Groupthink

Your constantly-updated definition of Groupthink and collection of videos and articles

What is Groupthink?

Groupthink is a psychological phenomenon that is very likely to occur in an organizational setting, or any situation where there are many people together, where individual differences are lost in favor of group harmony and cohesion.

Controversial topics or any form of dissent and challenging opinions are avoided. Therefore, groupthink often leads to the loss of the individual’s creativity and opinion. Instead of having many ideas and challenging each other, personal beliefs are lost or overshadowed by the groups’s identity. A classic signature of groupthink is bandwagon bias, a cognitive bias arising from the comparative ease of going along with popular beliefs.

Groupthink affects many organizational settings and that is why many businesses make errors in their strategies or decisions.

Literature on Groupthink

Here’s the entire UX literature on Groupthink by the Interaction Design Foundation, collated in one place:

Learn more about Groupthink

Take a deep dive into Groupthink with our course Creativity: Methods to Design Better Products and Services .

The overall goal of this course is to help you design better products, services and experiences by helping you and your team develop innovative and useful solutions. You’ll learn a human-focused, creative design process.

We’re going to show you what creativity is as well as a wealth of ideation methods―both for generating new ideas and for developing your ideas further. You’ll learn skills and step-by-step methods you can use throughout the entire creative process. We’ll supply you with lots of templates and guides so by the end of the course you’ll have lots of hands-on methods you can use for your and your team’s ideation sessions. You’re also going to learn how to plan and time-manage a creative process effectively.

Most of us need to be creative in our work regardless of if we design user interfaces, write content for a website, work out appropriate workflows for an organization or program new algorithms for system backend. However, we all get those times when the creative step, which we so desperately need, simply does not come. That can seem scary—but trust us when we say that anyone can learn how to be creative­ on demand. This course will teach you ways to break the impasse of the empty page. We'll teach you methods which will help you find novel and useful solutions to a particular problem, be it in interaction design, graphics, code or something completely different. It’s not a magic creativity machine, but when you learn to put yourself in this creative mental state, new and exciting things will happen.

In the “Build Your Portfolio: Ideation Project”, you’ll find a series of practical exercises which together form a complete ideation project so you can get your hands dirty right away. If you want to complete these optional exercises, you will get hands-on experience with the methods you learn and in the process you’ll create a case study for your portfolio which you can show your future employer or freelance customers.

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All open-source articles on Groupthink

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