worldview and perspective on Groupthink

In the country of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.

A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices.

If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.

In his book The Contrarian’s Guide to Leadership, former president of the University of Southern California Steven Sample, details a critical element leaders must possess if they wish to make sound ju...

Great minds discuss ideas. Average minds discuss events. Small minds discuss people.

Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to reform (or pause and reflect).

A large part of the problem is that we’ve lost much of our ability to think deeply. We’ve forgotten the art of deep and focused mind-management. We want things fast, quick, now. We often don’t want to...

George Herbert Mead, an influential early 20th-century sociologist, coined the term “generalized other” to describe the vague group we consider when shaping our actions. How often do we behave a certa...

Once an idea has taken hold of the brain, it's almost impossible to eradicate.

It is a profoundly erroneous truism that we should cultivate the habit of thinking of what we are doing. The precise opposite is the case. Civilization advances by extending the number of operations w...

In a room where people unanimously maintain a conspiracy of silence, one word of truth sounds like a pistol shot.

Those who can’t change their minds can’t change anything.

At the start of the process the idea is just a thought - very fragile and exclusive. When the first physical manifestation is created everything changes. It is no longer exclusive, now it involves a l...

“All thinking men are atheists.”

80 percent of Americans agree with the statement “an individual should arrive at his or her own religious beliefs independent of any church or synagogue.”

You've got to think about big things while you're doing small things, so that all the small things go in the right direction.

Everybody believes that their reality is the real real reality.

We think in generalities, but we live in detail.

We are taught, often by the tone of voice of the media and the politicians rather than by explicit argument, to bow down before…progress. It is unstoppable. Who wants to be left behind, to be behind t...

It is always crucial to remember that our beliefs are formed not only through reason and argument but also through social conditioning.

The real problem is not whether machines think but whether men do.

When we have the same thought again, the line of the original thought is deepened, causing what's called a memory trace. With each repetition the trace goes deeper and deeper, forming and embeddin...

The average person has more than thirty thousand thoughts per day. Of those, so many are negative that “according to researchers, the vast majority of the illnesses that plague us today are a direct r...

To most people nothing is more troublesome than the effort of thinking.

When Freud says…that consciousness is the tip of the mental iceberg, he was short of the mark by quite a bit-it may be more the size of a snowball on top of that iceberg. The mind operates most effici...

When I think of vision, I have in mind the ability to see above and beyond the majority.

Our lives are always moving in the direction of our strongest thoughts. What we think shapes who we are.

I began to see a pattern at work in many of us. Our emotions were leading us to thoughts, and those thoughts were dictating our decisions, and our decisions were determining behaviors, and then the be...

As thou art in church or cell, that same frame of mind carry out into the world, into its turmoil and its fitfulness.

Our culture is no longer banded together by shared beliefs; it’s drawn together by shared spectacles. Like Halloween costumes designed to match the most popular movies, we seek our self-identity insid...