8 ms·

Symptoms of Groupthink (2012)

125 points by aleyan 7y ago

we_are_one 7y ago
Example of past groupthink on HN (approx 2009-2013): 1. We should all use Chrome and switch our family members and friends to it Example of current groupthink on HN: 1. Nuclear energy is good 2. Electron is bad
workthrowaway 7y ago
> Self-Censorship this one is interesting.
- dandelo53 7y ago
  Human's are lazy by what once was necessity, and that is still deeply rooted in our behavior. Most folks in tech can grok that Laziness can be a virtue. However, modern society has perverted the image this trait reflects to appear somehow inferior to "hard work." We live in a society where we are raised to "endure" adulthood. It definitely doesn't have to be like this now. Whether it did in order to achieve the tech at hand is a lovely debate to be had... if only more people could hear the opportunity is literally pounding at the door begging to come in. Wishful thinking anyway...`
- BaronSamedi 7y ago
  The economist Timur Kuran has an interesting theory on this topic called “Preference falsification”. Under this theory people lie about their true opinion due to social pressure of various kinds. The interesting part is that this phenomenon can produce dramatic and unexpected changes when a widespread preference is no longer falsified.
draw_down 7y ago
Fortunately these problems don’t apply to any groups of which I am a member. Other people’s groups, though, they really need to watch out for this stuff.
diego 7y ago
After reading the article, I realized that if a site like HN or Reddit wanted to mitigate groupthink, they would want to limit how much an item can be upvoted or downvoted (e.g. max 5 like Slashdot did). Apparently people really like groupthink, it increases engagement.
- ryandrake 7y ago
  I don’t think you can get rid of groupthink while still letting everyone vote on everyone else’s opinion. People are going to inevitably use the up and downvotes as agree/disagree buttons and boom, you have crowd-enforced “correct” opinions. If your goal is to curate quality discussion, don’t crowdsource that curation. All voting systems I’ve seen confuse popularity with quality.
  - hiccuphippo 7y ago
    What about adding separate "I agree/disagree with this" buttons? With minimal or no influence on the position/color of comments. Would people be able to say "I disagree with this comment but it makes a good point"?
    - ryandrake 7y ago
      I liked good ol Slashdot’s system, where if you vote, you need to select a reason with a drop down menu. This tiny bit of extra friction might be helpful to discourage quick “drive-by” downvoting and brigading. Additionally, their meta-moderation system helped to make sure people were really voting in good faith. I think they were really ahead of their time in some respects. Also, give people a vote budget so they think about whether they really need to vote. Maybe 5 votes per day. For whatever reason I can only write 5 posts per day here, so I try to use them wisely. Same should go for votes.
  - BurningFrog 7y ago
    > If your goal is to curate quality discussion, don’t crowdsource that curation. But what other resource than the crowd is readily available to curate? Non curated public discussions are absolute garbage, so I'll take a flawed curation over none every time.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
bentona 7y ago
I have a feeling this will be true for most, but I immediately thought of the increasingly common political bubbles we often exist in today, especially given facebook feed algorithms, etc.
motohagiography 7y ago
Criticisms of groupthink and other anti-patterns are funny to me because they presume that if people only had access to these valuable insights they would change. Organizational anti-patterns are rarely broken, they work for someone, and someone's salary depends on sustaining that dissonance. The work in large organizations is to achieve outcomes within the broken and inconsistent rules of their internal logic, so as to preserve the integrity of them, and not the outcomes themselves. The essence of being a geek, nerd, or technologist is to focus on the outcomes and problem solving to achieve them, whereas the essence of being typical is to be a working part of the system to sustain it, independent of it's outcomes. Warren Buffett said, "I try to invest in businesses that are so wonderful that an idiot can run them. Because sooner or later, one will." To me, the point of a startup is to defect from these dissonance machines and create something people actually want. Viewed this way, a startup is not a business. It's like an anti-business that gets absorbed by a business and releases stored potential revenue in the collision. Groupthink might be more of a sign than a problem. It's possible that it is a sign of the growth stage of a business and whether it's ready to absorb something, or just be hollowed out in some long term private equity cost optimization hell.
- asdfman123 7y ago
  It's easy to be cynical but I believe some corporate cultures are far healthier than others. I believe lots of companies try to avoid the HiPPO effect (deferring to highest paid person's opinion) with varying success. I worked for a few years at Shell though and now I'm wary of ever working for a large corporation again. The sweet spot I've found is mid-sized companies, where they're small enough where they can't just absorb the costs of useless software projects, but big enough where there isn't the mad scramble to ship. (I've never worked for a startup, though, so apologies if that's an unfair characterization.)
  - growlist 7y ago
    > I worked for a few years at Shell though and now I'm wary of ever working for a large corporation again I didn't find them that bad tbh, I think that there's good parts and bad parts in all monsters like Shell - my take was that their size, heritage and criticality to the global economy has resulted in them developing certain bureaucratic traits akin to a governmental civil service, but even with that said they do some amazing stuff (which most civil services cannot get anywhere near) - and I worked with probably the smartest IT pros I've met in my career. They operate a massive global IT infrastructure at scale and they do it pretty well, with some aspects being indisputably world-leading.
Ididntdothis 7y ago
I know groupthink has a negative connotation and can be damaging but on the other hand it seems necessary to have some kind of groupthink in order to align an organization on a goal. Especially in areas where there is not a clear cut decision what’s best you have to form a group opinion that assumes certain things. For example in software dev at some point you have to decide on an architecture and live with it even if there are alternatives that are as good. People who constantly reopen that question are not really helpful at some point. The danger is probably for people to stick to that decision for too long even after weaknesses start showing up. But I think especially for a large organization it’s hard to find the point when it’s time to change course. I guess all I want to say is that damaging groupthink is easy to spot in hindsight but that well functioning organizations also rely on groupthink. And that it’s quite hard to distinguish between positive and necessary groupthink and negative groupthink.
- ben_w 7y ago
  Are you sure that’s groupthink that you’re describing? Groupthink isn’t mere agreement, but specifically agreement contrary to the professional (not personal) options of informed experts. “It’s not my first choice, but it will do” isn’t, I think, in that category.
  - Ididntdothis 7y ago
    I think often agreement gets relabeled as groupthink later.
  - asdf21 7y ago
    What about when all the informed experts are wrong? Like consuming dietary cholesterol causing high blood cholesterol? Or trans fats being healthier than saturated fats? Or tariffs harming the US economy?
    - lopmotr 7y ago
      How can your group know something that informed experts don't? If you have special knowledge they don't, then they aren't informed. Your group might knowingly take a risk in guessing the experts are wrong, perhaps to test a novel idea, but that's not the same as refusing to recognize their opinion as valid, like in groupthink.
asdfman123 7y ago
Does anyone else go crazy in the presence of groupthink? I've never been unpopular and I'm the kind of guy to make friends with individuals in various groups, but I've always been allergic to cliques. Whenever I find myself part of an in-group that's rapidly converging on groupthink, I get deeply uncomfortable and don't last long there. When I'm on the periphery of a rapidly coalescing clique, I often find myself becoming the outspoken outsider. I just can't stand people agreeing on everything -- I've got to play the contrarian. Universal agreement just doesn't seem safe or comfortable. I feel I have a natural resistance to groupthink and it's a huge liability. Most people seem to love forming into tribes. And frankly, how do you stop the ever-present march of groupthink? I guess key is creating a culture where respectful disagreement is encouraged and expected, where people can openly admit to being wrong without losing face.
- Nasrudith 7y ago
  I understand the feeling - I often feel like the world is insane and you are the crazy one for pointing out that something makes no sense and dismissed without even a half-assed hypothesis backing it. Finding out there is a good counterintuitive reason for apparent irrationality is a relief. I suspect the easiest fix on a personal level is ironically self-selection but certain things are known to exacerbate groupthink like the sense of a threat - annoyingly completely separate from /actual/ threats.
  - asdfman123 7y ago
    What drives me over the edge though is that developers believe they are so imminently intelligent. Don't get me wrong, many of them are. But sometimes they believe so strongly in their own biases and preconceptions that it is deeply frustrating. For instance, there are some who believe in the gospel of whiteboard interviews and when you try to discuss things like individual variation and how the process could be mostly random, their minds are completely closed. Honestly, I don't encounter these sorts of problems nearly as often with people who have had liberal arts educations... but then again, I don't debate those sorts of people online like I do with programmers. Maybe it's just people are more confident in arguing their opinions when they're anonymous.
rossdavidh 7y ago
The problem with most of these kinds of analyses of groupthink, is that everything they say is a characteristic of groupthink, is also characteristic of achieving consensus of any sort. We don't call it self-censorship unless it turns out badly, because the absolute lack of self-censorship is cacophony where nothing is ever decided. "Belief in inherent morality of the group", is not what we call it when it turns out that, say, those in favor of abolitionism _were_ in the right. We only call it that when it turns out to be false. I've seen cases where you actually lack all of the things listed here, and they are groups which are never able to agree on a course of action, or cooperate to achieve anything. You call it either "agreement" or "groupthink" depending on whether it turns out to be good or not. Which means, that a list of "symptoms" like this will not help you to discover in advance whether the group in question has a problem, which is what is actually needed. It's something that can give you the comforting illusion of being able to detect groupthink ("it won't happen to me"), without in fact helping you actually notice when the group you're part of is heading off in the wrong direction.
- naravara 7y ago
  >s that everything they say is a characteristic of groupthink, is also characteristic of achieving consensus of any sort. ALL of them? How about: - Outgroup stereotypes? - Self-appointed mind guards to insulate leadership from challenging ideas? - Illusion of unanimity? I don't see how any of those are necessary for consensus. Same for self-censorship really. One can voice disagreement with a course of action and then agree to go down it anyway to be a team player. People do this all the time.
  - Ididntdothis 7y ago
    "- Self-appointed mind guards to insulate leadership from challenging ideas?" this one I can see in a consensus environment. At some point it's not useful when people keep questioning the decided upon course of action and it may be necessary to stop listening to them.
    - naravara 7y ago
aazaa 7y ago
It might be interesting to list some contraindications as well. What aspects of group dynamics work against groupthink, or are signs of its absence? I suspect all of them could be view as anti-patterns. For example: - frequent dissent - group frequently breaks ranks when new facts emerge - lack of confidence - lack of a clearly-defined enemy - lack of consistent message/frequent flip-flopping It seems likely that some aspects of groupthink are essential for any collective action. Without it, people can't or won't work together. With too much, the group makes mistakes no individual would have made.
notelonmusk 7y ago
For mobile users : https://pastebin.com/raw/ik8YPBhy https://pastebin.com/raw/ik8YPBhy
hi41 7y ago
>> At the hearing, engineer Brian Russell noted that NASA managers had shifted the moral rules under which they operated. I would like to juxtapose it with the current sway of moral relativism - It is okay for you but not okay for others. Where does one draw the line between an absolute moral code and an opinion.
miguelmota 7y ago
Groupthink happens because humans are tribal by nature. Tribes provide protection as long as you comply with their principles. Doing something contrarian is questioning those principles which is a threat to the tribe. Groupthink keeps you from being ostracized from the group as long as you go along with it because it’s desirable to be accepted in that tribe in order to achieve your long-term plans.
foobar_ 7y ago
How do you avoid it ?

125 points by aleyan 7y ago

Example of past groupthink on HN (approx 2009-2013): 1. We should all use Chrome and switch our family members and friends to it Example of current groupthink on HN: 1. Nuclear energy is good 2. Electron is bad

workthrowaway 7y ago

> Self-Censorship this one is interesting.

dandelo53 7y ago
Human's are lazy by what once was necessity, and that is still deeply rooted in our behavior. Most folks in tech can grok that Laziness can be a virtue. However, modern society has perverted the image this trait reflects to appear somehow inferior to "hard work." We live in a society where we are raised to "endure" adulthood. It definitely doesn't have to be like this now. Whether it did in order to achieve the tech at hand is a lovely debate to be had... if only more people could hear the opportunity is literally pounding at the door begging to come in. Wishful thinking anyway...`
BaronSamedi 7y ago
The economist Timur Kuran has an interesting theory on this topic called “Preference falsification”. Under this theory people lie about their true opinion due to social pressure of various kinds. The interesting part is that this phenomenon can produce dramatic and unexpected changes when a widespread preference is no longer falsified.

draw_down 7y ago

Fortunately these problems don’t apply to any groups of which I am a member. Other people’s groups, though, they really need to watch out for this stuff.

diego 7y ago

After reading the article, I realized that if a site like HN or Reddit wanted to mitigate groupthink, they would want to limit how much an item can be upvoted or downvoted (e.g. max 5 like Slashdot did). Apparently people really like groupthink, it increases engagement.

ryandrake 7y ago
I don’t think you can get rid of groupthink while still letting everyone vote on everyone else’s opinion. People are going to inevitably use the up and downvotes as agree/disagree buttons and boom, you have crowd-enforced “correct” opinions. If your goal is to curate quality discussion, don’t crowdsource that curation. All voting systems I’ve seen confuse popularity with quality.
- hiccuphippo 7y ago
  What about adding separate "I agree/disagree with this" buttons? With minimal or no influence on the position/color of comments. Would people be able to say "I disagree with this comment but it makes a good point"?
  - ryandrake 7y ago
    I liked good ol Slashdot’s system, where if you vote, you need to select a reason with a drop down menu. This tiny bit of extra friction might be helpful to discourage quick “drive-by” downvoting and brigading. Additionally, their meta-moderation system helped to make sure people were really voting in good faith. I think they were really ahead of their time in some respects. Also, give people a vote budget so they think about whether they really need to vote. Maybe 5 votes per day. For whatever reason I can only write 5 posts per day here, so I try to use them wisely. Same should go for votes.
- BurningFrog 7y ago
  > If your goal is to curate quality discussion, don’t crowdsource that curation. But what other resource than the crowd is readily available to curate? Non curated public discussions are absolute garbage, so I'll take a flawed curation over none every time.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

bentona 7y ago

I have a feeling this will be true for most, but I immediately thought of the increasingly common political bubbles we often exist in today, especially given facebook feed algorithms, etc.

motohagiography 7y ago

Criticisms of groupthink and other anti-patterns are funny to me because they presume that if people only had access to these valuable insights they would change. Organizational anti-patterns are rarely broken, they work for someone, and someone's salary depends on sustaining that dissonance. The work in large organizations is to achieve outcomes within the broken and inconsistent rules of their internal logic, so as to preserve the integrity of them, and not the outcomes themselves. The essence of being a geek, nerd, or technologist is to focus on the outcomes and problem solving to achieve them, whereas the essence of being typical is to be a working part of the system to sustain it, independent of it's outcomes. Warren Buffett said, "I try to invest in businesses that are so wonderful that an idiot can run them. Because sooner or later, one will." To me, the point of a startup is to defect from these dissonance machines and create something people actually want. Viewed this way, a startup is not a business. It's like an anti-business that gets absorbed by a business and releases stored potential revenue in the collision. Groupthink might be more of a sign than a problem. It's possible that it is a sign of the growth stage of a business and whether it's ready to absorb something, or just be hollowed out in some long term private equity cost optimization hell.

asdfman123 7y ago
It's easy to be cynical but I believe some corporate cultures are far healthier than others. I believe lots of companies try to avoid the HiPPO effect (deferring to highest paid person's opinion) with varying success. I worked for a few years at Shell though and now I'm wary of ever working for a large corporation again. The sweet spot I've found is mid-sized companies, where they're small enough where they can't just absorb the costs of useless software projects, but big enough where there isn't the mad scramble to ship. (I've never worked for a startup, though, so apologies if that's an unfair characterization.)
- growlist 7y ago
  > I worked for a few years at Shell though and now I'm wary of ever working for a large corporation again I didn't find them that bad tbh, I think that there's good parts and bad parts in all monsters like Shell - my take was that their size, heritage and criticality to the global economy has resulted in them developing certain bureaucratic traits akin to a governmental civil service, but even with that said they do some amazing stuff (which most civil services cannot get anywhere near) - and I worked with probably the smartest IT pros I've met in my career. They operate a massive global IT infrastructure at scale and they do it pretty well, with some aspects being indisputably world-leading.

Ididntdothis 7y ago

I know groupthink has a negative connotation and can be damaging but on the other hand it seems necessary to have some kind of groupthink in order to align an organization on a goal. Especially in areas where there is not a clear cut decision what’s best you have to form a group opinion that assumes certain things. For example in software dev at some point you have to decide on an architecture and live with it even if there are alternatives that are as good. People who constantly reopen that question are not really helpful at some point. The danger is probably for people to stick to that decision for too long even after weaknesses start showing up. But I think especially for a large organization it’s hard to find the point when it’s time to change course. I guess all I want to say is that damaging groupthink is easy to spot in hindsight but that well functioning organizations also rely on groupthink. And that it’s quite hard to distinguish between positive and necessary groupthink and negative groupthink.

ben_w 7y ago
Are you sure that’s groupthink that you’re describing? Groupthink isn’t mere agreement, but specifically agreement contrary to the professional (not personal) options of informed experts. “It’s not my first choice, but it will do” isn’t, I think, in that category.
- Ididntdothis 7y ago
  I think often agreement gets relabeled as groupthink later.
- asdf21 7y ago
  What about when all the informed experts are wrong? Like consuming dietary cholesterol causing high blood cholesterol? Or trans fats being healthier than saturated fats? Or tariffs harming the US economy?
  - lopmotr 7y ago
    How can your group know something that informed experts don't? If you have special knowledge they don't, then they aren't informed. Your group might knowingly take a risk in guessing the experts are wrong, perhaps to test a novel idea, but that's not the same as refusing to recognize their opinion as valid, like in groupthink.

asdfman123 7y ago

Does anyone else go crazy in the presence of groupthink? I've never been unpopular and I'm the kind of guy to make friends with individuals in various groups, but I've always been allergic to cliques. Whenever I find myself part of an in-group that's rapidly converging on groupthink, I get deeply uncomfortable and don't last long there. When I'm on the periphery of a rapidly coalescing clique, I often find myself becoming the outspoken outsider. I just can't stand people agreeing on everything -- I've got to play the contrarian. Universal agreement just doesn't seem safe or comfortable. I feel I have a natural resistance to groupthink and it's a huge liability. Most people seem to love forming into tribes. And frankly, how do you stop the ever-present march of groupthink? I guess key is creating a culture where respectful disagreement is encouraged and expected, where people can openly admit to being wrong without losing face.

Nasrudith 7y ago
I understand the feeling - I often feel like the world is insane and you are the crazy one for pointing out that something makes no sense and dismissed without even a half-assed hypothesis backing it. Finding out there is a good counterintuitive reason for apparent irrationality is a relief. I suspect the easiest fix on a personal level is ironically self-selection but certain things are known to exacerbate groupthink like the sense of a threat - annoyingly completely separate from /actual/ threats.
- asdfman123 7y ago
  What drives me over the edge though is that developers believe they are so imminently intelligent. Don't get me wrong, many of them are. But sometimes they believe so strongly in their own biases and preconceptions that it is deeply frustrating. For instance, there are some who believe in the gospel of whiteboard interviews and when you try to discuss things like individual variation and how the process could be mostly random, their minds are completely closed. Honestly, I don't encounter these sorts of problems nearly as often with people who have had liberal arts educations... but then again, I don't debate those sorts of people online like I do with programmers. Maybe it's just people are more confident in arguing their opinions when they're anonymous.

rossdavidh 7y ago

The problem with most of these kinds of analyses of groupthink, is that everything they say is a characteristic of groupthink, is also characteristic of achieving consensus of any sort. We don't call it self-censorship unless it turns out badly, because the absolute lack of self-censorship is cacophony where nothing is ever decided. "Belief in inherent morality of the group", is not what we call it when it turns out that, say, those in favor of abolitionism _were_ in the right. We only call it that when it turns out to be false. I've seen cases where you actually lack all of the things listed here, and they are groups which are never able to agree on a course of action, or cooperate to achieve anything. You call it either "agreement" or "groupthink" depending on whether it turns out to be good or not. Which means, that a list of "symptoms" like this will not help you to discover in advance whether the group in question has a problem, which is what is actually needed. It's something that can give you the comforting illusion of being able to detect groupthink ("it won't happen to me"), without in fact helping you actually notice when the group you're part of is heading off in the wrong direction.

naravara 7y ago
>s that everything they say is a characteristic of groupthink, is also characteristic of achieving consensus of any sort. ALL of them? How about: - Outgroup stereotypes? - Self-appointed mind guards to insulate leadership from challenging ideas? - Illusion of unanimity? I don't see how any of those are necessary for consensus. Same for self-censorship really. One can voice disagreement with a course of action and then agree to go down it anyway to be a team player. People do this all the time.
- Ididntdothis 7y ago
  "- Self-appointed mind guards to insulate leadership from challenging ideas?" this one I can see in a consensus environment. At some point it's not useful when people keep questioning the decided upon course of action and it may be necessary to stop listening to them.
  - naravara 7y ago

aazaa 7y ago

It might be interesting to list some contraindications as well. What aspects of group dynamics work against groupthink, or are signs of its absence? I suspect all of them could be view as anti-patterns. For example: - frequent dissent - group frequently breaks ranks when new facts emerge - lack of confidence - lack of a clearly-defined enemy - lack of consistent message/frequent flip-flopping It seems likely that some aspects of groupthink are essential for any collective action. Without it, people can't or won't work together. With too much, the group makes mistakes no individual would have made.

notelonmusk 7y ago

For mobile users : https://pastebin.com/raw/ik8YPBhy https://pastebin.com/raw/ik8YPBhy

hi41 7y ago

>> At the hearing, engineer Brian Russell noted that NASA managers had shifted the moral rules under which they operated. I would like to juxtapose it with the current sway of moral relativism - It is okay for you but not okay for others. Where does one draw the line between an absolute moral code and an opinion.

miguelmota 7y ago

Groupthink happens because humans are tribal by nature. Tribes provide protection as long as you comply with their principles. Doing something contrarian is questioning those principles which is a threat to the tribe. Groupthink keeps you from being ostracized from the group as long as you go along with it because it’s desirable to be accepted in that tribe in order to achieve your long-term plans.

foobar_ 7y ago

How do you avoid it ?