> what leads people to this type of thinking once they get in a group setting? It just... seems endemic at this point.

Large and fascinating topic I'm researching, very relevant for agentic AI and ML too. One way that groups can fail is that they just don't work to dampen / vote out individual errors properly (see PAC learning, Condorcet). Other kinds of errors only occur in groups, and can occur even when constituents individually aren't actually wrong. Some related stuff is:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Condorcet's_jury_theorem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Group_polarization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Availability_cascade https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_cascade

The last is probably the most relevant here and made worse by the negative effects of hierarchy. To quote one section:

> The negative effects of informational cascades sometimes become a legal concern and laws have been enacted to neutralize them. Ward Farnsworth, a law professor, analyzed the legal aspects of informational cascades and gave several examples in his book The Legal Analyst: in many military courts, the officers voting to decide a case vote in reverse rank order (the officer of the lowest rank votes first), and he suggested it may be done so the lower-ranked officers would not be tempted by the cascade to vote with the more senior officers, who are believed to have more accurate judgement;

For token-maxxing, our "senior officers" are just executives, and line workers aren't going to vote. Who is the senior officer for those senior officers? It's not shareholders! It's really the executives of even bigger companies, because that is the actually applicable promotion ladder. It's all kind of obvious, but also a genuinely better explanation than "monkey see monkey do". These are just the simpler things, and there's more gnarly dilemmas in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_knowledge_(logic)