Has group think ever affected you, personally?

I used to work as a consultant…when these “group workers” got stuck on an idea (usually they stopped thinking about the solution to a problem/product because of a “great idea” one of them came up with…..and started thinking on how to change the problem/product to fit the solution) they would call me in to give outside opinion on how to fix this…

So just because it’s a popular idea…..doesn’t make it a good idea.

Well yeah – all the time. But most of the time it’s a group of which I am not a member.

As for a specific example – I can point to one that happened to me here – or rather, was revealed to me here. It’s been expressed over and over in media, etc., that the majority, and often its expressed as the vast majority, of terrorists are Muslim. I realized that I bought into it without really thinking about it – I automatically agreed. I got out of it quickly, though, and thankfully, because I attributed what I believed to be the phenomenon at the time to the fact that much of the Muslim majority lives in developing areas, and much of them conflict areas, and it tends that one oppressive regime or another is in charge in those situations, and oppressive regimes often lead to extremist behavior like terrorism.

Of course, I realized that I was wrong about that in the end, at least where it mattered to me and the people who most often I was in conversations with or whom I was listening to – in terms of targeted attacks against Western nations.

I would have a hard time believing anyone that claimed they’d never been effected by group think.

this could get very Meta – let’s see if anyone actually claims that they weren’t affected by it at any point – I bet we might see some group think about group think…;-)

Try jury duty sometime. Watching while I knew what was going on was interesting.

This morning I was talking to a guy who was leading a research project. They had a database which, he felt, was abnormal (it was a flat file database—how is that “denormalized”). Anyway, the data were being entered by one person at one terminal, and the person couldn’t keep up. So they wanted to set up a web-based interface to do this.

Now that’s where I think the group think started. Why web?

So they went to the computer gurus who told them that then would need some kind of complex SQL relational database that then would translate the data back into the form they were currently working with it in.

The problem had been originally presented to me as a SAS conversion problem, but actually the conversion ran the other way. This conversion was probably unworkable. Very expensive. They were looking at hiring all kinds of grad students to work on it. At least they realized it was not going to be workable.

So now they were thinking of going back to some kind of SAS solution, since they had the knowledge to do that on their own. What’s the big deal, I wondered. It’s a very complex SAS program. What does it do? He went into a long spiel. Oh, I said, so it’s running some queries? Yup.

Why the web? I asked. We wanted to have several people doing it at a time, he said. Were any of these people out there in the world? No.

No one, it seems, had ever questioned why the web. They had bought into the problem as presented.

Why not do it on the local network? Well, he said, those machines didn’t have enough power to handle it. Why? I don’t know what he was thinking, but it seemed that he had this idea that their software was complex and had tentacles everywhere, and not only that, it was inextricably integrated with the data.

Those machines don’t need power. They are just data entry ports. The server can hold your program and run it.

So all you need to do is set up a few data entry machines, hook them to your server, write a little software to make sure they could handle multiple data entry and be on their merry ways.

Very interesting proposal, he said. Let me run it by my tech guy. Funny. I asked my sister (a big deal web techy) about this, and she never came up with this.

Ah doctors. The cult of expertise. All these people with different hammers thinking everything looks like a nail.

I’d love to know who originally framed the problem… or rather, the solution. I’m not sure anyone even understands the problem since they were trying to jump through all kinds of hoops.

Now maybe there’s something I don’t understand about the software or the problem, but this just seemed too easy to me. And then I thought about group think. And how it is possible that this could come about as a consequence of noone questioning the ideas of the person before them because they were experts running multi-million dollar research projects.

It blows me away. It can’t be that simple, can it? How could all these terribly educated people invent this huge deal around it? Was it a make-work conspiracy? Was I collapsing that house of cards? Would everyone hate me for taking away jobs? Or at least, jobs in their particular department?

I must be wrong. The alternative is too scary. Or am I being influenced by group think?

@wundayatta – That was an incredibly clear example. I feel like that’s a big problem with departments – it’s viral groupthink some of the time. When a department is used to X solution for a problem like “we need to get multiple people working on this at the same time,” that’s what they resort to. And because of that, people in the department interacting with them are locked into, in their minds, the limited range of solutions available with that solution.

The problem is often hierarchy as well. The people most qualified to come in and ask the “why this?” question are those who are the freshest – and often the most expendable. They might not ask “why” because it would make them look incompetent.

I’m on a friend’s laptop so I apologize for not having a reference to link here, but a recent and very well designed study showed that brain-storming is one of the worst ways to get ideas out and on the table. It’s always more effective when people are allowed to think things through on their own long before hand and present competing ideas to an arbiter.

@iamthemob I guess I’m lucky. They pay me to ask people why. It’s fun, too, because you can learn a lot. I have a rap I can give before hand if I want to set the groundwork for looking stupid.

@crazyivan That’s scary. I’ve been taught about brainstorming until it drops from my ass. I wonder if it depends on who facilitates the brainstorming. Because there is the phenomenon of the people in the group tending to go along with whoever speaks first. But a skilled facilitator can avoid that problem. So I’m told.

If so, I didn’t really notice.

It probably affects everyone – everyone who isn’t catatonic. The trick is to learn to consider it and how it affects you.

Great! You’re all correct. Congratulations—we nailed that one.

I don’t think I have ever been susceptable to “group think.” I am far too inner-directed, and am stubborn to the point of obstinance. : )

@CaptainHarley -

A quote from you, on another thread:

“Yes, like most people, I have a tendency to read that which agrees with my world-view.”

An example of group think or no?

Not really. Just a statement of a personal tendency to limit my reading to that with which I already agree. : )

@CaptainHarley I think that there’s a form of antithetical group-think as well…

I think this depends on whether or not we consider confirmation bias to be, in certain situations, a product of group-think.

I’ve heard it said (in a workplace that was very much afflicted by groupthink—even though taking and supporting risks is officially part of the company culture): “They tell you to think outside the box; but the pay is inside the box.”

In that same environment, where I was punished numerous times for divergent thinking, I correctly analyzed one project I was supposed to lead when I understood that the unspoken message from management was “Here’s the solution we’ve already decided on. Try to have the problem that fits it.” My implicit task was to define and shape the problem so that the predetermined solution would be accepted.

Ever afterward, whenever I was assigned to a team I made it a point to ask if the team’s findings and recommendations had been dictated in advance of our analysis or if we actually had an open-ended challenge.

@Jeruba Did they appreciate that question? Or did they take it as perfectly natural and tell you the truth?

@wundayatta, I don’t think they appreciated it very much at all; not the managers, anyway. The peer leaders did. We were forever being hamstrung by delivering our findings in honest reports that managers didn’t like because they had already made up their minds what the solution should be. My question at least got this frustrating little tactic on the table. When we were lied to, everybody knew it later if not sooner. It put the onus back on the managers instead of their blaming us for not producing satisfactory results.

Interestingly, we had one director who asked my immediate manager to relay this question to me: “You know that list of pesky questions you always ask when you’re on a newly forming team? Would you write those down for me?” I did. (I still have them.) He thought it was important to try to make sure teams did address such questions as part of the definition of their mission. His successor regarded me and my questions as a thorn in his side and put me on his short list; I’d have been out the door in a layoff (they called it a “limited restructuring event”—LRE) in a few more months, I’m sure, if I hadn’t ended up on a fast track to early retirement thanks to a companywide initiative to get rid of the expensive and annoying older workers.

It was a pretty stressful environment for those who weren’t into the groupthink mode. Nevertheless, I got ten years of a great salary, bonuses, stock options, and benefits out of it, together with a handsome separation package and the dignity of retirement, and now I don’t have to go to work any more.

Sounds both interesting (if you can distance yourself from it) and frustrating (if you can’t). Did you feel like you were fighting the good fight, or just that you couldn’t go along with management because you know it was not a good way to proceed, or out of ethical concerns?

How did the groupthink affect the organization? Did it matter to the bottom line or to customer satisfaction or anything? Why did the managers want to do things the way they did? Was it purely internal climbing the hierarchy stuff?