Thursday, April 26, 2012

Week 10 - Groupthink

Dear Susan Cain,

Your article on groupthink was an interesting one and reaffirms my belief that by playing devils advocate, I'm doing more than simply trolling a group I'm in. Groupthink is a dangerous situation to find yourself in, where the entire group just goes along with the ideas that one person randomly comes up with, and then have the rest blindly follow.

Keen's article talks about the democratization of online media, which in a sense can be considered going down the path of groupthink. However, as with any good democracy, I think that the voices of everyone with different opinions will be brought to light, and this helps stray away from groupthink.

The final related article was from Shirky and it was about trust in collaboration. I think it is obviously important to build trust in a collaborative setting, but if everyone trusts everyone, then nobody is going to want to speak out against that person if they don't completely agree with their ideas. This is the kind of situation that promotes groupthink that Cain was talking about.


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