Summary Of Group Minds By Doris Lessing

Social influences by the majority is believed to be a basic human need in order to feel connected to the world and accepted by it. Novelist, Doris Lessing, gives her opinions on the topic with her work, “Group Minds,” in which she challenges those who have the knowledge of how humans can be influenced and teach it in schools, so that it may better the current lives of western society. It’s commonly said, “knowledge is power,” but Lessing is expressing her opinions on the topic in a similar way to Marvel’s comic book character, Benjamin Parker, when he says, “with great power there must also come great responsibility.”
In “Group Minds”, Lessing gives her opinions of the individualist mindset of the free world, and how those who have found …show more content…
She talks about the various “classic” experiments that have been conducted and ends paragraph seven with this phrase, “...but most give in to the majority opinion, obey the atmosphere.” In this I found her results to not be accurate, Solomon E. Asch, a social psychologist, conducted one of these “classic” experiments that Lessing writes about. In this experiment Asch tested the minority to gain knowledge whether or not the majority opinions had an affect on the opinion of the minority. In his experiment, Asch found that “32%” of the subjects tested on fell victim to the opinions of others. While some did conform to the social influence of the majority, most did not, which is causes the statement from Lessing to be flawed with inaccuracies. While Lessing does have some inaccuracies, her work is stilled considered to be significant to the topic of the majority conforming to the minority. Furthermore, Lessing does a terrific job of conveying the idea of all people having a group mind, allowing themselves to be influenced by those most like themselves. This is visible in many groups were an individual becomes a product of their environment, and rarely is there someone who steps of of the social norm to become an individual. Lessing’s interpretation of the information was done so unfairly. She claims that the people of the western world lack the ability to analyze the group mindset, and are helpless against any sort of pressure and conform the opinions of the majority. In cases this is shown to be true, but without proper experimentation of her statement, she is unfairly making claims of people in the west without any first hand knowledge. Lastly Lessing’s opinions are mostly argued from a logical standpoint. She writes, “It