeopleGroups Vs Individuals
Book:Middle School - Safety Goggles Advised: Exploring the WEIRD Stuff from Gossip to Grades, Cliques to Crushes and Popularity to Peer Pressure
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“There is no need for us all to be alike and think the same way, neither do we need a common enemy to force us to come together and reach out to each other. If we allow ourselves and everyone else the freedom to fully individuate as spiritual beings in human form, there will be no need for us to be forced by worldly circumstances to take hands and stand together. Our souls will automatically want to flock together, like moths to the flame of our shared Divinity, yet each with wings covered in the glimmering colors and unique patterns of our individual human expression.”

SoulFaithNationsCommunityFreedomPrejudiceUnityDivinityCooperationSpiritual LifeIndividualismIntoleranceUniquenessBeliefsFollow Your DreamsCoercionSimilaritySelf ExpressionFreedom Of ChoiceSamenessFreedom Of ReligionIndividuationFollow Your BlissDivinity WithinGroupthinkGroup ThinkAlikeIndentityIndivuality
Author:Anthon St. Maarten
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“For it is dangerous to attach one's self to the crowd in front, and so long as each one of us is more willing to trust another than to judge for himself, we never show any judgement in the matter of living, but always a blind trust, and a mistake that has been passed on from hand to hand finally involves us and works our destruction. It is the example of other people that is our undoing; let us merely separate ourselves from the crowd, and we shall be made whole. But as it is, the populace,, defending its own iniquity, pits itself against reason. And so we see the same thing happening that happens at the elections, where, when the fickle breeze of popular favour has shifted, the very same persons who chose the praetors wonder that those praetors were chosen.”

American PoliticsMobGroupthinkMilgramPith
Author:Seneca
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“Development is directed toward the inner world if children receive the kind of love that enables them to experience helplessness without feeling alone. If this is the case, helplessness will not be perceived as a total abandonment or condemnation but as a state through pain and sorrow to new strength rather than to destruction. This sort of experience will produce a self that does not perceive helplessness as a deadly threat but as a possibility for new integration and new beginnings.”

Childhood TraumaChild DevelopmentSelf HateGroupthinkConsensus Trance
Book:The Insanity of Normality: Toward Understanding Human Destructiveness
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“The majority never has right on its side. Never I say! That is one of the social lies that a free, thinking man is bound to rebel against. Who makes up the majority in any given country? Is it the wise men or the fools? I think we must agree that the fools are in a terrible overwhelming majority, all the wide world over. But, damn it, it can surely never be right that the stupid should rule over the clever! (An Enemy of the People, act 4)”

DemocracyStupidityMinoritiesRebellionIndividualismFree ThinkingGroupthinkSheepleMajoritarianism
Book:Oxford Ibsen Vol 6: An Enemy of the People / The Wild Duck / Rosmersholm
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“In his important social psychological experiments with students, Asch found out in simple tests that there was a yielding toward an ERRING MAJORITY opinion in more than a third of his test persons, and 75 percent of subjects experimented upon agreed with the majority in varying degrees. In many persons the weight of authority is more important than the quality of the authority.”

MajorityErringGroupthinkAuthority Figures
Book:The Rape of the Mind: The Psychology of Thought Control, Menticide, and Brainwashing
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“Solidarity is great for a group that needs to work in unison or march into battle. Solidarity engenders trust, teamwork, and mutual aid. But it can also foster groupthink, orthodoxy, and a paralyzing fear of challenging the collective. Solidarity can interfere with a group's efforts to find the truth”

FearGroupsSolidarityGroupthink
Book:The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting up a Generation for Failure
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“Of course, there is no way to avoid being a hypocrite, even when seeking to remove oneself from the falseness of this material existence. And perhaps, this attribution of ‘falseness’ is not sufficiently accurate as a descriptor either; yet, how else is it to be articulated if something of it seems inauthentic and insincere as though existence itself were mediated through codes and objects and structures that constrained the domain of possibility, or rather relegated the notion of free will as becoming a reaction to prompts and the construct of independent action as having emerged from latent subsets of choices that presented themselves according to the dynamic interplay of obligation, code, preservation and groupthink?”

HypocrisyOntologyMaterial WorldImposterFalsityGroupthinkSpectacleSignifiers
Book:Inward and Toward
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“All of us are not always smarter than one of us, leaders need to distinguish between the wisdom of crowds and the madness of crowds.”

Decision MakingGroupthinkScience And ChangeCognitive BiasesWisdom Of Crowds
Book:The Science of Successful Organizational Change: How Leaders Set Strategy, Change Behavior, and Create an Agile Culture
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“Telling people that they are racist—on the basis of immutable characteristics, using incomprehensible definitions that they may not know or understand—then claiming they are “fragile” and in denial when they try to defend themselves, or accusing them of “gaslighting” when they don’t agree with you, is a punitive way of treating people, whatever their colour.”

RacismCrueltyGroupthinkCritical Race TheoryWhite Fragility
Book:Cynical Therapies: Perspectives on the Antitherapeutic Nature of Critical Social Justice
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“But we must realize that even this tendency to restrict the exploitation of class privileges is a fairly common ingredient of totalitarianism. Totalitarianism is not simply amoral. It is the morality of the closed society—of the group, or of the tribe; it is not individual selfishness, but it is collective selfishness.”

SelfishnessNationalismAltruismTotalitarianismEgoismCollectivismTribalismIdentity PoliticsGroupthinkAnti Individualism
Book:The Open Society and Its Enemies - Volume One: The Spell of Plato
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“Maybe you think you’re just one person. What you do doesn’t really matter. You can read a few tweets or blog posts and then publicly render your judgment of a total stranger. Who cares? You’re just one tiny voice in a huge ocean. But the thing about tiny voices is that when they band together they can be incredibly loud. Uncomfortably loud. Sometimes that’s a good thing—a strong thing. A group of voices can wake people up to the truth. But a group of voices can be a bad thing too, because we’re not always right. Or even when we are right, sometimes the things we do to each other still aren’t okay.”

GroupthinkOnline Etiquette
Book:This is How it Happened
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“In order to achieve something, in competition with the powerful and smartly wielded influence of corporations, we need to join forces and be as well-organized as they are. This does not come natural to us more intellectual types, as we tend to be averse to hierarchy and groupthink; we don't like to be part of anything like a disciplined and well-organized team or movement. But the alternative is to continue losing politically - which means continued failure to protect the world's poor, who are really bearing the brunt of our disorganization.”

WorldNeedsWellsMeanDoeOrderForceNaturalPoorPowerfulTeamInfluenceAchieveMovementTypeProtectIntellectualLosingCompetitionAlternativesCorporationsOrganizedHierarchyGroupthinkDisorganization
Author:Thomas Pogge
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