The most recommended books about groupthink

This is honestly one of the smartest books I have ever read about group thinking, negotiating in groups, and avoiding massive group mistakes—which happen around the world every day! The authors give examples from negotiating the names of new household products to understanding group polarization and how to negotiate around it. They break down numerous conflict situations involving groups and give very detailed insights into what is going wrong and what can be done to make things go well. This is a great little book for negotiators, business managers, politicians, and everyday people who want to know how to get what they want in any group negotiations. 

Amy coined the term psychological safety, and in this book, she tells you how to create that environment in order to build high-performance teams. This book walks you through every step needed and how to respond to the most common speed bumps when building an inclusive culture. She connects a diversity of every dimension to the process, and her work is a must-read.

When I was at Yale, Professor Irving Janis became aware of my interest in mass psychology and asked if I would be interested in seeing a manuscript he was working on. I jumped at the chance and soon was reading Victims of Groupthink.

The book relates histories of bureaucratic decision-making that went wrong. Janis postulated that in a group setting, people defer the hard work of reasoning to others, whom they assume must be working on the problem. As a result, no one works on the problem, and whatever decision emerges derives from the dynamics of group psychology. This book is out of print and hard to find.

I had begun to worry about my social media consumption when I came across this book.

As a science journalist, I had interviewed Lanier in the past. So I knew his work, and I knew he always had something profound to say about technology. You can tell that this is a personal book for him. Many times he refers to his children, and he worries about how social media impacts them.

He enumerates several reasons why social media is destroying our minds, our attention spans, our self-esteem, and our decency. Lanier has consulted with most of the major firms that have foisted social media on us, so he knows the players and he knows how much better the technology can be, if only its creators did not capitulate to greed.

I recommend pairing this book with a viewing of the documentaries, The Social Dilemma and Fake Famous. After seeing those… show more.

As well as being academically sound this book is accessible and engaging, and it deals with subjects such as explaining, listening, assertiveness, negotiations, and persuasion in a way that is highly applied and always useful. Perhaps most importantly it addresses many of the aspects of interpersonal communication that I have for a long time found fascinating and challenging.

Mentaligence takes conscious mind development one step further. It suggests that we are burdened with an indoctrination dictating how to behave and meet preordained goals pressed upon us by parents, teachers, religious leaders, and society in general. Its premise is that we must recognize these factors and any negative effect on our well-being; learn how to throw off their shackles; and develop a new attitude of thinking. In short, acquire what Dr. Lee calls mental agility.

Indoctrination, group-think, and social brain-washing are related terms for the negative force. While some indoctrination may be considered beneficial, few would disagree with the negative effect of Nazi group-think or that leading to mass suicides in Jamestown. They illustrate the need for objective thinking to all manifestations of indoctrination.

In To Start a War, Robert Draper investigates how it was that the US came to invade Iraq in 2003. A gifted writer, he reveals the paranoia and fear that led to the collecting of ‘intelligence’ that confirmed the biases of senior US officials – but which was often fabricated and false. 

I was given a free copy of this book at a conference and only read it as I had nothing else to read at that point. But, for the time, its method of communicating ideas and concepts was revolutionary and this, as well as the contents of the book, have stayed with me.

I hadn’t read it for a while, but on re-reading it to write this review, I enjoyed it just as much as the first time. Once again, I am drawn to the emphasis on the individual and their ability to be creative, adaptable, and innovative. These concepts seem, in my eyes, to be lost in finance education but are fundamental to a strong real-world financial system that avoids the effects of the groupthink seen in the 2008 financial crash.