What if Robespierre was on Twitter
The case of Donald McNeil and the New York Times
I barely remember business class during College, only a few concepts stuck with me throughout the years. My mind has always been somewhere else and I could only pay half-attention to things like “company organization”, “Kanban boards” and Kaizen philosophy. But I remember clearly when we touched the concept of “groupthink” my attention spiked from the very beginning. It was something that was probably speaking directly to me. I was fascinated to discover the fallacy in decision-making when is bounded by social pressure and relationship constrains.
Probably that’s because it was one of the few notions that I could also apply to direct experience: from school teamwork to deciding the movie to watch on a saturday night with friends, it was already easy to see this recurring pattern even among the simplest things. More often than not final decisions weren’t influenced by real interest or benefits but by the more powerful social relations. The human need for conformity and social-acceptance often override rationality in favour of the most accepted idea in the group. Groupthink can have some mild effect like wasting a saturday night re-watching “50 First Dates” because your (now ex) friend is really a Adam Sandler’s fan or can have much more disastrous snowball impact, like the…
