Groupthink

- Was high school or secondary school fun for you? For most people, it was a time of desperately trying to fit in. And if you were considered part of the in crowd, you spent most of your time trying to stay there. You may have found yourself agreeing with things your friends said or did because you thought everyone else did too. And you didn't to stick out. While in hindsight, this can seem like deliberate behavior and not something outside of our control, in the moment, the behavior is instinctual and that's what makes it unconscious bias. There is a genuine leap that is made by our brain which is caused by our desire for self preservation. This type of judgment can lead us to make grave mistakes. The bandwagon effect or group think occurs when individuals try too hard to fit into a group by agreeing with the majority or stifling opinions that may differ from the group. It doesn't have to occur in large groups. It happens in smaller groups, between coworkers and even among family members. In the 1950s, in a series of psychological experiments, researchers found that people were willing to go as far as giving a wrong answer in order to conform to the rest of the group. What does this mean for organizations like yours? It means that people are willing to go along to get along. We can miss creativity and independent thought and end up with people who may have all agreed with an idea, even though those in a room knew that idea was terrible. What may look like harmony may actually be groupthink and appeasement, which can stifle companies trying to innovate, improve or change. Ever launched a product that everyone somehow knew was to fail, yet no one said anything? I know I've been part of that. I worked for a video game company where we launched a title that everyone said would be disastrous. We would discuss in hushed whispers the futility of the project and the wasted marketing dollars, yet we continued to march forward. The title was eventually released and it was the colossal failure we all knew it would be, but had someone said something before the project really gained momentum, the company could have saved a lot of money and embarrassment. There are decades worth of research on this behavior. And if you want to positively change the way you make decisions, try one or more of these steps. First, take on the role of the dissenter, someone whose job it is to poke holes and provide alternative arguments to each decision and let everyone know, this is the role you'll be serving in. Next, if you're the person with the most authority in the room, avoid stating your preferences and or expectations first. Then, reserve a sizable block of time to critically evaluate the options that have been discussed. Finally, invite an impartial third party to attend the meeting and challenge the opinions of the group. You may not be able to implement each step for every meeting and you may not want to. However, adding these steps to your toolkit will help you make decisions that are likely to be more rational and less biased.