When Distrusting Experts Becomes Its Own Dogma

In his Atlantic essay “Everyone Hates Groupthink. Experts Aren’t Sure It Exists,” David Merritt Johns challenges the reflexive idea that groupthink is always harmful. He notes that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and the MAHA movement accuse public-health experts of groupthink in order to undermine trust in institutions. Their narrative is familiar: elite scientists misled the public on masks and lockdowns, so now vaccines must be suspect too. But this rebellion against “consensus” doesn’t eliminate groupthink—it simply creates a rival version of it, one driven by conspiracy, resentment, and selective skepticism.

Johns argues that not all group alignment is created equal. Sometimes consensus forms because experts evaluate evidence and converge on the best available guidance. Other times, conformity produces catastrophic choices. The trick is to distinguish disciplined collaboration from unthinking obedience. Irving Janis gave groupthink its negative reputation as the enemy of independent thought, but scholars like Sally Riggs Fuller and Ramon Alday complicate the picture, noting that what we often label “groupthink” may actually be bureaucratic opportunism—people following political incentives, not blind loyalty.

The term has since been weaponized. Political commentators now dismiss peer-reviewed science as “groupthink” whenever it clashes with their ideology. Johns argues this is sloppy and dangerous. Blaming pandemic missteps on a mystical force called groupthink distracts from real causes, while assuming “lonethink”—the rebel outsider posture—automatically produces better decisions is equally foolish. Expertise demands rigorous debate, scrutiny, and correction, not reflexive suspicion or anti-institution bravado.

Following conspiracy movements like MAHA and their crusade against vaccines reveals the stakes. Lives saved through immunization are treated as evidence of corruption, and public-health systems are condemned for doing exactly what they are designed to do: evaluate data, revise strategy, and protect citizens. When political identity replaces critical thinking and “groupthink” becomes a lazy insult for any professional consensus, the result is not liberation—it is reckless decision-making disguised as independent thought.