Originally Posted by filtherton

I don't necessarily disagree with you, Atreides88. I just think that a lot of those processes that we tend to deem irrational are rational, but function in a domain that isn't really suited to effective and thoughtful decision making. If people weren't rational in how they embrace shiny things then shiny things wouldn't be so predictably effective at motivating people. It doesn't seem the act of succumbing to group think is the result of a logical decision making process, but I think that in the short term it is. If it weren't, then group think wouldn't necessarily be so predictably commonplace.

Words like "irrational" and "illogical" are generally used to describe behaviors that don't make sense. But if you accept the notion that people generally only do things that they believe they have reason to do, then everything everybody does is rooted in some sort of rational justification, be it well founded or not. People do things when people feel like it makes sense to do them.

Aristotle, himself no stranger to logic, thought the concept of spontaneous generation was a very compelling explanation for how certain animals are born. It was a rational conclusion for him to come to. His problem wasn't that he couldn't think clearly or that he was irrational. It was that he lacked enough information to come to an accurate conclusion. His attempts at using logic to explain the world around him were doomed from the get-go.

Valid logic is very frequently based on bad information, regardless of whether that information is due to underdeveloped understandings of biology or the simple limitations of the human mind. One problem with the human mind (at least with my mind) is that there is a limit to the amount of information it can consider at one time. Every decision is made with limited focus and limited information.

I don't think that the problem of group think is one of rational versus irrational, it could also be a matter of "Hey, there are all these people who are doing this thing, and there's a lot of them and so maybe there's something to what they're doing, so I'm going to trust that there's a good reason and do it too." The desire to defer to the wisdom of the crowd trumps the desire to think independently and from there a rational decision is made to do what the crowd is doing. The decision isn't irrational because there is a clear line of reasoning throughout.

That doesn't mean it was a good decision to make. That depends on whatever is actually happening. Sometimes the crowd is right and sometimes the crowd is wrong.

In any case, I think the folks who can take advantage of things like group think can do so because they understand the logic of human decision making. Shiny things are useful because their shininess distracts us from how much they cost. A rational decision taking into account cost becomes a rational decision taking into account how great owning a shiny thing would be.