Argumentative Essay On Groupthink

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Groupthink, a term that is so prevalent in society that few even raise a question onto what the expression actually means. Groupthink has developed in our culture as a buzzword that brings forth ideas of Big Brother and a diminished idea of self-reliance. Groupthink can be heard in conversations on late night television and on the news, but what is groupthink? The common definition of groupthink is “when a group makes faulty decisions because group pressures lead to a deterioration of “mental efficiency, reality testing, and moral judgment” (psysr.org). Although groupthink seems to be a common occurrence in American society, there is no way to truthfully analyze how common it is. Groupthink has no way to be measured and many scientists …show more content…

In order to obtain a strong conclusion in a scientific experiment, the conclusion must be backed up with evidence and must be able to be replicated. The whole concept of groupthink was from one man named Irving Janis. Groupthink wasn’t a collaboration of many different scientists, but just Janis having an idea, and then he tested that idea. When Irving Janis first conducted the experiment on groupthink, he believed that he had strong evidence to back up his new theory and the public instantly hopped on the bandwagon of the mysterious groupthink. Groupthink now allowed the public to not be responsible for their actions and instead they could blame it on their brain in groups. The only problem with Janis’s theory is that to this day no one has been able to replicate his findings in the slightest. There were many problems of Janis’s study first off, the support for groupthink was due mainly to retrospective studies (Aldag 536). Also Janis’s test used a relatively small sample and had no real format. There was no …show more content…

This illuminates a strong contrast between the scholarly sources and this source from a public website. The public just agrees with groupthink because they believe that it is the truth and backed up by science. The scholarly sources are condemning it as false, how can these two sources be on the same topic, and yet have vastly different points of view? This is due primarily to the public’s perception of groupthink. According to a popular website, verywell.com, the benefits of groupthink are the ability’s to “make decisions, complete tasks, and finish projects quickly and efficiently.” But this can apparently lead to “poor decision-making and inefficient problem-solving.” To the general public this may seem like a groupthink phenomenon, but in actuality it could simply be teamwork because humans as a species work well in groups. It isn’t always due to an intricate occurrence instead it could just be because we can work together. Poor decisions can be blamed on an individual; there is no way to tell if the group has anything to due with the bad decision. In any group scenario there will be bad and good outcomes, and there might not even be any correlation to groupthink. The public has decided that any bad group decision is the result of groupthink and any good group decision was the individual’s idea. In societies eye

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