The Critical Effect of Mass Groupthink in a Technologically Interconnected World
The Critical Effect of Mass Groupthink in a Technologically Interconnected World
Covid, climate change, the Ukraine conflict, the war in Gaza, and the culture wars: our opinionated and emotional reactions to these crises are fast, reflexive, and politically polarizing. Opposing camps quickly develop. Empathy and goodwill drain away. The inevitable result is misunderstanding, societal fragmentation, poor policy decisions, and conflict. Our current political behaviour and our mental states are not what is needed to effectively deal with the crises that we face.
Watch this video course to:
• Develop the skills to think critically through these crises and help manage them by learning about a key piece of the puzzle: mass groupthink.
• Become part of a global network of people committed to raising their level of political awareness in a period of increased conflict and chaos.
This learning process is aimed at citizens and political practitioners alike, for we are all citizens in the end.
Course Description
This workshop is designed to help people improve their response to crises – political, social, even personal – by helping them recognize and understand a key piece of the puzzle: mass groupthink.
When mass groupthink takes hold, there is an inability to take in dissenting views and a tendency to devalue any opposition. There is no pause to reflect so as to reach for the bigger context. Instead people favour making rapid, appearance-oriented, and emotionally driven, theatrical decisions laced in rhetoric, and deal with destructive consequences later. It's almost as if it’s not the cause that matters but the emotional states that come with it. All is fuelled by the digital realm abetted by noise, opinion and media reporting pretending to be knowledge.
This behaviour has various names (“mass groupthink”, “mass hypnosis”, “cult behaviour”). Whatever you call it, this perilous tendency is built-in to all group behaviour and increasingly exhibited in a modern interconnected world. Innate needs underlie this group behaviour, but we are largely ignorant of their presence and role as well.
If we are to lessen this dangerous trend, what is required is greater knowledge about what it is, how it comes about, and, above all, how to manage it better. This knowledge exists and our aim is to disseminate it as broadly as possible.
The Video Workshop
This pre-recorded virtual workshop ran in the Spring of 2024, as part of a series of three courses that is still on offer.
This course will answer three main questions: What is ‘mass groupthink’? How does it function? Where and how do we see it operating?
Learn how to take your political behaviour up a notch, diminish the polarizing effects of mass groupthink in crises, including by understanding innate needs, and bring some humanity back into politics: an essential step today if we are to have any hope of navigating the chaos around us.
Note: If you would like to enrol for the two remaining LIVE virtual workshops in the mass groupthink series in Spring 2024, plus this pre-recorded first course, click here.
Those who purchase this course will receive a downloadable file with a VIMEO link to the recorded video workshop.
If you have questions, please contact us at info@conciliators-guild.org.
Course Leaders
Ivan Tyrrell
Conciliators Guild Director of Strategy, Human Givens College founder and author.
John Bell
Conciliators Guild Director, diplomat and mediator.
John Zada
Conciliators Guild Director of Communications, journalist and author.