Being in a crowd doesn’t make you part of a mindless mob | Psyche Ideas
It’s often assumed people lose their minds in a crowd. Research on riots, festivals and sports tells a more uplifting story
groupthink
every company needs a cassandra
an ai agent for the socially expensive work of organizational dissent
The Tenth Man Rule: How to Take Devil’s Advocacy to a New Level
A reflection on the Tenth Man Rule, a form of institutionalised devil's advocacy. How can we benefit from a professional pain in the neck?
Why Competent People Disappear: Functional Stupidity and the Invisible Professional
Or: how organisations accidentally became very good at ignoring their best people.
10th Person - Blain Smith
Winning with misinformation: New research identifies link between endorsing easily disproven claims and prioritizing symbolic strength
Conversations around misinformation that assume everyone cares about literal truth may be missing the point.
suggests that some people consider it a “win” to lean in to known falsehoods.
The strongest predictor of whether someone believed in COVID-19-related misinformation and risks related to the vaccine was whether they viewed COVID-19 prevention efforts in terms of symbolic strength and weakness. In other words, this group focused on whether an action would make them appear to…
When Values Eat Their Young: How Ideal-Driven Groups Drift into Their Own Shadow
Picture this: A Slack channel for an open-source project that prominently displays "Be excellent to each other" in its community guidelines. Six month
These aren't moral failures—they're predictable system dynamics that we can recognize, understand, and potentially prevent.
In any community with strong values, there's social currency in being seen as embodying those values.
Why Good Ideas Die Quietly and Bad Ideas Go Viral
Gideon Lewis-Kraus reviews “Antimemetics,” a new book which argues that notions get taken up not because of their virtue but because of their catchiness.
One obvious flaw in this argument is that “misinformation” was only ever going to be a way to describe ideas you didn’t like.
It was better described as a channel for the transmission of culture in the form of memes
Psychology’s Groupthink Helps Explain the Signal Chat Fiasco
At the heart of the Trump administration’s Signal scandal lies the familiar psychological pitfall of groupthink
Columbia's Last Flight
The inside story of the investigation—and the catastrophe it laid bare
What Makes Group Decisions Go Wrong. And Right.
Why intellectual laziness doesn’t have to lead to groupthink.
Why trolls extremists and others spread conspiracy theories they don’t believe
These people share conspiracy theories to promote conflict, cause chaos, recruit and radicalize potential followers, make money, harass, or even just to get attention.
They are opportunists.