I recall while taking psychology classes in pursuit of my degree, studying about Group Think. Group Think is when people do things that are out of character for them in order to fit into a group; that is, belonging to the group becomes more important than their own personal values.

I was thinking about this phenomenon recently in relation to Vance Boelter, because I’ve been trying to reconcile in my own mind the first picture I saw of him where I saw kindness and good in his eyes, with him having become a murderer. I’ve always heard the eyes are the window to the soul and have always thought you can tell a lot about a person by what you see in their eyes. But later pictures of him show a difference in what you see in his eyes. So what changed?

While we don’t know yet what Vance’s motives were in shooting the two legislators and their spouses, I’ve been pondering whether it could have been a case of Group Think leading to actions that might otherwise have been out of character for him, because even those who were interviewed who knew him well felt like what he did was out of character for him.

While it is in no way my intent to downplay nor make excuses for his heinous crimes, I have recently become interested in trying to understand what leads people to commit crimes; I like to try to understand reasons behind people’s behaviors.

Vance was a man who purported to be a Christian, with a video on YouTube of him speaking to a crowd in Africa about his supposed salvation experience. And yet his speech is intermingled with comments against transgender people. Although there are certainly disagreements among Christian groups regarding people who are sexually “different,” under no circumstance should disagreements regarding how others live their lives lead to hatred or harm to them. That’s not representing a God who loves and offers forgiveness to all of us. The problem with one hatred is that it easily grows to other hatreds--once we let hate take root in our soul, it grows.

While we don’t know whether Group Think is what seemingly led to a change in Vance Boelter that led to such hatred in his heart, that he would shoot and kill others whom he disagreed with, we do know that Group Think is a dangerous phenomenon and one we all need to be both mindful of and careful about. If we take the time to self-examine where our heart is today in relation to where it’s been in the past, has it changed? And if so, has it changed for the better? or for the worse? When we carefully examine our values of the past contrasted with our values today, have they changed? And if so, for the better? or for the worse? And if we carefully evaluate those who are influencing our lives most, are there people we need to clean out of our lives? Are they positive influences? or negative ones?

Sometimes we aren’t mindful enough. We all need to be more mindful of the dangers of Group Think and to be very careful about the influences in our lives. A close friend from several years ago used to often tell me, “Be true to you.” Determine who you are, who you want to be, and be true to your own values instead of changing your values to align with others. Beware of the power of Group Think.

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