What is groupthink? the power and influence of the group using persuasion to alter and adjust one's opinion. none of these answers a marketing technique that utilizes the correlational relationship between thoughts, influences, and shopping trends of pop culture to predict consumer spending. the kind of thinking that occurs when people place more importance on maintaining group cohesiveness than on assessing facts of the problem that the group is concerned about?

Groupthink is a kind of thinking that happens when persons place more significance on retaining group connectedness than on determining facts of the problem that the group is distressed about. The term groupthink was coined by social psychologist Irvin Janis (1972), and occurs when a group of people creates decisions that are faulty due to group pressures that leads to mental efficiency.

as university of miami psychologists debra lieberman and adam smith pointed out in a recent article in the journal current directions in psychological science, humans have social and psychological mechanisms to deter incest. with very few exceptions, marriages between brothers and sisters and between parents and their children are verboten in every human culture. the primary psychological anti-incest mechanism is the yuck response. even the idea of sex with their mom or dad, bro or sis is upsetting to most people. the psychologist jonathan haidt has found that nearly everyone is repelled by the prospect of brother-sister sex, even in hypothetical situations in which there is no chance of pregnancy).

the biological cost of incest

this raises an interesting question: just what’s so bad about incest? sure, having sex with your dad or your sister seems gross — but why? some anthropologists have argued that incest taboos are learned social conventions. this explanation, however, doesn’t make sense to me as it does not explain the widespread existence of anti-incest mechanisms in creatures ranging from cockroaches to chimpanzees. second, the incest taboo is about as close to a universal law as human moral rules get.

why should mechanisms to avoid incest be so widespread both in nature and across human societies? the answer is simple. the problem with having sex close with relatives is that there is an astonishingly high chance that your offspring will be born with a serious birth defect.