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: an angry 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

“And one of the experiences that I had was, was generating outrage, right? Like you can find people that will agree with you, you can point somebody out and you can generate that energy. And once I saw, once I actually felt how you could do that, man, it felt like a, like a villain's superpower that's incredibly dangerous, right? Because yes, you can do that and yes, you can vanquish your enemies for a little while, but then you, you've put this darkness into the world that eventually comes for you. The mob always comes for you.”

“I think that it was really difficult for me when all the stuff with COVID was going on. I was like, man, mobs are forming so fast here. And then we watched the Canadian trucker convoy get blown into this, like, oh, these are traitors of their country. And when the Ukraine, Russia thing came out, and now suddenly people are so pro Ukrainian that you can't even bring up other ideas, it really, I think was the most startling of all. There is a straight line between the what people want you to believe and where if you go over that line, you're knocked out.”

“I was just talking with a teacher the other day who said one of the things he didn't expect would happen during COVID is when they came back to school, there is this a percentage of students, about 10% that became the strongest enforcers of people wearing masks. He's like, it wasn't very long before I got reported because I wasn't wearing my mask when doing some lessons, and all of a sudden you had kids going and reporting on me, which like, woo, that sent a chill down my spine.”

“Controlling a mob is an illusion. You can never control a mob once it gets going, because once it starts to consume that energy that let's go take down this person, let's go, you know, cancel or let's go destroy this person, then it takes on a life force all of its own. And once it organizes and once it gets enough foundational energy, it won't stop until it's spilled the blood of both the guilty and the innocent.”

“I think that when we use mob action, we run into a danger of if you use the tactics of your enemies, it is not long before you become your enemies, the very thing that you were fighting against.”

“So this happens a couple times and finally they're like, all right, what are we gonna do? Well there's a bunch of young guys, you know, 18 to 26 that don't have jobs. Why don't we pay them a little bit of money at night that the community security and then they'll just kind of go around. Eventually they decide, you know what, we know who it is. It's those people from that other town and we're gonna, we know they just got released from jail, so we're gonna go to their house. We're gonna bring pitchforks and torches, pull 'em out, drag 'em back to the city, put tires over and pour kerosene on 'em, light 'em on fire and kill 'em. And people do that when they're afraid and they don't think justice is coming.”

Tested against real rooms

Vance has argued this material with, among others:

• Kaspar Pavilanskas, guerrilla social media marketer (February 2021)
• Alex Kaschuta, host of the Subversive podcast (April 2022)
• Mark Reardon, St. Louis radio host (June 2026)
• Dr. Peter Schreiner, chemistry chair at Justus Liebig University, Germany (July 2020)
• Dr. Isaac Amon, legal scholar and speaker on Jewish history (April 2023)
• Christine (software engineer, last name withheld at her request) (November 2023)
• Jeremy Lakosh, retirement community executive and investor (May 2024)

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.