Group Mentality

I'm reading an amazing book, Quiet-The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking. I checked it out of the library but because I want to re-read and underline SO MANY things already, I really need to buy it.

Right now, there's one particularly influential section of the book I want to summarize to remember. Solomon Asch did experiments in the 1950s about the dangers of group influence.

He gave individuals a simple test in which 95% of the testers answered all questions right. Influencers were planted in the groups to confidently give wrong answers and only 25% of the testers now answered everything correctly. In 2005 Gregory Berns decided to revise the study and do his own research with an fMRI machine. This way, we wouldn't just see whether people answered differently in a group than as individuals but we could also see brain activity to know about WHY people answer differently in groups.

Did people know they were giving the wrong answers and just conform or were people's perceptions altered? When people answered individually, there was activity in the occipital cortex and the parietal cortex, which are linked with visual & spacial perception and in the frontal cortex, which is linked with decision-making. IF people were knowingly conforming, the brain scans would show more activity in prefrontal cortex to show that they were making the decision to conform.

However what actually happened was activity was heightened more in the areas affecting perception and less in the frontal brain regions. Susan Cain, the author writes, "These early findings suggest that groups are like mind-altering substances. If the group thinks the answer is A, you're much more likely to believe that A is correct, too. It's not that you're saying consciously, "Hmm, I'm not sure, but they all think the answer's A, so I'll go with that." Nor are you saying, "I want them to like me, so I'll just pretend that the answer's A." No, you are doing something much more unexpected-and dangerous. Most of Bern's volunteers reported having gone along with the group because "they thought that they had arrived serendipitously at the same correct answer." They were utterly blind, in other words, to how much their peers had influenced them...

Remember that the volunteers in the Asch and Berns studies didn't always conform. Sometimes they picked the right answer despite their peers' influence. And Berns and his team found something very interesting about these moments. They linked heightened activation in the amygdala, a small organ in the brain associated with upsetting emotions such as the fear of rejection...Many of our most important civic institutions, from elections to jury trials to the very idea of majority rule, depend on dissenting voices. But when the group is literally capable of changing our perceptions,

and when to stand alone is to activate primitive, powerful, and unconscious feelings of rejection, then the health of these institutions seems far more vulnerable than we think." -------------------------This applies to certain aspects of my life right now that weigh on my mind but I want to remember this because I think it could be helpful in so many other situations, too. As a sidenote, the book doesn't bash on all group activities, it provides examples of when a group can be beneficial. This just shows that there is science and research to suggest that groups making big decisions as a group might not always yield the greatest results. It's funny that just after reading this, I was at church in a class that usually runs in a lecture-style format. This week, however, the teacher told everybody to get into groups of 3-5 people and I was the only one there from my family. "Get into a group..." are some of the most dreaded words of my life. I hated it all through the regular school years. I was relieved to go to college, only to discover many professors said those dreaded words there as well. When it gets said at church, I about have a breakdown because you should be free from that there...I not only survived the grouping but it actually turned out to be a good experience this time. For me, that amygdala activity and feeling negative emotions starts before the group even begins. When I hear that we have to get into a group, negative emotions flow. That situation is covered much more in depth in the book. It's a good one.