Groupthink in Individual Decision-Making

This chapter provides an understanding of the relationship between this “gut feeling”, the inner sense of personal identity, and the identities attached to the social groups surrounding one’s life experience. It shows that social identities bring us closer or make us depart from the inner self in the way individuals make decisions (Sect. 1.2), act upon those decisions (Sect. 1.3) which eventually impact on the allocation of resources in human interactions (Sect. 1.4). Finally, it shows that the market economy and associated revealed preferences in market exchange are just the tip of the iceberg in the way group biases at the psychological level affect the process of resource allocation. Collective biases then aggregate at the macro-level in a non-systemic fashion whereby the aggregation of choices by individuals with multiple identities is unpredictable, unless dominant patterns of group behaviour can be identified and acted upon. Hence, the chapter ends by calling for a widening of the resource allocation spectrum from market to social interactions where the rule of legitimacy over access to resources refer to identity-based entitlement in exchange.