Groupthink
noun ·Rare ·Advanced level
Definitions
- 1 A process of reasoning or decision-making by a group, especially one characterized by uncritical acceptance of or conformity to a perceived majority view. countable, uncountable
"At present we do not know what percentage of all national fiascoes are attributable to groupthink. Some decisions of poor quality that turn out to be fiascoes might be ascribed primarily to mistakes made by just one man, the Chief Executive. Others arise because of a faulty policy formulated by a group of executives whose decision‐making procedures were impaired by errors having little or nothing to do with groupthink."
- 2 decision making by a group (especially in a manner that discourages creativity or individual responsibility) wordnet
Example
More examples"Essentially not a "groupthink" idea, each individual really has his or her own religion. Even though the person may belong to an organized religion, which is really a human idealized abstraction, the person has her or his own views about it. So, religion is essentially individualized."
Etymology
Coined by William H. Whyte in 1952, from group + think, modelled on earlier doublethink from Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four.
More for "groupthink"
Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.