When one thinks of social influence, they ponder about how it teaches them of important cultural values and behaviors, which basically is essential to a successful social living. Having stated that earlier, one can reach to the point that social influences has a major hold on behaviors and how we interact with individuals around us. Groupthink was a term coined up by Irving Janis in the year 1972. What can be a more relied definition of groupthink? According to Karen Huffman, groupthink is a condition that is the result of a highly cohesive group striving for agreement to the point of avoiding inconsistent information; the result is faulty decision making. Is it true that most time the faulty decision made overrides the realistic truth? The
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One may ask, why are people bent on going along with the crowd even when they know it is not right? Has the need to be accepted or approved really blinded the eyes of individuals that they can barely tell the difference of what is realistic and not realistic? With all honesty we believe that even if the process of groupthink starts with group members feeling a deep, great sense of cohesiveness or isolation from judgments of qualified outsiders, this attitude is greatly attributed with social influence because individuals feel, for them to have a successful social life, they have to go along with what is said or what is done. Now groupthink being distinguished as a condition will however portray symptoms that are basically exhibited in most cases. According to (Huffman, 2001) the symptoms of groupthinks are illusion of invulnerability, direct pressure on dissenters, illusions of unanimity, stereotypes of out groups, collective rationalizations, self-censorship of doubts of dissenting opinion and beliefs in the morality of the group which is the worst symptom of all. These symptoms all add up together to make the member feel as if they invulnerable. The drastic part of this condition is, it basically makes members start to play the role of group “mind guards” which means they begin to work as bodyguards to basically isolate and protect the group from all differences in opinion. When this happens groupthink becomes a dangerous type of thinking occurring when a group desire for agreement overrules its desire to critically evaluate information. Why are people bent to conform to groupthink? Well this have social influence written all over
One may ask, why are people bent on going along with the crowd even when they know it is not right? Has the need to be accepted or approved really blinded the eyes of individuals that they can barely tell the difference of what is realistic and not realistic? With all honesty we believe that even if the process of groupthink starts with group members feeling a deep, great sense of cohesiveness or isolation from judgments of qualified outsiders, this attitude is greatly attributed with social influence because individuals feel, for them to have a successful social life, they have to go along with what is said or what is done. Now groupthink being distinguished as a condition will however portray symptoms that are basically exhibited in most cases. According to (Huffman, 2001) the symptoms of groupthinks are illusion of invulnerability, direct pressure on dissenters, illusions of unanimity, stereotypes of out groups, collective rationalizations, self-censorship of doubts of dissenting opinion and beliefs in the morality of the group which is the worst symptom of all. These symptoms all add up together to make the member feel as if they invulnerable. The drastic part of this condition is, it basically makes members start to play the role of group “mind guards” which means they begin to work as bodyguards to basically isolate and protect the group from all differences in opinion. When this happens groupthink becomes a dangerous type of thinking occurring when a group desire for agreement overrules its desire to critically evaluate information. Why are people bent to conform to groupthink? Well this have social influence written all over