Mental and Interpersonal Mechanisms of Groupthink Maintenance

                                                                                          PatientSafe Network

This post is a shortened version of one of my chapters in the upcoming multi-author book, Groupthink in Science.

One of the defining characteristics of groupthink is something called “willful blindness.” People often know things but choose to pretend that they do not, in order to fit in with larger social groups. They lie to everyone including themselves They refuse to look at any sources of information that might call into question any beliefs that help them to “convey and conform to” the needs of the various groups to which they belong. The paradox of such willful ignorance is that in cases in which you are motivated to avoid looking at something, you have to know where not to look! In other words, you had to have seen it.

The reason that we all do this has to do with a significant characteristic of natural selection during biological evolution. Conforming to the values and requirements of our kin group or tribe has high adaptive value. Genes that contribute to the survival of the tribe or clan to which we belong, as opposed to those that only benefit individuals, are highly likely to be passed on. This process is known as kin selection.

While sacrificing oneself for a group – such as the widespread willingness to die for one’s country in a war – is not beneficial for individual survival, it does contribute significantly to group survival. Nonetheless, it can sometimes actually harm a group’s interests in the long run. The term pathological altruism has been used to describe situations in which this tendency to self-sacrifice backfires and harms not only the individual making the sacrifice but his or her group as well.

Many mental mechanisms and tricks have evolved to help us lie to ourselves to achieve these purposes. Interestingly, we also tend to assist our fellow group members in using these tricks on themselves. Groups as a whole also have a variety of mechanisms for keeping certain information censored. The mechanisms are the subject of this post.

They appear at the level of the individual, where they include the defense mechanisms described by psychoanalytically-oriented psychotherapists, and the irrational beliefs enumerated by cognitive behavioral psychotherapists. They also appear at the level of the family or kin group, where they are called family myths. They also exist at the level of cultural groups, where they are called mythology.

Defense mechanisms were originally defined as mental processes, typically subconscious, employed by individuals to avoid ideas or impulses that are unacceptable to their own personal value system, and to avoid the anxiety that those ideas or impulses therefore created. Notice, however, that these mechanisms do not just serve an internal purpose within our mind, but an interpersonal one as well. We may, for example, compulsively try to act in the opposite way that an impulse that is unacceptable to our group would dictate (reaction formation), or displace our anger at one person within our kin group onto another outside, safer person to avoid tension within our group.

Irrational Beliefs are often automatic in that they come to us without any conscious effort in response to an environmental event, and they quickly lead to specific behavior patterns. They are often said to be subliminal, which is a similar concept to subconscious. If you, for example, catastrophize (imagining every single thing that could possible go wrong if you did something, no matter how unlikely) about your engaging in a course of action not condoned by your group, you will indeed scare yourself away from engaging in it. Group norms are often internally policed by unquestioned thoughts that start with “I should or must” do or think this or that. If you had contrary thoughts in the past that turned out to be wrong, you might overgeneralize by thinking that all the thoughts related to the earlier ones are always going to be wrong as well.

Logical fallacies can also be used to either explain away or justify ideas that might contradict group norms or beliefs. For instance, post hoc reasoning assumes wrongly that if event A is quickly followed by event B, then it is probably true that A caused B. Therefore, you opt to avoid A in order to avoid B. An example: "Looking at pornography will lead to sex addiction." This is fallacious because the pairing is often due to another variable common to both A and B - in this case the internal conflict over one's sexuality - or because the pairing is just a coincidence.

Group Mythology. In order to operate as an integrated unit, groups with a common purpose also have mechanisms that they use to enforce conformity of thought within their numbers. Members employ various strategies to invalidate any competing ideas with which they might be challenged. Once again, group cohesion has its advantages; it often maximizes the group’s chances of success, but these mechanisms can also backfire severely and lead to failure.

Family therapists have studied groupthink phenomena within families, but similar ones are used by other groups as well. An individual's family often acts as if they all share a set of beliefs, and they all seem to live by them almost compulsively. While some of these beliefs are applied only to certain individuals, others apply to the whole group. The latter ideas are referred to as family myths. They justify and support a set of rules which dictate how each family member should behave and why, and what family roles each must fully and habitually play. This allows the family to function in a predictable way (family homeostasis).  

The myths function as a belief system which the family uses, often defensively, to explain or justify its behavior and beliefs. They are sometimes verbalized explicitly, but can also be expressed implicitly. Sometimes they take the form of oft-verbalized adages or slogans. One good example of this was seen in a family that strongly believed in fatalism—the idea that people are powerless to change their world so one should make the best of that which already exists. They all spouted three different proverbs on numerous occasions that expressed and reinforced within the group a warning about what happens to anyone who tries to take charge of their lives: "The grass is always greener on the other side of the hill;" "The devil you know is better than the devil you don't know;" and "You've made your bed so now you have to lie in it." 

Within-group Mechanisms for Enforcing Groupthink: Disqualification and Invalidation.

Individuals can, when necessary, use two related mechanisms to obfuscate their own real beliefs to themselves or others. This is done so that if later said beliefs are rejected, the persons can deny they had meant what they had in fact said. These tactics are called disqualification and invalidation. Disqualification is a strategy used to make one’s own position on an issue ambiguous. When someone does this, other members of the group cannot say for certain what it is that the person actually believes. When other people ask for clarification, they are basically told that they are misperceiving in some way the person they are asking. Doing this to them is an example of invalidation. 

Discussing Dysfunctional Family Patterns with the Family: More Tricks of the Trade

Offering Theories Better than Asking Questions

As I have discussed in many previous posts, when adult children try to figure out the reasons behind their parents' confusing behavior, they usually conclude that the parents are either mad, bad, blind, or stupid. I mean, how else can you explain the following bizarre parental behavior: denying the obvious, giving double messages that put their child in a damned-if -you-do/don't situation, seeming to want their children around (often in a caretaker role of some sort) while simultaneously seeming to hate their guts, putting up with abusive spouses while making excuses for them, being completely preoccupied with one sibling while acting like another child barely exists—and a host of other unfortunately fairly common dysfunctional behaviors.

I believe, as readers of my blogs know by now, that most parents who act like this are neither mad, bad, blind nor stupid. They are instead acting out roles with their children - in a highly ambivalent fashion - that they themselves had learned in their own families of origin. These roles stabilized the grandparents, who were themselves highly conflicted about certain family and cultural norms and rules of behavior.

Mothers who have gender role conflicts are a really good example of what I am talking about. They often give out mixed messages to their daughters about both having careers and having children. Their daughters are somehow also expected to get some man to take care of them while simultaneously being independent.

Just asking the parents why they are doing what they are doing usually leads to more obfuscation, non-sequiturs, denial, and various other ways of invalidating the person who poses the question and/or disqualifying their own true beliefs. Or even worse, questions sometimes even lead to violence, suicide attempts, and other forms of acting out. 

"Why" questions are also particularly likely to lead to either aggressive or defensive remarks because they can sound accusatory—sorta like asking a child, "Why is your hand in the cookie jar?"

Asking "yes or no" questions is equally problematic. It also often leads to responses that are less than edifying about what the parents are trying to accomplish with their bizarre behavior. The parents can just answer "yes" or "no" with no additional explanation.

One trick in metacommunication is based on the idea that in human interactions, certain verbalizations seem to require certain responses, making it more likely that when they are used, the other person will feel obligated to respond in certain ways. They may say things that are more enlightening or clear. Of course the strategy I am about to describe is not foolproof, but it does increase the odds that a useful exchange may take place.

The trick is for the person to empathically offer some speculation about family interpersonal processes that may be triggering problematic feelings or behavior in the parent. There is something about tentatively offering someone someone a hypothesis that makes it much more difficult for them to merely agree or disagree. Hypotheses seem to demand more than questions; they increase the likelihood that the parent will feel it necessary to explain what is wrong or right with the hypothesis, rather than just giving out an unexplained acceptance or rejection of it.

This is especially true if the adult child overtly labels the intervention as a guess, thereby giving the parents an "out" that allows them to reject the guess if they are just feeling too threatened to respond with more information. This technique makes it difficult for the parent to provoke a power struggle with the adult child over the accuracy of the hypothesis.

The potential metacommunicator can base speculations or hypotheses on any information concerning his or her family that is already available, or on typical patterns that they have seen or read about in my blogs or elsewhere. Having done one's family's genogram often provides a good source of such guesses. Such hypotheses should always be offered in a tentative and non-threatening manner.

Continuing with the gender role conflict situation mentioned above, for example, the adult child might say something to her mother like, "I don't know if this applies to you or not, but in other families where a woman's career choice is an issue, mothers often feel bad because their daughters get to do things the mother always wanted to do but was not free to do. I wonder if this might apply to our situation?

Validating Invalidation

Invalidation, as used in psychology, is a term most associated with Dialectical Behavior Therapy and Marsha Linehan. Invalidating someone else is not merely disagreeing with something that other person said. It is a process in which individuals communicate to another that the opinions and emotions of the target are invalid, irrational, selfish, uncaring, stupid, most likely insane, and wrong, wrong, wrong. Invalidators let it be known directly or indirectly that their target’s views and feelings do not count for anything to anybody at any time or in any way. In some families, the invalidation becomes extreme, leading to physical abuse and even murder. However, invalidation can also be accomplished by verbal manipulations that invalidate in ways both subtle and confusing.


Marsha Linehan


Linehan theorizes than an “invalidating environment” is, along with a genetic tendency to be over-emotional, one of the two major causes of borderline personality disorder (BPD). She does not really specify which environment she is talking about, but it is obviously the family in which the person grew up.

When I first read Linehan, I thought of a similar concept that I had read about in a classic book in family systems theory by Watzlawick, Beavin, and Jackson first published way back in 1967 called Pragmatics of Human Communication. They called this concept disqualification. I at first thought that maybe Linehan was re-discovering the wheel, but then I went back to the old book to look at how they defined disqualification. To my surprise, disqualification is something one does to oneself, not someone else. One disqualifies oneself when one is afraid to say what one really feels and means for fear that others will reject it. Hence disqualifiers say things in a way that allows them “plausible deniability.” They can claim they were misinterpreted if the other family members object.

They accomplish this through wide range of deviant communicational phenomena, “…such as self-contradictions, inconsistencies, subject switches, tangentializations, incomplete sentences, misunderstandings, obscure style or mannerisms of speech, the literal interpretation of metaphor and the metaphorical interpretation of literal remarks, etc." (p. 76).

Now why would anyone disqualify themselves? The answer has to do with something that the psychoanalysts, who got a lot of things wrong, got right. They thought problematic behavior resulted from an unresolved conflict within the individual between two opposite courses of action. Now the analysts assumed that the conflict was between biological impulses like sex and aggression and a person's internalized value system, otherwise known as his or her conscience.

While certainly one can feel conflicted over those things, the focus of the analysts was far too narrow. Experiential therapists like Fritz Perls and Carl Rogers felt that the basic conflict was over one’s need to express one’s true nature (self-actualization) and doing what was expected by everyone else. Family systems pioneer Murray Bowen framed this as a conflict between the forces of individuality and the forces of togetherness.

Those with such a conflict suppress parts of themselves that do not seem to conform to what they believe other important family members expect of them, but the suppression is never complete. Such a person will disqualify what they are trying to get across just in case it is unacceptable to others. If it is, then they can claim that they were merely misunderstood.

Unfortunately, when someone disqualifies what they are saying in this manner, the other people listening are on shaky ground when trying to determine what is being communicated to them. The communications are very confusing. In fact, just when listeners think they have a fix on it, the person may contradict themselves, leaving listeners to start to doubt their own perceptions about what was just said. In other words, when someone disqualifies themselves, they are often invalidating the person listening to them. The two concepts are not just similar to each other, they go hand in hand!

This leads to the proposition that when family members seem to be invalidating another family member, the apparent invalidators may really be disqualifying themselves.  Listeners would have no way of knowing this, and would be inadvertently led to believe that they were being mistreated by the apparent invalidator. Most therapists think this as well.

In families that produce children who grow up to develop BPD, this whole process is rampant and pervasive compared to the average family, as Linehan suggests. Because the person with BPD has frequently been invalidated, they start to disqualify their own opinions. In doing so, they invalidate everyone else. In other words, they end up giving every bit as good as they get.

Because of other factors which I will not go into here, the specific needs that patients with BPD tend to disqualify in themselves are their need to find a good balance between being cared for by others and self-actualization. As a result, they end up invalidating anyone who tries to form an intimate relationships with them.

If you have to deal with people who do this, there are well-established ways to prevent them from invalidating you. In future posts, I will detail some of them. They can all be found in my book for psychotherapists, Psychotherapy With Borderline Patients: An Integrated Approach.