My entire Geology 101 class panicked when the earthquake hit last week. Outside, I could see small waves running through Drumheller fountain, every cell phone out of every back pack and people shifting in such a way that I could tell their hearts were pounding a mile a minute along with my own. But, what the hell was I doing outside anyway?
Everyone, including our geology professor, had done exactly the wrong thing and ran out of our lecture hall before the shaking had stopped. I followed without even really thinking at all. In these types of situations, when many people are acting as a group, no one stops and actually thinks as an individual; and this "group think" can be dangerous and it is something that society rarely addresses.
Reading The Daily recently, you'd see many examples of the positive aspects of group think, especially in the Greek system. As a group, fraternities earn above average GPAs and raise thousands for charity. They almost always gather together on Thursday nights with the sole purpose of having fun. However, this was not the case on Thursday, Feb. 8.
On the night made famous by the snow, a mob of about a hundred gathered on 21st Ave. NE, and what began as a snowball fight quickly escalated. A large group of fraternity members beat up another fraternity member sending him to the hospital.
This type of dangerous mob rule is certainly not Greek row exclusive. Last year, a traditional Greek event included a scavenger hunt, which led a group of fraternity men and sorority women to the front of McMahon Hall. While they searched through the bushes and trees with flashlights, all the balconies facing front began to fill with dorm residents wondering what all the commotion was about. Words were exchanged. As more and more residents took to their balconies things got ugly. Dorm residents were screaming. We were all angry, but I'm really not sure why. Beer bottles and almost everything else was thrown off of balconies. The usually nice girls on the balcony six floors below mine were getting running starts and throwing water balloons at the Greek brothers and sisters below. One sorority girl got a little too close to the building and in range of one of my cluster mates and his bucket of water.
A direct hit.
The water made the sound of a belly flop when it hit the girl, but this was quickly cut off by her scream, which was then cut off by the cheers of the residents. Then the voice of reason cut through all the noise. That voice of reason sent a hush over the residents and, along with the arrival of the police, sent us all back inside, defeated and wondering what the hell we were doing. Ironically, the voice of reason came from a sorority girl who was digging through bushes with a flashlight in the middle of the night. She screamed simply, "Dorm life must be real exciting!"
Today it seems that group think and delusions perpetuated by many are everywhere. Ranging from the serious, for example the riots on Fat Tuesday, to the seriously annoying, like the forwarded chain letters I find in my inbox that urge me to bother another eight more people or suffer bad luck forever.
Group think however, is rarely addressed because it's overshadowed by other apparently more serious problems of our society. The riots on Fat Tuesday are now being ascribed to racial issues. Never mind that the perpetrators and victims were of many races. Our society demands to know the reasoning behind the violence. We must know what those who committed violent acts were thinking, and racism is an easy way to try and rationalize what has happened. The truth is, the rioters were probably not thinking at all and probably didn't have any kind of agenda. For society, this is a hard pill swallow.
Now that the earthquake has reminded some of us we live on a fault, the proper procedures to follow in the event of "the big one" are popping up everywhere. This isn't enough. I'm assuming that at least one out of the couple hundred students in my geology class knew the proper procedures, yet still not a single student followed them. Why not educate people on the dangers of group think along with the correct procedures? Why are fraternities forced to take alcohol and rape awareness classes but not educated on group think, and why aren't dorm residents forced to learn all of the above? Why not, instead of pointing the easy finger of racism, acknowledge that group think may have been the main reason behind the Fat Tuesday riots and that race had very little to do with it.
By stressing individual thought and warning against simply "following along" and group think these types of violent acts could be prevented. The term group think is itself misleading. It implies that individuals in a group are thinking together, when the truth is no one is really thinking at all.
Copyright©2000 The Daily University of Washington