One of the most burdensome side effects that happen when one belongs to an organized group is that individual responsibility fades, high-sounding discrepancies are silenced, and ideas become homogeneous .
If the group has religious roots (life after death, untouchable dogmatism, ideological stability and unearthly forgiveness of faults in carnal life), then these secondary effects are even more evident; Although many secular movements (political ideologies) have behaviors almost identical to that of religions .
Imitation and gregariousness
The philosopher Gustavo Bueno already said: 100 individuals, who separately can constitute a distributive group of 100 wise men, when they get together they can form an attributive group made up of a single idiot. What Well did not say, in addition, is that 100 individuals can behave in a less critical, less responsible way, with fewer nuances.
Imitation is embedded in the neurological circuits of our brain . If our behavior differs from the behavior of the people around us, then neurons emit an alarm signal: regions associated with reinforcement learning and those that modulate reward are activated.
According to the neurologist Vasily Klucharev , we act like this because we perceive that, by going as a group, we will obtain more benefits. Gregariousness, then, thrives on its inherent evolutionary advantages.
The diversity of voices offers no more guarantees of obtaining the truth, as Dieter Frey , professor of psychology in Munich, argues. Groups cling more often than individuals to information that they find pleasant, they doubt the correctness of their decisions and pay less attention to contrary arguments, no matter how full of reason they may come.
If there is any doubt or plot fissure, any minimal cognitive dissonance, then hatred of the other, ethnicism, racism, xenophobia, classism and, in short, group identity, will do the rest. Because we all, more and more, live in bubbles :