Groupthink
 

Based on Wiki's definition of the word, do you all think we as a people are encountering too much "groupthink" and not enough review on our own?

I am not interested in what we could do better, but are we encountering it too much, now?

Is there a biological basis for this process?

And there is a way to change it.

We as a people = humans

or

We as a people = blacks
??

Humans are very simplistic in our thought processes unless challenged otherwise. Most people will never find out new things on their own. Most people are also threatened by new things that challenge what they've been always told to be true. It's always easily to go with the "conventional wisdom" and agree with everyone else. That's why people who challenge conventional wisdom and new knowledge, based on new and valid information, are met with hostility and often called troublemakers. This is a cultural phenomenon but I guess it can also be biological if it's rooted in the human brain waves or whatever.

It's important to note that not every person or thing that goes against the grain is doing so based on new and valid information. Also, life goes through cycles so there will always be something new to knock the other "new" thing off its pedastol. Every innovator is just like the last innovator.

Are you referring to people on Pledge Park?

AKAMonet would never be so moved to do that. :p

First off, it depends on what issue "Groupthink" is reviewing or analyzing.

People hold a variety of issues dear to them. If it's something precious, they may not be interested in entertaining or accepting someone else's or anyone else's theories on it because they've settled their own belief/thinking on it, or for a variety of other reasons.

If it's an issue of must less "personal" importance, then focused, effective groupthink may provide some assistance, depends on the range of thinking, and those participating.

D-

Right now, I wanted to open up this discussion to all people. I think most groups have an urgent need to be accepted in their cultural paradigm, however, that may be the wrong thinking in that group, per "groupthink's" definition.

From my reading on the subject matter, I think there may be a biological basis for it. It may be evolutionarily conserved and several animal species exhibit similar behavior, such "herd mentality" and the early psych experiments were with rats.

Do I think it is monogenetic, no. I think it is global brain regulation influenced by past experiences and environment. Many people have reasons for what they do, I just find it rather interesting right now... ;)

There are 2 articles, on in the Seattle PI about the PFO causing migraines and the 60 Minutes' show on the peanut butter mixture that saved severely malnourished kids in Africa.

Groupthink would have never put forth the idea that the heart would have anything to do with the brain. Moreover, groupthink would have never given the peanut butter mixture to kids who were thought unsaveble.

So every group can have "groupthink". It doesn't matter how smart one is.

The idea came about during the Bay of Pigs. So, President Kennedy instituted a policy regarding when to address serious events to "be sure that we are not making a bad decision".

I definitely think the "groupthink" is hyperaccelerated with mass media and communications. But social psychology is not my field and I don't know much about what the current concepts are, that is why I posted it.

That is interesting and something that I had not considered before. Not in psychology either, but I know that there is a way that the media collaspes space and time in ways that allow us to conceptualize ourselves as a group. The positives are that we can think of ourselves as part of a larger group that we are connected to through the media and which we would have no other connection to otherwise (city, nation, world and so forth); one of the down sides could be this hyperaccelerated "groupthink". Benedict Anderson writes about that in Imagined Communities; it might speak to some of the psychological connections that you want to make with group think.