Groupthink
By: David Deschesne
Editor/Publisher,
Fort Fairfield Journal
September 9, 2020
If you sit and stare at a small, single, stationary point of light in a darkened room, you will slowly begin to perceive it as moving; this is known as the Autokinetic Effect; the physiology of which is complex, but it is likely due to the lack of perceivable context clues to reference to and the subtle movements of both your head and eyes, as well as your brain trying to get a “fix” on the point’s location.
How much that stationary point of light is perceived to move is subjective - that is, it’s a matter of your own personal opinion, based upon your own perception. But, what if you sat with a group of people who shared their perceptions out loud, would your perception change?
The 1930s saw an explosion in research into the field of Group Dynamics. In 1936, Muzafer Sherif published a book1 containing ingenious experimental investigations of the origin of social norms among groups of people.”2
In his research, Sherif used the example of the stationary point of light in a darkened room, as previously described. He first had individual people sit alone in a darkened room and report their perceptions of the movement of light to him without anyone else knowing. He then placed those same people together in a room at the same time and had them report their perceptions of the movement of light out loud, so all members of the group could hear. What he found was the individual perceptions all seemed to converge to a common group agreement on the light’s movement. When compared with their previous, isolated perception, each subject ultimately varied his/her perception to fit the group’s. Sherif then isolated the individuals again and asked them to report their perception of the light movement. Their new perception now conformed with the group’s - not their original perception.3
In 1971, Social Psychologist, Irving Janis coined the term “groupthink” as the tendency of decision-making groups to suppress dissent in the interests of group harmony.4
From historical records and the memoirs of participants, Janis identified several groupthink symptoms:
- Group members become close-minded.
- The Group suffers from pressures toward uniformity by rebuffing those who raise doubts about the group’s assumptions or plans.
- People in groups practice “self-censorship” to avoid being chastised by other members of the group, creating an illusion of unanimity.
- “Mindguards” are employed by some members of the group to protect the group from information that would call into question the effectiveness or morality of its decisions.
Janis noted groupthink symptoms can produce a failure to seek and discuss contrary information and alternative possibilities.5
Janis cited the use of mindguards in the space shuttle Challenger disaster of January, 1986. As it turned out, the top NASA executive was shielded from information by engineers at Morton Thiokol - the company that manufactured the booster rockets - and was only allowed access to management officials. Due to “mindguarding,” he never learned of the engineers’ reservations and allowed the fateful launch to go forward.
Bureaucrats, the media and advertising executives have come to learn and excel at the use of groupthink processes and in a way have become the “mindguards” of Janis’ thesis. Change-agents in the Departments of Education first teach a perception of reality they wish the public to believe. Those students then grow up; some become newscasters, show producers, journalists, authors and teachers who then “parrot” what they have learned to the rest of the group (i.e. society); thereby bringing society’s perception of “truth” into convergence with what the government would like it to be. This is called the “Mockingbird effect.”
Advertising executives also engage in groupthink strategies in order to hype and sell their product. One classic example is a popular name-band home speaker system that, due to mass-marketing, is perceived by society as the greatest speaker system ever built, when in reality it’s of mediocre value and uses cheap components made in China just like the majority of other brand name home stereo speakers. The public, however, has been taught to believe - by marketing slogans alone - that this speaker system is far better than all the others and use ownership and possession of it as a status symbol among their peers.
Groupthink has been employed for years against our society. For example, we have all been taught that the income tax is a lawful, legitimate tax. However, new research within the past ten years has revealed that the 16th amendment, which supposedly authorized an income tax, was never actually ratified by enough states - thereby making income tax by the U.S. government, within the individual states, from those states’ inhabitants - illegal from the start. The government and its school and university systems have diligently trained society (the group) to close their collective minds and rebuff those researchers as “tax protestors.”
Another example of groupthink is the 9/11 disaster. With any objective analysis - emotions and politics aside - an observer would conclude that there is no way the government’s version of events - as parroted by the mainstream news media - could have actually happened. As indicated in Janis’ study, our society - the group - has become close-minded and censors and rebuffs those who don’t go along with the group’s accepted version of events. Even though a vast majority of the population now believes the U.S. government had a degree of involvement at the sub-bureaucratic level, they practice self-censorship and don’t speak out. The mindguards in the corporate/establishment media then continue to produce pro-government movies and news articles to reinforce the resultant illusion of unanimity within society.
In 2006, a groupthink project was undertaken by the pharmaceutical industrial complex and World Health Organization with the supposed “bird flu” epidemic (which was not an epidemic at all.) Story after story in the mainstream newspapers and television news discussed the 200 deaths attributed to bird flu. They discussed the possibility that the virus might mutate and jump to humans and how horrible that might be. This is to get the group (society) in line to take their toxic vaccinations - a very profitable endeavor.
By framing the debate, what they didn’t discuss is those 200 deaths were out of a population of 6.5 billion people, or statistically zero. Also, many of the top vaccine manufacturers, as well as officials in the World Health Organization, ascribe to the neo-Malthusian theory that the world is horribly overpopulated and the population must be culled, or thinned out, like you would a herd of cattle. These Malthusians are either in a position to manufacture a virus, or a tainted vaccine to help them achieve those sinister ends, all while the group of society is lining up like lemmings to follow their every edict.
In 2012, social media giant, Facebook conducted a mass-scale emotional contagion event amongst 155,000 of its users, who were unaware they were being manipulated.6 What Facebook did was artificially adjust the amount of either positive or negative feeds on their users’ News Feed section to see if it would have an effect on their emotions. They found that if they increased the positive news feeds, the rate of negativity in subsequent posts decreased significantly and the rates of positive posts increased. The same effect was mirrored in negative posts; those who received more negative feeds responded with more negative words and a reduction in positive words and posts. The effects were noted to last in some cases over several days. This is not a conspiracy theory intended to bash Facebook. The Facebook Core Data Science Team had their research published in the scientific journal, PNAS, which is footnoted in footnote number 6, below.
That Facebook experiment was 8 years ago, an eternity in technological terms. The ability of social media platforms to mindscrew and program the public must have advanced exceedingly going into 2020.
Groups and society evaluate their members, partially at least, on the basis of conformity to established group or societal norms - that is, what the majority of society has deemed “normal” - a perception that, in the U.S., is cultured in large part by government, public schools and the establishment media within our children between 5 to 18 years of age.
Groups can be beneficial, though. Tests show that in simple tasks like winding string on a reel, children perform much more efficiently when in a group, than when alone (however, in a demanding task like tug-of-war, it has been shown that people don’t pull as hard in a group compared to if they were alone).
During World War I, J.L. Moreno had administrative responsibility for a camp of Tyrolese displaced persons, and he observed that the adjustment of people seemed to be better when they were allowed to form their own groups within the camp.7
Curiously, one month before the 9/11 disaster, the U.S. Army republished an updated version of its Military Police Interment/Resettlement Operations Manual. The manual describes how to inter (imprison) civilian populations and use “elected” prisoner groups within the camp to quell dissent among the civilian prisoners.8 Then, the towers fell and FEMA received vastly expanded powers to monitor, track, trace and control the citizenry.
Now, in 2020, the world is going through another mass-scale groupthink psychological warfare operation by the globalists in the contrived COVID-19 pandemic (yes, some people have died from a new virus, but not as many as reported and nowhere near the level of hype generated by the mindguards in the mainstream media). From experiments as simple as seeing how many people will wear face masks to “protect” themselves from the virus - even though it’s public knowledge that cloth and surgical masks offer little to no protection from viral transmission - to social distancing standards which vary from three feet to six feet depending on what country you’re in, the public has shown itself to be very malleable and easily programmed when a requisite amount of fear is instilled in them.
As for those ineffective face masks, society has adopted them as a means to display their righteousness to each other - this is called “virtue signaling” today. Since a virus is invisible, another means to create a mass groupthink homogenization of society was needed. That came in the form of a face mask. Face masks are visible cues, external identifiers that everyone can immediately see that signals the wearer has conformed to the group and is thus showcasing their morality. The reality is, since face masks don’t really work (aside from hospital grade N95 masks that the public is not using) the whole purpose of face masks is to influence social unity and conformance to authoritarian government mandates - a feature found in all past communist dictatorships throughout history.
The intel gathered from the face mask experiment has been most telling. It has been found that around 10 to 20 percent of the population are all that is necessary to convince of the lie about face masks and they will use group pressure to force a large percentage of the rest of the population to also wear face masks even if that segment of society is privately opposed to the use of face masks, or at least understand face masks don’t stop viral transmission.
Groupthink is also going to be easily deployed against the people as several supposed COVID-19 vaccines have been developed at lightning speed over just five or six months and are set to be deemed “safe and effective” as early as next month - this speed of development has never been seen in history, unless of course the whole event was planned and the so-called “vaccines” were made ahead of time. The reality is it takes years to determine safety and efficacy of vaccines and as long as a decade to determine what, if any, adverse side effects may occur. The Groupthink mindset, however, will cause the majority of the public to ignore all of those safety concerns and stand in line to take an untried and unproven vaccine, which has been designed to alter their own DNA and ultimately kill off 80 to 90% of people from society, simply to conform to the Group’s self-imposed, fear-based, self-destructive mandate.
NOTES
1. The Psychology of Social Norms, ©1936 New York: Harper & Row
2. Group Dynamics: Research and Theory, ©1963 New York: Harper & Row, p. 23
3. ibid, p. 24
4. Psychology Today, Groupthink, November, 1971, pp. 43-46.
5. Exploring Social Psychology, 2nd ed., David G. Myers, ©2004 McGraw Hill, pp. 166-170
6. Experimental Evidence of Massive-Scale Emotional Contagion Through Social Networks, Core Data Science Team, Facebook, published June, 2014, www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/10.1073/pnas.1320040111
7. Who Shall Survive, J.L. Moreno, 1934 Nervous and Mental Diseases Publishing Co.
8. FM 3-19.40,HQ, US ARMY, Sec. 5-46
