Groupthink illustrated

In my opinion, the story of the "six-pixel bird" provides a textbook real-life example of groupthink. A small error by one person became a colossal error when it was simply accepted without question by large numbers of other people.

From page 223 of "The Grail Bird" (the bold font is mine):

As I watched the area where I thought the bird would be, I noticed a black-and-white object on a tree,", he [David Luneau] said. "After watching this part of the tape many times, I began to have more confidence that the flying bird was really our quarry."

David showed the videotape to Bobby [Harrison] soon after he made it, so I called Bobby to get his opinion. He laughed. "It makes a bad Bigfoot movie look good,", he said. "But you know, I do think it's the bird. I especially like that black-and-white shape on the tree. The size is perfect. And I've been to that tree and looked at that spot on its trunk. There's nothing like that on it."

After the initial error by Luneau, the branch stub error was evidently accepted as truth by the rest of Cornell's vaunted team; by The Nature Conservancy; by the peer reviewers at Science magazine; by the Department of the Interior scientists; the Arkansas bird records committee; the "60 Minutes" crew and the rest of the mass media, etc etc.

Cornell's full team mistook a tree branch for an Ivory-bill, given a year's time to replay and analyze a video endlessly. Surely it would be easier for individual team members to mistake a Pileated for an IBWO, given a one-time fleeting glimpse, and easier yet to mistake a glimpse of an abnormal Pileated for an IBWO.

You didn't need to be an eminent ornithologist to catch this error--all you had to do was watch the Luneau video and notice all the other potential "six-pixel birds" as they appeared and disappeared elsewhere on the screen.

(Note--Cornell's current, tortured defense of the "six-pixel bird" is here.)