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Group thinking

Group thinking seems at first, very innocent! To create a group Thinking could be helpful for people to get information of something, and to increase their horizons. But is that true? Is Group thinking a good way to explain our thoughts?

Well, “Group- thinking” means more than the above. It’s a term create by social psychologist Irving Janis (1972), which occurs when a group makes faulty decisions, because group pressures lead to a deterioration of “mental efficiency, reality testing, and moral judgment”. The groups that belong to this group thinking, tend to take irrational actions and to ignore alternatives. So, the meaning of “Group- thinking” seems to be more negative and has unpleasant effects of the individuals.

In everyday life, all people belong to different groups, like in school, in the leisure time, in the work, in the sports activity, or even in the ideology. People interact with others through different groups with the same interests, the same past and life conditions and also with the same beliefs.

Group thinking causes individual members of the group to unquestioningly follow the word of the leader and it strongly discourages any disagreement with the consensus.

According to researches: “In many cases, people will set aside their own personal beliefs or adopt the opinion of the rest of the group. People who are opposed to the decisions or overriding opinion of the group as a whole frequently remain quiet, preferring to keep the peace rather than disrupt the uniformity of the crowd.”

Symptoms of group thinking

According to Janis, he found some symptoms, which if these will exist in a group that is trying to make a decision, there is a reasonable chance that groupthink will happen. Groupthink occurs when groups are under considerable pressure to make a quality decision, which lead to carelessness and irrational thinking, forgetting to consider the alternatives. These symptoms are: the protection of the member of the group from problematic information, the illusion that the thoughts of the mass are the right ones, also there are the lack of doubts and deviations, and finally pressure not to express arguments against the ideology of the group.

Why people prefer the Group thinking?

Let’s think about the last time we were part in a group, in which someone proposed an idea, which we didn’t agree with. However, everyone else in the group agrees with that person and the decision seems to be clear. Would we voice our agreement or would we go along with the majority opinion?

Scientists say about this: “In many cases, people end up engaging in groupthink when they fear that their objections might disrupt the harmony of the group or suspect that their ideas might cause other members to reject them.” Janis continues: “Groupthink tends to be the most prevalent in conditions where there is a high degree of cohesiveness, situational factors that contribute to deferring to the group, such as external threats, moral problems, difficult decisions, and structural issues, such as impartial leadership and group isolation.” People fear to become an outsider, an outcast.

Well, the positive effects of “Group thinking” are the completion of tasks more quick and efficient. A large number of people, often helps to assert opinions and different human rights. But, however, the suppression of individual opinions, and creative thought can lead to poor decision-making and inefficient problem-solving. Furthermore, when a group has similar members, more likely to change in extreme stress and moral dilemmas. In each case, Group thinking has an affect on the psychological condition.

According to Marlene E. Turner & Anthony R. Pratkanis, in “Twenty-Five Years of Groupthink Theory and Research: Lessons from the Evaluation of a Theory”, 1998, the “group thinking” begins to become dangerous by including illusions or invulnerability, collective rationalization, stereotypes of outgroups, self-censorship, mind guards, and believes in the inherent morality of the group.  There are also the lack of incomplete survey of alternatives and objectives, poor information search, failure to appraise the risks of the preferred solution, and selective information processing.

“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 judgment 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.”– Seneca

The post Group thinking appeared first on MottoCosmos.com.



This post first appeared on Mottocosmos.com | Wonderful People Said!, please read the originial post: here

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