Groupthink is widely talked about.  I remember being a teenager and considering all the viewpoints surrounding me.  I remember thinking I wanted to base my beliefs on the Bible but looking at all the other options that seemed so inviting.  Some of them weren’t anti-biblical, and I imbibed them as my own.  

One thing that sticks out to me is my parents standing in front of me as a teenager and telling me, “Marissa, think for yourself.  Don’t let anyone else define what you think or believe.”

Those words have stuck with me my whole life.  I have watched other kids my age follow their teachers, mentors, and peers mindlessly.  It always shocked me.  My family reads books galore, talks about everything, and analyzes politics, religion, and culture every night at the family dinner table.  We don’t agree on everything, but we know what the others think.  We don’t follow groupthink.

What Is Groupthink?

Groupthink is defined as the “deterioration of mental efficiency, reality testing, and moral judgment in the interest of group solidarity” and “results in an extreme form of consensus, which isolates members from different views and in turn, narrows their perspective” (The Hill).

So it deteriorates your mental efficiency?  It creates moral issues?  It narrows perspectives and isolates other people who think differently?

Sheesh… we’ve never seen anything like this before, right?

Right….

America is not the only country with the problem of groupthink.  It’s all over the world.  Groupthink stains the pages of history, and sometimes it’s tragic.

Groupthink in Nazi Germany

During the Holocaust in WWII, nearly six million Jews were killed in concentration camps and massacres.  This tragic loss of life ripped families apart and destroyed the conceptions of humanity’s goodness prior to the Holocaust.

Psychology Today wrote an article about how groupthink paved the way for regular, everyday citizens in Germany to casually take part in the murder of countless Jewish lives.  It is true that Germany wasn’t the only country killing Jews, but it was the main killing machine and is to blame for most of the concentration camps.

The study’s findings were a sadly fascinating insight into the minds of Nazi-era Germans.  

Germans during Hitler’s Third Reich were regular people with families, friends, and jobs.  Psychology Today writes that “neither participants nor passive bystanders showed signs of having psychopathic or sadistic dispositions prior to the Nazi era.”  At times, when German male citizens were recruited to shoot Jewish children and women, they “willingly embarked on the mission but ‘only’ shot a few before succumbing to moral disgust.” 

This is not to excuse those who willingly participated and reveled in the murder of innocent people.  The people who did such things bear a heavy, moral weight.  But why did ordinary citizens live their normal lives while Jews were incinerated, and the smoke from the incinerators blackened the sky above the German’s houses?

Psychology Today suggests that the Germans killed Jews because they thought it was the right thing to do.  They were taught that Jews were out to destroy Germany and German heritage.  The Germans were so proud of the Nordic heritage, and they had heavy anti-God influence from Nordic mysticism that they bought the lie that Jews were evil and had to be killed.  They believe Jews were less-than-human.

Therefore, killing a Jew was like killing an animal that was threatening you.  It was morally right.

And that’s where groupthink came in.  The more propaganda, speeches, church services, and powerful people who propagated this idea that Jews were inferior, the more German citizens began to believe that the Jews had to be destroyed at all costs.

This is perhaps one of the most tragic examples of groupthink in history and morally reprehensible.

Groupthink Brought To Light… 2020

Americans are not at the point of Nazi Germany just yet.  But we are struggling to hold on to our tradition of rugged individuality.

Americans are always known as rugged individuals.  We’re different compared to other countries.  We think for ourselves, we know what we want, and we go after and achieve our goals.

Want to read more about America’s Rugged Individualism?

This rugged individuality that characterized America seems to have ebbed away gradually over the generations until COVID-19 hit in 2020.  I didn’t think people would fall for the masks, but they did.  Who would have thought Americans would fall for shutdowns?  But they did.  People gave up their jobs or worked from home.  Some were thought of as “essential” while others were… what?  Disposable?

We all know that story, and it’s just about the best example of a country going down the slippery path of groupthink.  We all think the same, right?

Wrong.

You can change groupthink.  You can be the one to go against the status quo.

During the shutdowns, my church was one of the first to open up (hurray!), but when it did open up after three months of shutdowns, it mandated masks.

Now you have to get a picture of what my church is like to understand this.  My church consists of mostly 70+-year-old people, and we have about 60-70 people in attendance each Sunday.  The numbers were even lower during the shutdowns.

That said, you can’t walk into my church and go unnoticed.  Everyone knows you, and you know everyone.  So… a mask mandate meant that anyone who didn’t wear the mask stuck out like a sore thumb.

My family and I showed up that first Sunday without our masks on.  We were nervous about what people would say, but we did it anyway.  And you know what?  An 80-year-old couple saw our masks conspicuously absent from our faces, and they took theirs off.  Another 80-year old guy joined us, showing up without his mask.  Then another family took theirs off the next Sunday.

Needless to say, the mask mandate didn’t remain very long at our church, and miraculously, we all got along great, mask or no mask.  It was a blessing from God to have the freedom at church to be the point person to stop the mask-wearing and have unity within the church.

Read another post from the blog!  What Is Objective Truth?

How To Stop Groupthink

• Think For Yourself

Question everything.  Study different viewpoints.  Allow yourself to think outside the box, and if the whole world is doing something, stop and think, “Is this right?”

Usually, when everyone around you is doing one thing, you need to stop and think about it.  Like wearing masks.  Like shutdowns.  Like raunchy music.  Like excessive drinking.  Like porn.  Stop and think before you participate.

• Don’t Let The Government Step In

In other words, the government has provided welfare, jobs, money, food, and birth control for far too long.

At one point in time, America was a country made up of small, tightly knit communities that supported each other.  The people in those communities didn’t know what was happening to the people in other communities.  Every once in a while, they might learn about a famous person (the president, for example), but they didn’t know what the mayor of the next town over was doing for a Christmas celebration.  They knew and supported the people in their respective communities.

Now, through phones that sit in the palm of our hands, the government has an open invitation to our homes and minds.

Think about it.  Social media effectively connected everyone all over the country and eventually all over the world.  This global theme began primarily with the “Great Society” as Democrats began sprinkling government into those tight-knit, private communities.  The government began to take care of the needy instead of the church.  The government began to feed the hungry instead of loving neighbors.  The government provided money (welfare) for those who were out of work instead of friends helping a needy family out or finding work for a friend.  The community was slowly covered by the government like sand in the desert.  Eventually, the community was the government and depended on the government for everything.  

So stop and think, and question the government.  Your best bet is tight-knit family and critical thinking and Christian faith.

Conclusion

Keep growing your critical thinking skills and ditching the crowd.  This will help you assess criticisms, questions, and potential solutions that different people and ideologies propose.

As my dad would always say, “If all your friends jumped off a cliff, would you jump off the cliff?”

The answer he wants to hear would be, “Nope!”

And the smart-ass answer is… “Heck yeah!” 

Don’t be a smart ass. 😉