Groupthink
The tendency for groups to preserve harmony, cohesion, or momentum at the cost of critical evaluation and live dissent.
Hypothesis AssessmentAssociationTeams & managementPolitics & institutions
Learning Path
Social Pressure And Belonging
A path for the distortions that show up when agreement, status, loyalty, and fear of standing apart start doing cognitive work.
6 biases
Teaching And Team Use
50 min
By the end of this path
- Identify where agreement pressure is arriving before evidential convergence.
- Use dissent-friendly meeting design as a debiasing tool rather than a management accessory.
- Improve how classrooms, teams, and leadership groups surface independent judgment.
How to study it
Work the pages in order, then loop back and compare which distortions happened earliest, which ones protected the first impression, and which ones interfered with later learning.
Next:
Biases in this path
This is a deliberate sequence, not just a themed pile. Start at the top if the context is new to you.
Authority bias
The tendency to give excess weight to the opinion of a high-status or authoritative source independent of whether the source has earned that weight on the specific issue.
DecisionAssociationTeams & managementMedia & politics
Social desirability bias
The tendency to over-report socially approved attitudes or behaviors and under-report the ones likely to invite embarrassment, judgment, or sanction.
Opinion ReportingOutcomeSurveys & interviewsTeams & management
False consensus effect
The tendency to overestimate how many other people share one's own beliefs, preferences, habits, or reactions.
EstimationSelf-PerspectiveMedia & politicsTeams & management
Ingroup bias
The tendency to favor, trust, defend, or positively interpret people and claims associated with one's own group more readily than comparable outsiders.
Causal AttributionSelf-PerspectiveMedia & politicsTeams & management
Reactance
The tendency to push back against a perceived attempt to limit one's freedom of choice, sometimes by moving toward the very option one was being steered away from.
DecisionOutcomePersonal decisionsConflict & persuasion