Groupthink

[AKA_Monet]

Originally Posted by TonyB06

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.

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.

[Little32]

Originally Posted by AKA_Monet

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.