Groupthink, Polarization, and the Psychology of the Mob

Most speakers on workplace polarization come from research or journalism. Vance Crowe comes from experience. He witnessed an actual mob in Kenya during his Peace Corps service, studied the group psychology of genocide in graduate school, and later stood inside the internet's largest pile-ons as the public face of the most distrusted company in America.

His argument: the mob is the most dangerous force on earth, and the moment you adopt the tactics of your enemies you become them. Audiences leave understanding how conformity spirals start, why good people join pile-ons, and what leaders can do before fear takes over a room.

In his own words

“I knew many of the boys that were a part of that vigilante group, they were not bad or evil or any different than I was as an 18-year-old kid, but something was triggered in their brain that gave them the permission to feel righteous. That they knew and understood that the people living in that house were bad and evil and the bringers of the things that everyone was afraid of. And so that made them feel justified, giving their own individual sanity, their own individual responsibility, their own individual way of looking at the world. And they gave it over to the crowd because they wanted that fear to end.”

“I get worried because once the mob has taken hold, there is no stopping it. No individual, no amount of rationality, no amount of trying to slow people down and trying to stop them can stop the wave once it is built up. And so, while I'm sure that you are a perfectly rational person, you're a person that wants to make the right decisions, I just wanna call out that all of us are capable of joining a mob.”

“I know that it is possible to get an outraged mob to be really upset about a thing and point that outrage at a group and, and try and, and try and get some kind of change there. But that's not lasting change. And really it's, it's destructive as opposed to constructive.”

“Whereas there was a while there where I thought that that was something worth striving for having the ability to do that in case you needed to. Now I think very, very poorly of that. In fact, I I, it it's, it's a level of connection on social media that not only do I wish other people didn't have, I'm, I'm pretty comfortable with even me not having it because that, that, with that sort of power to drive outrage and pointed at people, it's a dangerous power.”

“You could go outside of my backyard and hear the mobs of people yelling, I don't want that. Whatever we need to do to stop that, let's stop that. And so that was a really tense time... I had also never been afraid living in the United States, but when you could go outside of my backyard and hear the mobs of people.”

“I read that as you know, a bunch of young guys trying to psych themselves up to go be in a tense situation. And then when it gets brought to the light of day, there are a lot of text messages that nobody really wants brought to the light of day when you think you're talking to your buddies.”

Tested against real rooms

Vance has argued this material with, among others:

• Dr. Doug Sammons, chemist and glyphosate resistance researcher (May 2019)
• Bob Bayes, retired St. Louis County detective, 40-year career (June 2019)
• Dwayne Faber, dairy farmer, Washington state (March 2020)
• Jared McDaniel, Oklahoma Panhandle cattle rancher and host of Ag Uncensored (April 2020)
• [[Rob Sharkey and Megz Reynolds]] (September 2019)
• [[Jason Bockman]] (September 2019)
• Jayson Lusk (agricultural economist, Purdue University) (April 2020)
• Dan Broadbent (blogger/publisher, meme strategist) (April 2020)
• Kevin Folta (October 2019)
• Brian Rund (ag chemical sales, crop protection manufacturer) (April 2020)
• Spencer Wells (population geneticist, National Geographic Explorer) (April 2020)
• null (November 2019)
• Lyle Benjamin (April 2020)
• Joscha Bach, computational metapsychologist / AI researcher (May 2023)
• Dwayne Faber & Jared McDaniel (December 2019)
• John Duckworth, CEO of True Title, a St. Louis title insurance company (February 2020)

Common questions

Our workforce is politically divided and it is affecting teamwork. Can Vance speak about working across that divide?

Yes. This is the core of his mob and groupthink material: why polarization feels safer than dissent, how conformity cascades start inside teams, and practical ways leaders lower the temperature without scolding anyone. It pairs naturally with his conversation craft toolkit.

Who is this talk for?

HR and leadership conferences, financial services leadership summits, university leadership series, and any organization where people have stopped saying what they think.

How is this different from psychological safety or civility training?

Civility training tells people to behave. Vance explains the mechanism: how fear moves through groups, why mobs feel righteous from the inside, and how to build teams where disagreement is safe because it is expected.