Groupthink is a psychological phenomenon where a group of people share the same idea/goal/decision, even if it’s irrational or prone to fallacy. This phenomenon may seem like it can only happen in textbooks, clearly with sufficient reasoning by qualified individuals a group would be pursuaded. However, this is something which happens, and an example of such case is the rocket launching of the Challenger in 1986
January 28, 1986, the space shuttle launch day for the Challenger. It was a freezing morning, which would of just been any other day – today was the exception. Engineers of the solid rocket boosters for the Challenger warned NASA flight managers that the O-rings for the boosters aren’t designed for such cold temperatures. However, despite the warning of qualified individuals with solid reasoning, NASA personnels fell victim to groupthink. As a result, they launched as scheduled which resulting in the explosion of the Challenger 73 seconds after liftoff. This is one of many other events.
So now that we have an idea of groupthink, how do we represent this in a graph in a way that it behaves as mentioned above? The representation is actually very simple, as shown in the diagram from “the wisdom and/or madness of crowds“, a game which goes over different topics relationing to the graphical representation of crowds such as the small world and contagions theory.
The spread of information is similar to contagion, however rather than have infection based off of probability, we have it based on the information from neigbhors. As we can see in the model, it is very difficult to convince the group as a single node is only a fraction of the “influence” compared to everyone in the group itself. Taking a look at the model taken from the game, you can see that even if you managed to convince everyone in the group, you are unable to sway the concensus.
References https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbescoachescouncil/2018/09/18/avoid-groupthink-for-better-decision-making/#7847e24677da https://www.investopedia.com/terms/g/groupthink.asp https://ncase.me/crowds/