Experiences from conducting an independent research project on coronavirus in Japan in late March, when the public consensus was that it was under control

I love this part:

Sontaku (忖度) means, roughly, to intuit the preferences of other parts of the system and act to facilitate them without ever having been explicitly instructed to do so by formal authorities within the system.

It's great to have a single word that underpins flocking behaviour or groupthink in humans. We're all consciously or unconsciously adapting our behaviour to unspoken rules of reward and punishment in our institutions and society at large. When we go with the group's signals, we often stampede in the wrong direction, against the evidence we perceive and our own reasoning.