Groupthink Inside Out

Understanding how communication phenomenon are applied to our everyday interactions is critical for problem solving and educating people on how to understand other individuals, societies and nations. Identifying and studying these phenomena allows researchers to make sense of the extraordinary social and biophysical responses that occur in a communicative setting. The ideas established in the Disney and Pixar movie Inside Out unveil the difficulty individuals of different moral and constitutional beliefs and personalities encounter when attempting to make one cohesive decision. The second idea in Inside Out involves the incorporation of minority opinion into a preexisting group of people with established analogous beliefs on a specific subject …show more content…
According to Janis, this theory is broken up into three antecedents that will lead group members to result in Groupthink. The first is structural flaws, which describes how the group is organized. The potential flaws in the groups’ structure include group insulation, biased leadership, having a lack of procedural norms, and high homogeneity. The second is high cohesion, which refers to the “sense of solidarity” of the group, and the third is situational characteristics, which refers to how fast the decision needs to be made that ultimately detracts from the time spent thinking about the final outcome (Dainton & Zelley, 2015). In a study done by Griffin and Hensley, Groupthink was applied to a an instance where the Kent State University Board of Trustees voted to build a recreational center on the grounds of where four students died in a fatal shooting. Despite the issue receiving state and nation wide attention, the members of the board were grounded in their decision and even refused an appeal. Here, researchers applied Groupthink antecedents to explain the procedure that lead the group members to partake in a flawed decision. The research concluded that the Board of Trustees indeed had high cohesiveness, group insulation …show more content…
This theory emphasizes on the minority of people in a group setting who are “motivated by the fear of isolation” to not open up to others (Gearhart & Zhang, 2015). Those identified as the minority suppress their opinions while those who agree with the majority of the group share their thoughts on the issue and have open communication with fellow group members. Here, the larger group gains momentum as they feel accepted and may communicate more effectively with those who share the same beliefs. In contrast to the dominant group, the smaller group feels reluctant to participate in open communication and express themselves because they do not want to disrupt the harmony of the group with their opposing views. They feel at a disadvantage because if they speak out against the group, they will face social segregation and therefore feel the need to suppress their