Collective Stupidity: When Groupthink Goes Wrong and How to Put It Right

Summary

How epidemics of collective stupidity are threatening our world—and how businesses, governments and other organizations can adopt powerful strategies for making better decisions

The world is facing epidemics of collective stupidity—and it may be our biggest problem since it prevents us from solving all of our other problems. Every news cycle provides fresh examples of nations and organizations full of smart people with smart technology acting in stupid ways—countries that start wars without serious plans, companies that self-destruct and big groups of people that believe big lies. In Collective Stupidity, Geoff Mulgan provides an engaging new explanation for what’s going wrong and offers a host of practical steps that businesses, governments, nonprofits and organizations of all kinds can take to avoid the pitfalls of bad groupthink.

Collective Stupidity vividly tells stories of this phenomenon—from Australia’s war against emus and China’s battles against sparrows to financial bubbles and conspiracy theories about chemtrails. These aren’t just large-scale versions of individual stupidity. Rather they’re often fueled by benign or rational intentions: our desire to save mental energy, our need to be liked and our hunger for a world that makes sense. But there are concrete steps organisations and whole societies can take to immunize themselves against the worst of collective stupidity. The key is tapping the power of metacognition: methods for thinking better about how we think, including ways to use AI to make us collectively smarter rather than dumber—and ways for countries to learn from their mistakes.

Collective stupidity isn’t inevitable. But it needs to be systematically and deliberately designed against if we are to realize our collective intelligence. This book shows the way.