Shared Ideology Quotes

When you have people together who believe in something very strongly - whether it's religion or politics or unions - things happen.

When you're surrounded by people who share the same set of assumptions as you, you start to think that's reality.

The thing that can happen in a TV room is you can get 'teamthink': you can all go down a crazy path together.

Americans are so individualistic, they do not realize their individualism is a communally derived value.

It's not that tens of millions of people all want to be violent. But they share the worldview that then, at its extreme, gives rise to the violence. And in my view, this is why this is such a global problem.

Consensus is what many people say in chorus but do not believe as individuals.

Besides justifying the transfer of wealth to kleptocrats, institutionalized religion brings two other important benefits to centralized societies. First, shared ideology or religion helps solve the problem of how unrelated individuals are to live together without killing each other—by providing them with a bond not based on kinship. Second, it gives people a motive, other than genetic self-interest, for sacrificing their lives on behalf of others.

It is possible that people who share core values will make choices along the same lines.