Summary of Doris Lessing's Group Minds
A Summary of Doris Lessing’s “Group Minds”
In the article “Group Minds”, by Doris Lessing, she analyzes the fact that most people feel the need to belong to a group, and cannot be alone. The British writer and Nobel prize winner for literature refers to these people as “group animals”, and believes there is nothing wrong with this. The risk with this statement is that it is hazardous to being unable to comprehend the social laws that demonstrate to us how to live our lives. Considering this, belonging to a group usually entitles the members to think alike, and like one another. This similar thinking, as Lessing explains, tends to change our own individual thoughts and ideas, and that maintaining an individual opinion is extremely difficult.
She finds that everyone has experienced this feeling of belonging to a certain group – and there have been numerous amounts of experiments conducted by sociologists and psychologists in connection with this. One experiment in particular is the one in which there are a group of people in a room, with one or two as a minority. There are many different situations, but one in particular mentioned by
Lessing is the comparing of length or size of two similar objects. They seem almost identical to each other, and the difference is very slight. The majority of the group agrees to the two objects being the same size, while the minority consist and argue about the difference in size. Eventually, the minority fall and agree with everyone else, even though they know the group is wrong. Along with all this, Lessing states that it is hard to stand out in a group, and that it is easier to go along with everyone else. We are loyal to the group or groups that we belong to, and alterations in opinion are not noted, due to fear of being an individual and not feeling like we belong to the group. Lessing concludes that if this attitude were taught in schools, important information regarding world
In the article “Group Minds”, by Doris Lessing, she analyzes the fact that most people feel the need to belong to a group, and cannot be alone. The British writer and Nobel prize winner for literature refers to these people as “group animals”, and believes there is nothing wrong with this. The risk with this statement is that it is hazardous to being unable to comprehend the social laws that demonstrate to us how to live our lives. Considering this, belonging to a group usually entitles the members to think alike, and like one another. This similar thinking, as Lessing explains, tends to change our own individual thoughts and ideas, and that maintaining an individual opinion is extremely difficult.
She finds that everyone has experienced this feeling of belonging to a certain group – and there have been numerous amounts of experiments conducted by sociologists and psychologists in connection with this. One experiment in particular is the one in which there are a group of people in a room, with one or two as a minority. There are many different situations, but one in particular mentioned by
Lessing is the comparing of length or size of two similar objects. They seem almost identical to each other, and the difference is very slight. The majority of the group agrees to the two objects being the same size, while the minority consist and argue about the difference in size. Eventually, the minority fall and agree with everyone else, even though they know the group is wrong. Along with all this, Lessing states that it is hard to stand out in a group, and that it is easier to go along with everyone else. We are loyal to the group or groups that we belong to, and alterations in opinion are not noted, due to fear of being an individual and not feeling like we belong to the group. Lessing concludes that if this attitude were taught in schools, important information regarding world