Michael Shermer Quotes

When like-minded people deliberate as an organized group, the general opinion shifts towards extreme versions of their common beliefs.

I think better of our behaviour as individuals than I do when we see ourselves as members of a group. It's when people start forming groups that we have to watch our backs.

Groupthink can become a serious issue - old ideas stay around after they're useful, and new ideas too often don't get a fair hearing.

We always carry out by committee anything in which any one of us alone would be too reasonable to persist.

The individual is foolish; the multitude, for the moment is foolish, when they act without deliberation; but the species is wise, and when time is given to it, as a species it always acts right.

… 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 minute somebody joins a committee... they immediately suffer from committee brain. They become wildly over-enthusiastic, over-optimistic, over-pessimistic. Committees turn people into idiots, and politics is a committee.

Groups are only smart when there is a balance between the information that everyone in the group shares and the information that each of the members of the group holds privately. It's the combination of all those pieces of independent information, some of them right, some of the wrong, that keeps the group wise.

Crowds of minds can be wise, but crowds of bodies just aren't.

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

Groups tend to be more extreme than individuals.

Any time people come together in a meeting, we're not necessarily getting the best ideas; we're just getting the ideas of the best talkers.

Under the right circumstances, groups are remarkably smart - smarter even sometimes than the smartest people in them.

One man alone can be pretty dumb sometimes, but for real bona fide stupidity, there ain't nothin' can beat teamwork.

No president is well-served by groupthink or by everybody singing from the same sheet of music they think he's on.

Dividing into teams doesn't necessarily mean denigrating others. Studies of groupishness have generally found that groups increase in-group love far more than they increase out-group hostility.

For a crowd to be smart, the people in it need to be not only diverse in their perspectives but also, relatively speaking, independent of each other. In other words, you need people to be thinking for themselves, rather than following the lead of those around them.

Leaders can get stuck in groupthink because they're really not listening, or they're listening only to what they want to listen to, or they actually think they're so right that they're not interested in listening. And that leads to a lot of suboptimal solutions in the world.

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

It is an accepted commonplace in psychology that the spiritual level of people acting as a crowd is far lower than the mean of each individual's intelligence or morality.

Muddle is the extra unknown personality in any committee.

The intelligence of the creature known as a crowd, is the square root of the number of people in it.

So you [Romans] when you have got together in a body, let yourselves be guided by those whom singly you would never think of being advised by.

A committee is a cul-de-sac down which ideas are lured and then quietly strangled.

Group action -- yes; group thinking -- no.