The Power of Group Think

     Group think can become extremely dangerous to society with a perfect example being set at Penn State University. Upon the firing of Joe Paterno, thousands of Penn State students and fans rioted throughout the streets of the university, breaking public property and flipping cars. The students heard the news of Joe Paterno’s firing without knowing the true reasons of the University and quickly felt betrayed as fans. Joe Paterno is clearly an icon to the Penn State community and the students felt it was their duty to form together to avenge his firing and show their displeasure. With the power of thousands of students all thinking the same thing and not hearing any outside information, they quickly formed an “us against the world” attitude. Since the students only interact with each other, they all had the same view points on the scandal and shunned any outside opinions with the belief that since they attend Penn State they know the real story. With Penn State being the crazy party school that it is, a couple beers mixed with angered attitudes of thousands of students caused the students to riot and felt that is was their right in doing so. Knowing some friends that attend Penn State, after more information was released and the riots were shown as an embarrassment to the student body, the angry group think was sort of dispersed and new opinions came about between the students. The rioting at Penn State displayed how the power of group think can become extremely dangerous and powerful. 

Meeting New People

                Being in my third year here at Kutztown University, I never thought I would ever interact or come even relatively close to getting along with one of the towns people. With my background and judgment, I never wanted to even interact with anyone from the town. So with this being said I do have to admit that this person approached me, but normally I would have tried to end the conversation quickly and carry on with my day. At “club” shorty’s on wing night, a man approached the table where myself and two of my teammates were seated completely focused on eating the god like teriyaki wings. He said his name, which I also have to admit I quickly forgot, and told us he overheard our conversation about football and asked if we were on the team. We all answered yes and he quickly started telling us about how excited he is to have a winning team in town and how he and his friends bet on how many points we will score for each upcoming game. Before I knew it, we ended up talking to this man for over twenty minutes and found out that we had a lot more in common with him than we ever would have thought, especially considering how much older he is and by the way he was dressed. The man turned out to be a crazed football fan from the greater Philly area that moved out here for work. The whole event turned out to be a great learning experience for me about the prejudgments that most students have about the people that live in this town.     

Dyadic Relationships

           There is no part of a dyadic relationship that is not communication. People’s brains are constantly processing information subconsciously and can turn nothing into something. When someone is trying to not communicate, for example sitting down expressionless, is still communicating that the person does not want to communicate. This is because of the spontaneous factor of dyadic communication. Since dyadic communication is not planned out, no matter what one person in the conversation does, the other person will have to spontaneously process what is going on. Four other characteristics that make all dyadic relationships communication are direct, personal, immediate, and informal.

            The directness of dyadic relationships forces everything to be some sort of communication. For example, a person can hide in a group of people, but cannot hide in a face to face with another person. Being so direct, everything one person in a dyadic relationship does is communication because some sort of message will be sent to the other willingly or unwillingly. The immediateness of dyadic relationships causes each person to expect a response right away, causing each person so subconsciously process what is going on. The informal characteristic goes along with the spontaneous characteristic since everything is not planned out.

            Everything in a dyadic relationship is communication; there is no way around it. Even when someone tries to not communicate they are communicating something. The direct, personal, immediate, spontaneous, and informal characteristics of dyadic communication forces whatever is going on at the time to be some sort of communication.