Analysis Of Group Minds By Doris Lessing

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Blame it on Human Nature
Doris Lessing an intelligent British women and an even brighter novelist. She writes a short story by the name of “Group Minds”. In this short story she opens the readers eyes to the fact that humans are pack animals and we conform in groups every day, whether we notice or not. It is in human nature to feel wanted, loved, and to strive for the sense of belonging. “I am a citizen of a free society, and that means I am an individual, making individual choices” (652). Lessing uses this quote to portray the mindset everyone believes to have, but those beliefs fall short of most expectations. After reading “Group Minds” by Doris Lessing, she creates an effective approach of the power to conform in groups, because it’s apart …show more content…

Humans contain an instinct that is almost never flawed, and that is the since of belonging. It is rare in society to be the lone wolf, to use ones individual thoughts without conforming to group efforts. “When we’re in a group, we tend to think as that group does: we may even have joined the group to find “like-minded” people, but we also find our thinking changing because we belong to a group” (652). This quote helps layout the basics of human intelligence about groups and the problems groups can cause. In group thinking an individual may have his or her separate thoughts but after a little push from the group they are swift to change their answer. Lessing notices this as a drastic problem in today’s society and tries to dig into the thoughts of our youth. Lessing wants to show how this is a real problem and we must start with the youth of our …show more content…

After reading this I can completely understand the issue and never thought about it until she acknowledged it. Before reading this I was clueless to even my own group thinking as I fall under the category of a group mind. She uses an experiment to equip her story with evidence and proof, but I somewhat question the validity of that. In Lessing’s experiment she explains “a group of people are taken into the researcher’s confidence and one or two minority are left in the dark. Using separate lengths of wood the majority of the group are instructed to agree they are the same length the individual will fight and began to be irritated but after sometime they will conform to the group” (653). After reading articles similar to this the validity of this experiment is somewhat faulty. I agree with Lessing that this is a problem, but I feel as if the evidence is not sufficient enough to withhold her claim. I favor the experiment used in Solomon Asch’s “Opinions and Social Pressure”, as the experiment is somewhat similar to Lessing’s but accomplishes a lot more detail to support its assertion. They began using more trails then Lessing which increases the accuracy of the performance of the experiment. Yielding nearly the same results it also show the nature to conform. Even though the information in Lessing’s article is somewhat hard to interpret by her lack of sufficient evidence, never the less

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