[WikiEN-l] Meta-discussion: Groupthink

[Daniel R. Tobias]

I find it interesting, and a little distressing, that there seems to be a 
"groupthink" phenomenon on this list (and also sometimes on Wikipedia 
itself).  I saw it just now in the discussion of an expulsion from this list.  
When it was first brought up for comment, there was a "me-too" chorus of 
agreement with the ban.  Then, a day later, I posted my dissenting 
commentary (which I actually wrote yesterday, but failed to successfully post 
due to a misconfigured mail program... getting outbound mail sent while on 
vacation and using various different access providers is a pain with all the 
security moves and port blocking tossing up hoops to be navigated), and 
suddenly there were several other dissenting views following in close 
succession.

One can make all sorts of hypotheses to try to explain such things; perhaps 
people are timid about expressing their opinion unless somebody else has 
already broken the ice in their direction; perhaps people of firm convictions 
prefer to be quiet about them unless they're sure they have other supporters 
around so they won't be left to twist in the wind alone; perhaps people 
without convictions of their own are eager to find bandwagons to jump on so 
they'll take up a view that just happens to agree with whoever else posted 
last.  Whichever it may be (or a combination of these and other factors), it 
doesn't seem like the healthiest thing for honest discussion of views (even if 
sometimes the outcome might wind up agreeing with my own view).

I know that an atmosphere (which several prominent people seem to be 
promoting) where people are in fear of being blocked or banned for their 
expression of views is one highly conducive to such groupthink, where 
people will either adopt (or pretend to adopt) whatever they see as the 
dominant view, or else shut up and decline to state a view at all.
Dan
Dan's Web Tips: http://webtips.dan.info/
Dan's Mail Format Site: http://mailformat.dan.info/
Dan's Domain Site: http://domains.dan.info/