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Groupthink is a psychological phenomenon that occurs within a group of people in which the desire for harmony or conformity in the group results in an irrational or dysfunctional decision-making outcome. Cohesiveness, or the desire for cohesiveness, in a group may produce a tendency among its members to agree at all costs. This causes the group to minimize conflict and reach a consensus decision without critical evaluation. Groupthink is a construct of social psychology but has an extensive reach and influences literature in the fields of communication studies, political science, management, and organizational theory, as well as important aspects of deviant religious cult behaviour. Groupthink is sometimes stated to occur (more broadly) within natural groups within the community, for example to explain the lifelong different mindsets of those with differing political views (such as "conservatism" and "liberalism" in the U.S. political context or the purported benefits of team work vs. work conducted in solitude). However, this conformity of viewpoints within a group does not mainly involve deliberate group decision-making, and might be better explained by the collective confirmation bias of the individual members of the group. The term was coined in 1952 by William H. Whyte Jr. Most of the initial research on groupthink was conducted by Irving Janis, a research psychologist from Yale University. Janis published an influential book in 1972, which was revised in 1982. Janis used the Bay of Pigs disaster (the failed invasion of Castro's Cuba in 1961) and the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941 as his two prime case studies. Later studies have evaluated and reformulated his groupthink model. Groupthink requires individuals to avoid raising controversial issues or alternative solutions, and there is loss of individual creativity, uniqueness and independent thinking. The dysfunctional group dynamics of the "ingroup" produces an "illusion of invulnerability" (an inflated certainty that the right decision has been made).

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Pluralistic ignorance

In social psychology, pluralistic ignorance (also known as a collective illusion) is a phenomenon which occurs when people mistakenly believe that everyone else holds a different opinion than their own. Most people in a group may go along with a view they do not agree with, because they incorrectly think that most other people in the group agree with it. It refers to a situation in which the minority position on a given topic is wrongly perceived to be the majority position or where the majority position is wrongly perceived to be the minority position.

Herd mentality

Herd, mob, or pack mentality describes how people can be influenced by the majority. Social psychologists study the related topics of group intelligence, crowd wisdom, groupthink, and deindividuation. The idea of a "group mind" or "mob behavior" was first put forward by 19th-century social psychologists Gabriel Tarde and Gustave Le Bon. Herd behavior in human societies has also been studied by Sigmund Freud and Wilfred Trotter, whose book Instincts of the Herd in Peace and War is a classic in the field of social psychology.

Crowd psychology

Crowd psychology (also mob psychology) is a branch of social psychology that deals with the ways in which the psychology of a crowd is different from the psychology of the individual persons who are the crowd. The field of crowd psychology enquires into the behaviors and thought processes of both the individual members of the crowd and the crowd as a collective social entity. The behavior of a crowd is much influenced by deindividuation, a person's loss of responsibility, and the person's impression of the universality of behavior, both of which conditions increase in magnitude with size of the crowd.

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