When good vibes become dangerous
On groupfeel, toxic positivity, and the difficulty of dissent
I learnt about something new this week.
It’s called groupfeel.
Which admittedly sounds vaguely dystopian - somewhere between a psychology term and a startup that obsessively tracks your emotional state through an app you definitely should not have downloaded.
BUT the idea itself is genuinely interesting.
Firstly, a reminder of its long-established sibling groupthink. This is the phenomenon where a group is so eager to agree that they don’t critically assess ideas, instead just falling in behind all of the others. In the moment, you may already question the decision - or you may genuinely feel like you agree - but you fail to speak up, and afterwards start to regret it as doubt creeps in. The desire to belong overrides the willingness to challenge.
It would be easy to berate yourself for this behaviour, but it’s a logical side effect of the way we have evolved. Humans want consensus. We deeply need to feel part of the herd. Our bodies demand it, as a necessary requirement for survival. And it’s important to remember that it really was - being rejected by the community was genuinely dangerous, as the individual would lose the protection of the bigger group. This is why our nervous systems feel just as brutalised when we are rejected by a group, as when we were attacked by a lion out hunting hundreds of years ago.
And that’s why you find yourself nodding along, eager to agree, even when a little feeling deep in your gut tells you that something is not right.
Some of the biggest political fiascos of the last 100 years - I’m looking at you, Weapons of Mass Distraction - can be firmly attributed to the impact of groupthink, and the inability of a group to challenge the accepted approach.
I worked in corporate roles of various flavours for 20 years before starting my own business, and groupthink was a perennial feature of virtually every leadership team (and arguably, meeting) I was a part of.
Groupfeel is adjacent to this, but subtly different.
A recent paper in Frontiers in Social Psychology describes it as the “dark side of group emotion” - what happens when groups don’t just start thinking alike, but feeling alike. The mood itself becomes contagious, and eventually difficult to challenge.
The idea of groupfeel is interesting, because we tend to assume that positive emotion is always, well, positive. We are constantly exhorted to be positive (if you’re a woman and you’ve never had someone yell “cheer up love, might never happen” you’ve clearly never lived in London).
Groupfeel then, is toxic positivity on a collective scale.
While the examples given, of a spiritual community and a trading floor, are intentionally extreme (as a related aside, anyone else just binge watched season 4 of Industry? I need to discuss immediately), I think we can all recognise where this has played out.
A group of girlfriends are adamant that OF COURSE he will call, why wouldn’t he, there must be a logical explanation such as a phone-in-toilet scenario. (Also, this genuinely happened to me once. I am serious. Ask me for the story sometime, it’s absurd). A team that is completely convinced that they have just won a competitive pitch, to the point that they are dumbfounded when they find out they have lost. A family, that is so sure the lottery is theirs this week that they start spending their winnings in advance.
Where is the balance between getting on as a group (essential for a collective), and sufficiently challenging your joint perspectives and decisions?
Because groups do need shared feeling. After all, that’s part of what makes collaboration possible in the first place. But they also needs mechanisms that interrupt emotional certainty before it hardens into collective delusion.
This is where good collaboration design becomes surprisingly important.
Firstly, we can build in challenge and critique as a general part of the process in any collective. Edward de Bono, as part of his ‘6 Hats’ approach, would call this the Black Hat. You can call it whatever you want! What about the Hole-Picker, the Empress of Disdain, or Captain Noir? Knock yourself out.
In any given group or discussion, you can allocate someone into this role. By making it a rotating role, it doesn’t fall on one person, who could otherwise start to feel like the Group Mum. Instead, the group takes joint accountability for tackling groupthink, as an embedded way of working. I have seen this work, to great effect, on not-for-profit boards where the group can otherwise be overly agreeable.
The next big tool is how you design specific interventions. If you have a particular high-stakes thing that needs to be critiqued (like a big client approach, for example), you can design around it. Play can be surprisingly effective here.
I was once working with a client, the incoming Chief People Officer at an ASX50 company who was bringing her new leadership team together for an offsite for the first time.
She genuinely wanted feedback on her new strategy, but knew it would be difficult to encourage a team to provide their frank and fearless feedback to their new boss, without worrying about offending her or getting her offside. We ran a module in the offsite where we put the strategy on trial - with different people in the team playing the prosecution, defence, and even a Judge Judy style judge (complete with gavel and wig). Framing what was essentially a feedback session up as a game took the emotion out and gave the team permission to really interrogate the new strategy, and our client got the stress-test she wanted. Importantly, everyone also had fun.
I suspect this matters far beyond leadership teams and boardrooms. You can see groupfeel in politics, startup culture, online communities, wellness spaces, media cycles - anywhere collective emotion starts overpowering independent thought.
The irony is that shared emotion is one of the best parts of being human. It just needs to be balanced with enough challenge and formalised dissent for the right decisions to get made.