What happens when its members check their individuality and ideas at the door and succumb to the will of the group. When individual creativity, uniqueness, differences, and independent thinking is secondary to the group’s cohesiveness and mission. The stronger and tighter the group, the easier it is for groupthink to rear its ugly head. Risks of stifle creativity and foster narrow-mindedness if you’re not careful when using SNSs. Pagliarini (2010, Feb 20) Is Social Networking Bad for you? Retrieved from http://www.pickthebrain.com/blog/is-social-networking-bad-for-you/ Individual creativity, uniqueness, and independent thinking are lost in the pursuit of group cohesiveness, as are the advantages of reasonable balance in choice and thought that might normally be obtained by making decisions as a group.[citation needed] During groupthink, members of the group avoid promoting viewpoints outside the comfort zone of consensus thinking. A variety of motives for this may exist such as a desire to avoid being seen as foolish, or a desire to avoid embarrassing or angering other members of the group. Groupthink may cause groups to make hasty, irrational decisions, where individual doubts are set aside, for fear of upsetting the group’s balance. To make groupthink testable, Irving Janis devised eight symptoms indicative of groupthink (1977).
Groupthink, resulting from the symptoms listed above, results in defective decision making. That is, consensus-driven decisions are the result of the following practices of groupthinking[5]
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