Groupthink

Groupthink is the extreme concurrence-seeking displayed by decision-making groups that is predicted to result in highly defective decisions. The groupthink concept was first developed by Irving Janis in 1972 to explain such disastrous incidents as the United States's decision to invade the Bay of Pigs in Cuba, the failure of the United States military to foresee the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Great Britain's appeasement of Nazi Germany in World War II, and the decisions to escalate the Vietnam War and the Korean War. According to this perspective, groupthink is hypothesized to occur when particular antecedent conditions are present. These include high group cohesiveness, insulation from experts, limited search and appraisal of information, directive leadership, and high stress combined with low self-esteem and little hope of finding a better solution to a pressing problem than that favored by the group leader or influential members.

These conditions lead to extreme concurrence-seeking that in turn leads to two classes of faulty outcomes: symptoms of groupthink and symptoms of defective decision making. Symptoms of groupthink consist of the illusion of invulnerability (the group can do no wrong), collective rationalization, stereotypes of outgroups, self-censorship (individuals do not express any objections to the group decision), mindguards (group members who enforce conformity), and belief in the inherent morality of the group. Symptoms of defective decision making include incomplete survey of alternatives and objectives, poor information search, failure to appraise the risks of the preferred solution, and selective information processing. These two categories of symptoms in turn are predicted to lead to highly defective decision making.

The concept of groupthink has had enormous popular appeal and captured the collective imagination of the public and analysts alike. For example, groupthink appeared as a dictionary term just 3 years after it was coined. In the popular press, the term is commonly used to refer to any group that appears to have made a poor decision without regard to existing evidence that conflicted with the group's choice. Researchers have continued to search for new examples of failed decisions that may support the groupthink theory. For example, recent work has used the groupthink concept to analyze the World Com accounting fraud incident, Nazi Germany's decision to invade the Soviet Union in 1941, Ford Motor Company's decision to market the Edsel, Gruenenthal Chemie's decision to market the drug thalidomide, the tragedy at Kent State during the Vietnam War, the Challenger and Columbia space shuttle tragedies, the European Union decision about imposing sanctions in the Chechnya conflict, and a city council's decision to ignore state-mandated earthquake preparation procedures.