CJC 2025 JC2 GP PRELIM P2 - Insert (Passages)

2 1 2 3 4 5 6 Passage 1: A writer explores the harms of crowds. In our world today, people have at times allowed themselves to get swept up into the violent storm of groupthink, leading to collective emotions of hatred and anger, the loss of autonomy and the erasure of personal responsibility. This easily occurs at the behest of manipulative activists and politicians who seek not to unite and elevate us in love, but to control us through shared hostility. Our best defence against falling prey to destructive groupthink is to understand it. Research over many years has shown that people can “catch” feelings by being in proximity to others who are experiencing those feelings intensely. This syndrome explains the sensation of being rapturously transported that people typically report when they participate in a mass exercise of praise and feel their inhibitions falling away. The result is an emotional positive sum, by which feelings of love and unity multiply through the group. There can be a cost, however. Although this mind-melding is an emotionally rich experience, it may involve the crowd sacrificing its effective intelligence and wisdom. Scholars have demonstrated that crowds can become less discerning about factual accuracy than their individual members are. When social influence - the perception of whatever everyone else believes - is present, a crowd can become obstinately wrong. Any of us can be susceptible to the subtle social influence that induces groupthink: It is perfectly possible that things you have come to accept unquestioningly as true might have been learned in this way. Moreover, the emotional contagion of crowds is not necessarily positive; negative emotions are contagious too. Scholars have written about moments when people in a mob barrel through the usual social restraints and erupt into disproportionate violence. This explains events such as soccer-crowd disorders, in which violence breaks out among sports fans when such contagious mass emotions meet a clear adversary among the other team’s supporters. All of this brings us to the polarised moment in which we find ourselves, when a zero-sum, us- versus-them mentality has taken hold across the political spectrum in the United States , with the almost daily spectacle of crowds yelling angry slogans, trading insults, and resorting to naked aggression. This outcome was predictable, as both political parties in the United States have become more extreme in their partisanship, policies, and rhetoric, by most Americans ’ reckoning. Even prestigious Ivy League college campuses are seeing more h ate-filled protest activity than they have in the recent past. The coronavirus pandemic only accelerated the process, perhaps as a response to pent -up anguish, which has then been exploited by ideological leaders. If you have ever found yourself in