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Morendil comments on The Good News of Situationist Psychology - Less Wrong
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I've noticed this too. If I hang out for a group of people for a long time, my style of thinking starts to mimic theirs. If I'm with a group of school peers who think a given task is easy and fun, it literally feels easier to me than if the group of people around me is complaining about the boringness and difficulty of the task. Moods are contagious. Memes are contagious. Attitudes are contagious... And from an evo-psych perspective, being influenced heavily by your situation (especially your social situation) makes sense, because a group of people that all mirror each other in attitude and life goals will work better as a team.
Ahem.
There's no contradiction -- you're both right. From an evolutionary psychology perspective, groupthink would be adaptive for small tribes living in an extremely familiar environment for generations. In the ancestral environment it was possible to know everything, and nearly everyone did.. Truly new problems would be rare or nonexistent. In the modern era ... things have changed a bit.
OK, rereading the OP with that proviso mentally tacked on ("a group that, etc. will fare better in the ancestral environment") makes more sense.
Aren't there equally obvious reasons to consider viewpoint diversity adaptive, though, even in the EEA?
Exactly what I was about to write. At some point I'm sure it was adaptive, when groups of humans were small and faced harsh but relatively simple threats. Now, it's sometimes adaptive but sometimes not.