After witnessing the sins and follies of “group action” on Facebook, I am re-posting the Groupthink series. The choice to follow Christ is always individual and personal. And that choice has supremacy over the choices made in any group to which we belong. Whoever follows the group over following Christ has placed the group before Christ and made a false god. Survivors of clergy abuse (or any abuse) have to recognize that, as valid as their experiences are, the experiences of other survivors are also valid. We object to Christian Fundamentalism because it demands a lockstep conformity. It imposes absolute uniformity of consensus and “total loyalty” upon its followers. So let’s monitor ourselves to make sure we don’t demand a lockstep conformity, that we don’t demand total loyalty.

Groups come together for all kinds of reasons. And the different reasons that cause groups to form will also form different types of groups.

For example, most of us are familiar with the riveting movie, Apollo13, when the engineers at NASA had to figure out a way to repair the rescue module air filter before the air aboard became too toxic with CO2 to sustain life. The “Tiger Team” at Nasa had roughly 24 hours to figure out a solution.

There could be no glib answers here. Men’s lives hung on a workable solution, and the entire world was watching. The team incorporated the best engineers at NASA, but they could not rest on reputation to get them through this. They had to question each other, challenge each other, and reject ideas that would not work.

And, they did. They were able to make a prototype and then communicate the step by step process of creating an ad hoc filter to the men in the rescue module. It worked.

History records that the Tiger Team dedicated to bringing the Apollo 13 crew home had almost unilateral authority to act in order to achieve that purpose. They could demand anything of anybody in order to save the crew. Everybody at NASA, at least for those few days, was subordinated to them. But their power and authority were tempered by a single gigantic point of accountability: if the Apollo 13 crew did not get home, the blame for a failed rescue would be placed right at the feet of every man on the Tiger Team. Each of them would be ruined by failure of the mission. Each of them would forever bear the guilt and shame of having failed the three men whose lives depended on them. No escape and no excuses. The Tiger Team had to stand and deliver no matter what problems were encountered during the return journey of the crew.

Beset by dangers, high expectations, a country clamoring for a miracle, and the voices of three men who would die without their help, the Tiger Team performed remarkably well.

Another type of group forms among occasional friends at social functions. In a much looser confederacy, when people gather at Sci-Fi conventions, friends who see each other from year to year bond into a group whose main purpose is to have fun. And I would not diminish that bond. Friends will chip in very generously to treat their less wealthy com padres to drink, food, even hotel rooms. Friends put in enormous amounts of time contributing expertise in sound systems or stage construction, or just menial tasks of cleanup so that everybody can have a good time. We saw this past year that, surpassing the skills and drive of motorcycle clubs dedicated to patriotism, a group of people from Comic Con actually banded together to shout down the loathsome Westboro Baptist Church gang. I don’t think anybody’s ever succeeded at that before.

But, armed with signs of their own, group slogans, plenty of enthusiasm (perhaps, I am guessing, helped along by judiciously applied slugs of beer), the Comic Con fans, in full costume, outshouted the Westboro fiends.

So even a loosely federated group without any indoctrinated moral purpose, once it establishes a common goal, can effectively reach that goal.

Groups can achieve. Groups can be powerful. Groups can do a lot of good.

What is obvious about the Tiger Team is that it challenged itself again and again and evaluated its success according to a single, objective, testable outcome: the safe rescue of the Apollo 13 crew.

The Comic Con protesters were effective because though they had various differences among themselves, these differences did not get in the way of the purpose of their protest: they all agreed that humor and determination together were the best strategy to defeat the impact of the Westboro protest.

There are groups that form for very good reasons, but they end up doing a lot of harm. Psychologists, sociologists, and even top management gurus have studied the reasons and the symptoms of groups that fail.

In the 1950′s Solomon Asch ran a series of tests to measure conformity. A group of people in a classroom were shown a series of lines and asked questions of comparison about them. Every person in the room except one knew it was an experiment and played along. At first they answered questions correctly, but then after the first few questions all the “in” crowd participants gave the same wrong answer.

In normal conditions, participants would get a question wrong 2-3% of the time. That was the measure of honest error for the test. Once the majority of the class gave a wrong answer to an obvious question, the un-initiated person would give the same wrong answer 32% of the time.

When questioned afterward, participants most often said that they doubted themselves when so many others voiced a different answer. They thought they were seeing the lines wrong or had misunderstood the question.

And yet, when one of the informed participants dissented from the majority, even if he was still wrong, the uninformed participant then was more likely to voice his true answer.

Concurrent with Asche, a psychologist named Irving Janis expanded and standardized the term Groupthink, as he explored the dangers inherent in highly cohesive groups coming together to make decisions.

Groups, even groups designed to do good, can grow into machines that do great harm. People in a group can agree to things or even come to believe things that they would not agree to or believe if they were examining the same question on their own.

I hope to take up this topic tomorrow, Lord willing.

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Other Essays in this series:

Groupthink: Part 2

Groupthink: Part 3

Groupthink: Part 4

