The key factor is losing touch with reality, which results in individual or collective harm.
There is also such a thing as mass psychosis, and those are unfortunately a more difficult situation because the government and corporations are generally the ones driving them, and they are culturally normalized.
If he meant mass psychosis, he should have said mass psychosis. And again, since he is not a public health scientist or any flavor of psych professional, he probably shouldn’t make those proclamations. And should probably call for a wellness check instead of posting on social media if he were truly concerned for their health.
For people who are considered neurotypical, social coherence often overwrites reality. Its a mechanism for achieving consensus withing groups while spending the least amount of brain compute energy. Same goes for social metainfo tagged messages, they are more likely to influence reality perception, subconsciously. E.G: If a rich guy says you should be hyped the people who wanna get rich will feel hyped and emotional contagion can spread between people who belong to the same "tribe"
It's very visible for us atypical folk who can't participate well in groupthink at all
I guess at a company of seven, if two people are making the executive decisions and the two people are drinking the same AI kool-aid and the other five people are dutifully following these executive decisions, the whole company can be considered to be under this condition.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Groupthink
Maybe the difference would be the level of absurdity that's accepted
A practice (or a fashion) has more social value to the degree that it is absurd, because it signals the person is able and willing to align with the group at personal cost.
This is easiest to see in some insular religious communities.
Normie culture is quite similar: a vast complex of ever-shifting shibboleths which signal, "I'm one of you. You can trust me."
It signals the person is able and willing to follow the rules, to make themselves predictable, easier to understand and cooperate with.
But what I find fascinating is how the groupthink mechanism alters the subjective reality of people.
Lies or fantasy becomes reality if the entire group believes it and people truly believe the collectively accepted things to be real.
It just makes me think about consciousness overall or the lack of it, because all these things are mainly governed by subconscious mechanisms in the brain.
We are not the same when it comes to levels of consciousness and if the group mechanism demands less of it, people have no conscious choice about it
Of course nothing is black and white
but if you ask somebody after they exited the groupthink state they will not say they did it out of fear.
They often say: "it just happened"
Why were you behaving like that?
"We just did"
Inability to explain reasoning points to subconscious mechanisms.
It's deeply built into humans to groupthink.
Do they think out loud : "Now I should shut up because x"
Or is it an instinct they have after looking at others?
The more you can trace reasoning the more conscious, but the moment there is something created implicitly like an emotion or instinct then it's initiated by an automated subconscious response.
A large percentage of communication is non-verbal (emitted and processed subconsciously) so eye contact, micro expressions, gestures and body language play a large part in group communication.
I use that example because I have literally seen people fall into delusions of thinking they're God after talking to AI enough. That's shit is scary, for real.