How many jobs in financial services will only look at candidates that have financial services experience? Healthcare businesses want employees that know all about healthcare. And educational establishments only employ people from other educational establishments.

Now, while I understand that you need to understand the product and regulated businesses need people that understand regulations – these businesses already employ experts on that. Often the thing they really need is a different perspective.

Groupthink or pluralistic ignorance or, in other terms, ‘collective stupidity’ occurs when a group of otherwise intelligent individuals makes decisions or takes actions that are far less rational and intelligent than they would have produced on their own. It is largely driven by conformity, social pressure to belong, and the tendency to abdicate critical thinking to the group.

Why smart groups make dumb choices 

While individual intelligence is an asset, placing people into a collective often diminishes their problem-solving capabilities. And it’s due to several social and psychological behaviours:

• Conformity & tribalism: Our deep human instinct to seek belonging often overrides objective truth. People suppress dissenting views to avoid not being seen as not a team player, allowing bad ideas to go unchallenged. Think, about jury service.
• Pluralistic ignorance: Individuals in a group may privately disagree with a prevailing narrative but publicly go along with it because they mistakenly believe everyone else supports it.
• Echo chambers: Commitment to group identity creates “selective amnesia” or information filtering. Any data that contradicts the group’s chosen narrative is ignored or framed as an attack.

Otherwise, it’s because people in this type of culture just feel it’s all too difficult and can’t be arsed.

Real-world manifestations

Collective stupidity is highly visible across various facets of society, operating on both micro and macro levels:

• In the workplace: Even highly intelligent corporate teams or boardrooms can make strategic errors due to groupthink and rigid, hierarchical structures.
• Financial markets: It fuels extreme economic phenomena, such as speculative asset bubbles or blanket crashes, where individuals ignore fundamental values simply because “everyone else” is buying or selling.
• In politics & media: Unchecked propagation of misinformation or harmful societal traits often scales rapidly when fear and group loyalty replace evidence-based reasoning, as we are seeing more and more in recent times. Or sensible rational people just simply not saying no or stop.

Unfortunately, AI being used as a crutch rather than a tool will exacerbate this situation even more by simply becoming a race to the middle.

How to counteract it

Avoiding collective stupidity requires deliberate effort to break out of the “lemming dynamics” of a group:

• Hold doubt: Recognise that certainty is seductive. Cultivate an environment where it’s safe to ask questions or change one’s mind.
• Analyse incentives: Ask who benefits from the prevailing narrative and whether the pressure to agree serves the truth or just group cohesion.
• Encourage dissent: Appoint a “devil’s advocate” or explicitly reward critical feedback to ensure the group actively considers all available data.

The Powerfully Simple solution to all of this is BPL…

If you are looking for a different opinion or a devil’s advocate, BPL would love to help – so avoid your collective stupidity and get some ideas that disrupt the status quo and deliver better results than you could have imagined – or just simply prove you were right all along.

If you want a second opinion – we would love to help.