Essay On Groupthink

Most people, whether aware of the terminology or not, are familiar with the idea of groupthink. As children it is taught as peer pressure. Peer pressure is defined as the "influence from members of one's peer group" (1). Beginning when kids are very young, it is taught not to fall into peer pressure, but even as small children people struggle with this. Most children, when in trouble for misbehaving, have used the excuse "well everyone else is doing it" and parents often respond by asking their children a question such as, "If everyone else jumped off a bridge would you jump too." This is dealing directly with the idea groupthink. The main cause of peer pressure or groupthink is an issue of conformity (2). In fact, Webster Dictionary even defines groupthink as "a pattern of thought characterized by self-deception, forced manufacture of consent, and conformity to group values and ethics."
Conformity is "a change in a person’s behavior to coincide more closely with a group standard" (2). When these two are looked at closely, it becomes obvious how groupthink and conformity go hand in hand. The notions that people must conform to society is the reason that they fall into the

This experiment, conducted in the 1970s, involved a group of young college-age men who were placed in a makeshift prison setting that was set up in the basement of the Stanford Psychology Department (2). Each of the men were randomly assigned a role of either prisoner or guard (3). A police office "agreed to 'arrest' the prisoners and book them" (3). Once at the prison, they were given identity numbers and went through the standard prison routine in order to make the experiment seem more real (3). The prisoners wore smocks with no underclothes and lived 24/7 in the mock prison for a planned two weeks (3). The guards took turns patrolling eight hour shifts around the prison