Group Think Quotes

The enemy of individuality is groupthink.

The less justified a man is in claiming excellence for his own self, the more ready he is to claim all excellence for his nation, his religion, his race or his holy cause.

The Chinese began with the assumption that the group is the fundamental unit of reality. Individuals? Sure, we can factor them out from their groups, but let us not think that they as individuals have any viability apart from their group.

Collective madness is called sanity.

In today’s Washington, with its emphasis on orthodox thinking, such a person could never rise inside the government … This is a great loss, because, as the life of George F. Kennan shows, individual, original thinking by one lonely person can sometimes illuminate and guide us better than all the high-level panels, commissions and interagency meetings.

In our "age of the expert" the expert has his constituency — those who have a vested interest in commonly held opinions; elaborating and defining the consensus at a high level has, after all, made him an expert.

The majority is always sane.

Malibu was a wellspring of counterculture group think.

The nail whose head is sticking up get hammered down.

Under the right circumstances, groups are remarkably smart - smarter even sometimes than the smartest people in them.

Journalists, by and large, are not the irascible free thinkers of lore, going their own way without fear or favor. Corporate institutions as a rule have limited use for such people. Especially in today’s electronic environment, journalists are creatures of availability bias, to borrow a term from social science. They believe what others in their milieu believe, say what others are saying, because it’s in their interest to do so.

European civil society and NGOs that petition for favours and influence for their special interests are often themselves funded from E.U. coffers. This creates a system of patronage that encourages self-reinforcing group-think and a cloying sycophancy.

Group think and groups in general allow you to more fully give yourself to something other than yourself and your betterment - to feel a sense of belonging. Now is this a good thing? I don't know, but it's something that is longed for, at least by me.

None of us is as smart as all of us.

A consensus means that everyone agrees to say collectively what no one believes individually

“The Wisdom of Crowds” suggests that if enough bumbling people act in concert, they’ll find their way to a less bumbling place.

For solving a surprisingly large and varied number of problems, crowds are smarter than individuals.

You can always tell when a man's well informed. His views are pretty much like your own.

A committee is not a good instrument for final judgment.

The political control of truth quite naturally calls up Orwellian impressions, but in fact the manipulation of knowledge goes deeper than censorship and is more subtle than outright propaganda. It can include conditions under which research will be funded and given a forum, and also the designation of legitimacy to be conferred or withheld in specific fields of inquiry. Jobs, tenure, professional advancement, all can come to depend on taking the approved line. Along with these comes the adjacent phenomenon of the "institute" and "think tank," in most cases with official backing of one sort or another. And then too, there is the way universities pressure their faculties to bring in big money by securing government projects. What all this scrambling means is that in the struggle of memory against forgetting we must compete with official versions and special interests, with public and private demands for serviceable knowledge, with the kinds of on-line information geared to short-term needs. Amid this din the scholar’s independent voice is hard to hear.

People with the same information often make the same decisions.

Investing is hard. So is saving our planet. Opinions on both differ. But humanity’s best chance of success is open and honest debate. If companies believe in diversity and speaking up, they need to walk the talk. [...] I will continue to prod with a sharp stick the nonsense, hypocrisy, sloppy logic and group-think inside the mainstream bubble of sustainable finance.