Debra L. Reed Quotes

When everybody in a group is susceptible to similar biases, groups are inferior to individuals, because groups tend to be more extreme than individuals.

We try to make sensible decisions with the facts in front of us. The problem with sensible decisions is that so is everyone else.

The crowd may be influenced easily, largely because it is a crowd.

In any great organization it is far, far safer to be wrong with the majority than to be right alone.

When a hundred men stand together, each of them loses his mind and gets another one.

Policy makers, like most people, normally feel that they already know all the psychology and all the sociology they are likely to need for their decisions. I don't think they are right, but that's the way it is.

None of us is immune to suggestion. We are social beings and live in a social world.

I believe people think as a group more often than we might realize or care to admit. We like to believe that we act as individuals and nothing more, but time and again - in corporations and business, in politics and religion, in fashion and culture, and in friendships and social circles - we think and do as one.

I think it's a very firm part of human nature that if you surround yourself with like-minded people, you'll end up thinking more extreme versions of what you thought before.

Men are like sheep, of which a flock is more easily driven than a single one.

A mob is not, as is so often said, mindless. A mob is single-minded.

You cannot make a man by standing a sheep on its hind legs. But by standing a flock of sheep in that position you can make a crowd of men.

The mob shouts with one big mouth and eats with a thousand little ones.

A crowd, proportionately to its size, magnifies all that in its units pertains to the emotions, and diminishes all that in them pertains to thought.

… when you assemble a number of men to have the advantage of their joint wisdom, you inevitably assemble with those men, all their prejudices, their passions, their errors of opinion, their local interests, and their selfish views. From such an Assembly can a perfect production be expected?

The aggregate of everybody's emotion, it's such a powerful thing. You can see it in the Trump rallies, where people - I just know, in their living rooms, would be better people - are driven to the worst possibilities by the bloodlust in a crowd. It just gets ginned up, and they're outside of themselves.

I've always been intrigued by why people believe one thing over another.

Thousands of people seeing the same thing cannot all be wrong.

Trends suck you in, anywhere in the world, patterns you don't even see. It's so easy. Look at Wall Street - look at any sports team in the world - there are trends. Look at exercising. Nothing but patterns and trends, and that's what I started to see. Like a flock of birds all flying in one direction.

An audience can become a mob very easily.

There's a momentum to being committed to a group that you think is good, and there's a certain amount of cognitive dissonance to make your choice a good choice.

We do our worst when we're surrounded by a lot of people who agree with us.

The thing that can happen in a TV room is you can get 'teamthink': you can all go down a crazy path together.

The important thing about groupthink is that it works not so much by censoring dissent as by making dissent seem somehow improbable.

Anyone taken as an individual is tolerably sensible and reasonable - as a member of a crowd, he at once becomes a blockhead.