1
Introductton:
Why So Many
Miscalculations?
Nobody is perfect
Year after year newscasts and newspapers inform us of collective miscalculations-companies
that have unexpectedly gone bankrupt because of
misjudging their market, federal agencies that have ~istakenly authoriz~d
the use of chemical insecticides that poison our environment, and White
House executive committees that have made i11-conceived foreign policy decisions
that inadvertently bring the major powers to the brink of war. Most
people, when they hear about such fiascoes, simply remind themselves that,
after all, "organizations are run by human beings," "to err is human," and
"nobody is perfect." But platitudinous thoughts about human nature do not
help us to understand how and why avoidable miscalculat~ons are made.
Fiasco watchers who are unwilling to set the problem aside lil this easy
fashion will find that contemporary psychology has something to say (unfortunately
not very much) about distortions of thinking and other sources
of human error. The deficiencies about which we know the most pertain to
disturbances in the behavior of each individual in a decision-making group
-temporary states of elation, fear, or anger that reduce a person's mental
efficiency; chronic blind spots arising from a person's social prejudices;
shortcomings in information-processing that prevent a person from comprehending
the complex consequences of a seemingly simple policy decision.
One psychologist has suggested that because the information-processing
capabilities of every individual are limited, no responsible leader of a
large organization ought to make a policy decision without using a c?mputer
that is programmed to spell out all the probable benefits and costs of
each alternative under consideration. The usual way of trying to counteract
2
lntroduction 3
the limitations of individuals' mental functioning, however, is to relegate
important decisions to groups.
lmperfections of group decisions
Groups, like individuals, have shortcomings. Groups can bring out the
worst as well as the best in man. Nietzsche went so far as to say that madness
is the exception in individuals but the rule in groups. A considerable
amount of social science literature shows that in circumstances of extreme
crisis, group contagion occasionally gives rise to collective panic, violent
acts of scapegoating, and other forms of what could be called group madness.
Much more frequent, however, are instances of mindless conformity
and collective misjudgment of serious risks, which are collectively laughed
off in a clubby atmosphere of relaxed conviviality. Consider what happened
a few days before disaster struck the small mining town of Pitcher, Oklahoma,
in 1950. The local mining engineer had warned the inhabitants to
leave at once because the town had been accidentally undermined and
might cave in at any moment. At a Lion's Club meeting of leading citizens,
the day after the warning was issued, the members joked about the warning
and laughed uproariously when someone arrived wearing a parachute.
What the club members were communicating to each other by their collective
laughter was that "sensible people like us know better than to take seriously
those disaster warnings; we know it can't happen here, to our fine little
town." Within a few days, this collective complacency cost some of these
men and their families their lives.
Lack of vigilance and excessive risk-taking are forms of temporary
group derangement to which decision-making groups made up of responsible
executives are not at all immune. Sometimes the main trouble is that the
chief executive manipulates his advisers to rubber-stamp his own ill-conceived
proposals. In this book, however, I shall be dealing mainly with a
different source of defective decision-making, which often involves a much
more subtle form of faulty leadership: During the group's deliberations, the
leader does not deliberately try to get the group to tell him what he wants to
hear but is quite sincere in asking for honest opinions. The group members
are not transformed into sycophants. They are not afraid to speak their
minds. Nevertheless, subtle constraints, which the leader may reinforce inadvertently,
prevent a member from fully exercising his critical powers and
from openly expressing doubts when most others in the group appear to
have reached a consensus. In order to ta ke account of what is known about
the causes and consequences of such constraints we mu st briefly review
some of the main findings of research on group dynamics.
JANIS, Irving L. Victims of groupthink : a psychological study of foreign-policy decisions and fiascoes. Boston : Houghton Mifflin company, 1972. 277 s. ISBN 0395140021.
Tento materiál je určen pouze pro studijní účely.
4 FIASCOES
Effects of group cohesiveness
In applying the concepts of group dyna~ics to .recent ~istor.ic policy decisions,
I am extending the work of some plOneenng social scientists. The
power of a face-to-face group to set norms that infiuence members was emphasized
by two leading sociologists earIy in the twentieth centuryCharIes
Horton Cooley and George Herbert Mead. During that same period,
William Graham Sumner postulated that in-group solidarity increases
when cIashes arise with out-groups.
Kurt Lewin, the social psychologist who began using empirical methods
to study group dynamics during the 1940s, called attention to the prerequisites
for effective group decisions. He described the typical dilemmas faced
by executive committees, incIuding wartime groups of military planners
who seIect bomb targets and peacetime groups of policy-makers who try to
improve relations between nations. Lewin emphasized the need for factfinding
and objective appraisal of alternatives to determine whether the
chosen means will achieve a group's goals. He warned that the lack of objective
'standard s for evaluating goal achievement allows many opportunities
for errors of judgment and faulty decisions. Lewin's analysis of the behavior
of small groups also emphasized the importance of group
cohesiveness-that is, members' positive valuation of the group and their
motivation to continue to belong to it. When group cohesiveness is high, all
the members expres s solidarity, mutual Iiking, and positive feelings about
attending meetings and carrying out the routine tasks of the group. Lewin
was most interested in the positive effects of group cohesiveness and did not
investigate instances when members of cohesive groups make gross errors
and fail to correct their shared misjudgments.
The potentially detrimental effects of group cohesiveness were emphasized
by another theorist, Wilfred Bion, an eminent group therapist. Bion
described how the efficiency of all working groups can be adversely affected
by the preconscious myths and misconceptions of their mutually dependent
members-that is, by shared, basic assumptions that tend to preserve the
group without regard for the work at hand.
Under the infiuence of Kurt Lewin's pioneering work, Leon Festinger,
Harold Kelley, Stanley Schachter, and other social psychologists ha ve carried
out experiments and field investigations on the consequences of group
cohesiveness. I Summarizing a large body of research findings that had accumulated
during the 1950s and 1960s on the ways members of cohesive
groups infiuence each other, Dorwin Cartwright concIuded that the evidence
converges on three main types of effects:
Other things being equal, as cohesiveness increases there is an increase in a
group's capacity to retain members and in the degree of participation by
members in group activities. The greater a group's cohesiveness the more
lntroduction 5
power it has to bring about conformity to its norms and to gain acceptance
of its goals and assignment to tasks and roles. Finally, highly cohesive
groups provide a source of security for members which serves to reduce
anxiety and to heighten self-esteem.
AIso under investigation are the causes of group cohesiveness-how
and why group identification and feelings of solidarity develop. It has I~ng
been known that group solidarity increases markedly whenever a collection
of individuals faces a common source of external stress, such as the threat
of being injured or kilIed in military combat. Some researchers are beginning
to consider the effects on group solidarity of subtler. sources of str~ss,
such as those that beset groups of harried policy-makers In large orgamza-
tions.
Conformity to group norms
In studies of social cIubs and other small groups, conformity pressures
have frequently been observed. Whenever a member says something that
sounds out of line with the group's norms, the other members at first Increase
their communication with the deviant. Attempts to infiuence the
nonconformist member to revise or tone down his dissident ideas continue
as long as most members of the group feel hopeful about talking him into
changing his mind. But if they fail after repeated attempts, the amount of
communication they direct toward the deviant decreases markedly. The
members begin to excIude him, often quite subtIy at first and later more obviously,
in order to restore the unity of the group. A social psychologic.al experiment
conducted by Stanley Schachter with avocat~onal cIubs In an
American university-and replicated by Schachter and his collaborators In
seven European countries-showed that the more cohesive the group and
the more relevant the issue to the goals of the group, the greater IS the inclination
of the members to reject a nonconformist. Just as the members insulate
themselves from outside critics who threaten to disrupt the unity and
esprit de corps of their group, they take steps, often without being awar~ of
it, to counteract the disruptive infiuence of inside critics who are attacking
the group's norms. . . ,
The norms to which the members of a cohesive group adhere, as Bion s
analysis implies, do not always have a positive effect on the quaIity of the
group's performance. Studies in industrial organizations indicate that while
the norms of some work groups foster conscientiousness and high prod~ctivity,
the norms of other, similar work groups foster slowdowns and ~oclalizing
activities that reduce productivity. The same type of vanatron In
norms that facilitate or interfere with the group's work objectives may be
found among policy-making groups in large organizations.
JANIS, Irving L. Victims of groupthink : a psychological study of foreign-policy decisions and fiascoes. Boston : Houghton Mifflin company, 1972. 277 s. ISBN 0395140021.
Tento materiál je určen pouze pro studijní účely.
6 FIASCOES
Much of the current research on group dynamics is an effort to pinpoint
the causes of the crucial differences in group norms that make for good or
poor performance on group tasks, especially tasks pertaining to decisionmaking.
Among the phenomena that have been intensively investigated in
recent years are two detrimental tendenci es arising under certain conditions
not yet adequately understood-the tendency of groups to develop stereotyped
images that dehumanize out-groups against whom they are engaged
in competitive struggles and the tendency for the collective judgments arising
out of group discussions to shift toward riskier courses of action than
the individual members would otherwise be prepared to take.
Conceptions of political decision-making
Group dynamics is still in the early stages of scientific development,
and much remains to be learned. At present there are only a few concepts
and generalizations in which we can have confidence when we are trying to
understand the behavior of policy-making groups. Nevertheless, social scientists
concerned with policy-making in the government-most notably,
Karl Deutsch, Alexander George, and Joseph de Rivera-have started to
use group dynamics concepts that hold the promise of enriching politi cal
science. The rapprochement between the two fields, however, is still mainly
a perspective for the future rather than a current reality. My hope is that the
case studies in the present book will help to concretize and give added impetus
to this new development within the social sciences.
The use of theory and research on group dynamics is intended to supplement,
not to replace, the standard approaches to the study of political
decision-making. Three conceptual frameworks have been described and
applied by Graham T. Allison in his analysis of the resolution of the Cuban
missile crisis. First is the classical approach-Allison refers to it as the rational
actor model or The Theory of International Relations, with a capital
"T"-which is rooted in the work of well-known scholars such as Hans
Morgenthau, Arnold Wolfers, and Raymond Aron. Analysts using this approach
construct a set of objectives that the statesman responsible for a policy
is intending to achieve, "presuming always," as Morgenthau puts it,
"that he acts in a rational manner." The aim of this type of analysis is to determine
the ends the political actor is trying to attain by means of the policy
he has chosen.
The second framework described by Allison grows largely out of the
work of Herbert Simon, James March, and their collaborators. The organizational
process model emphasizes factors that limit rationality in decisionmaking
by individuals and organizations. These factors include the limitalntroduction
7
tions of man's capacity to process information, constraints on attempts to
obtain the information necessary for calculating maximal gains, and the
tendency to find a course of action that will satisfy the most minimal goals
instead of seeking for the action with the best consequences (this is known
as a satisficing strategy). This approach takes account of "organizational rigidities"
such as routines and procedures of bureaucratic organizations that
grind out platitudes about what can be done to attain objectives.
The third framework, called by Allison the governmental politics
model, derives from the work of Gabriel Almond, Charles E. Lindblom,
Richard N eustadt, and other political scientists. It focuses on the intrusions
of the games of domestic and local bureaucratic politics into the dangerous
competitive games of international relations. In Lindblom's variant of this
approach, governmental policy-making is a matter of "muddling through":
Policy-makers take one little step after another and gradually change the
old policy into a new one, all the while making compromises that keep
every politically powerful group that enters the bargaining reasonably
satisfied, or at least not dissatisfied enough to obstruct or sabotage the new
trend.
Allison presents the three approaches as conceptual model s to help social
scientists generate hypotheees and discern important features that
might otherwise be overlooked when they are trying to explain how and
why a new foreign policy decision came about. He points out, "The best analysts
of foreign policy manage to weave strands of each of the three conceptual
models into their explanations." At the very least, according to Allison,
these conceptual model s can pose the questions to be answered in a
systematic way in case studies of foreign policy decision-making.
Most theorists have little respect for "case studies"-in large part because
of the atheoretical character of case studies of the past. ... What we need
is a new kind of "case study" done with theoretical alertness to the range
of factors identified by Models I, II, and III (and others) on the basis of
which to begin refining and testing propositions and models.
ln order to use the three conceptual models, analysts must take as the
unit of analysis either the individual decision-maker or a large group such
as the State Department, the governmenťs intelligence community, or the
various coalitions within the bureaucracy that participate in bargaining.
The group dynamics approach-which should be considered a fourth conceptual
model-uses a different unit of analysis. When we are trying to understand
how certain avoidable policy errors happen to be made, we should
look into the behavior of the small group of decision-makers, because all
the well-known errors stemming from limitations of an individual and of a
large organization can be greatly augmented by group processes that produce
shared miscalculations.
JANIS, Irving L. Victims of groupthink : a psychological study of foreign-policy decisions and fiascoes. Boston : Houghton Mifflin company, 1972. 277 s. ISBN 0395140021.
Tento materiál je určen pouze pro studijní účely.
8 FIASCOES
What is groupthink?
The group dynamics approach is ba sed on the working assumption that
the members ofpolicy-making groups, no matter how mindfuJ they may be
of their exalted national status and of their heavy responsibilities, are subjected
to the pressures widely observed in groups of ordinary citizens. In my
earlier research on group dynamics, I was impressed by repeated manifestations
of the effects-both unfavorable and favorable-of the social pressures
that typically develop in cohesive groups-in infantry platoons, air
crews, therapy groups, seminars, and self-study or encounter groups of executives
receiving leadership training.! In all these groups, just as in the industrial
work groups described by other investigators, members tend to
evolve informal objectives to preserve friendly intragroup relations and this
becomes part of the hidden agenda at their meetings. When conducting research
on groups of heavy smokers at a clinic set up to help people stop
smoking, I noticed a seemingly irrational tendency for the members to exert
pressure on each other to increase their smoking as the time for the final
meeting approached. This appeared to be a collusive effort to display mutual
dependence and resistance to the termination of the group sessions.
Sometimes, even long before members become concerned about the
final separation, clear-cut signs of pressures toward uniformity subvert the
fundamental purpose of group meetings. At the second meeting of one
group of smokers, consisting of twelve middle-class American men and
women, two of the most dominant members to ok the position that heavy
smoking was an almost incurable addiction. The majority of the others soon
agreed that no one could be expected to cut down drastically. One heavy
smoker, a middle-aged business executive, took issue with this consensus,
arguing that by using will power he had stopped smoking since joining the
group and that everyone else could do the same. His declaration was followed
by a heated discussion, which continued in the halls of the building
after the formal meeting adjourned. Most of the others ganged up against
the man who was deviating from the group consensus. Then, at the beginning
of the next meeting, the deviant announced that he had made an important
decision. "When I joined," he said, "I agreed to follow the two
main rules required by the clinic-to make a conscientious effort to stop
smoking and to attend every meeting. But I have learned from experience in
this group that you can only follow one of the rules, you can't follow both.
And so, I have decided that I will continue to attend every meeting but I
have gone back to smoking two packs a day and I will not make any effort
to stop smoking again until after the last meeting." Whereupon, the other
members beamed at him and applauded enthusiastical!y, welcoming him
back to the fold. No one commented on the fact that the whole point of the
meetings was to help each individuaf to cut down on smoking as rapidly as
Lntroduction 9
possible. As a psychological consultant to the group, I tried to call this to
the members' attention, and so did my collaborator, Dr. Michael Kahn. But
during that meeting the members managed to ignore our comments and reiterated
their consensus that heavy smoking was an addiction from which
no one would be cured except by cutting down very gradual!y over a long
period of time.
. This episode-an extreme form of groupthink-was on ly one manifestauon
of a general pattern that the group displayed. At every meeting, the
members were arniable, reasserted their warm feelings of solidarity, and
sought complete concurrence on every important topic, with no reappearance
of the unpleasant bickering that would spoi! the cozy atmosphere. The
concurrence-seeking tendency could be maintained, however, only at the
expense of ignoring realistic chal!enges (like those posed by the psychological
consultants) and distorting members' observations of individual differences
that would cal! into question the shared assumption that everyone
111the group had the same type of addiction problem. It seemed that in this
smoking group I was observing another instance of the groupthink pattern I
had encountered in observations ofwidely contrasting groups whose members
came from diverse sectors of society and were meeting together for social,
educational, vocational, or other purposes. Just like the group in the
smokmg clinic, all these different types of groups had shown signs of high
cohesiveness and of an accompanying concurrence-seeking tendency that
interfered with critical thinking-the central features of groupthink.
I use the term "groupthink" as a quick and easy way to refer to a mode
of thinking that people engage in when they are deeply involved in a cohesive
1I1-group, when the members' strivings for unanimity override their motivation
to realistical!y appraise alternative courses of action. "Groupthink"
lS a term of the same order as the words in the newspeak vocabulary George
Orwel! presents in his dismaying 1984-a vocabulary with terms such as
:'doublethink" and "crimethink." By putting groupthink with those Orwel!lan
words, I realize that groupthink takes on an invidious connotation. The
invidiousness is intentional: Groupthink refers to a deterioration of mental
efficiency, reality testing, and moral judgment that results from in-group
pressures.
Selection of the fiascoes
When I began to investigate the Bay of Pigs invasion, the decision to escalate
the Korean War, and other fiascoes, for purposes ofstudying sources
of error in foreign policy decision-making, I was initially surprised to discover
the pervasiveness of symptoms of groupthink. Although the sympJANIS,
Irving L. Victims of groupthink : a psychological study of foreign-policy decisions and fiascoes. Boston : Houghton Mifflin company, 1972. 277 s. ISBN 0395140021.
Tento materiál je určen pouze pro studijní účely.
10 FIASCOES
toms that could be discerned from published accounts of the deliberations
did not seem as obtrusive as in the face-to-face groups I had observed directly,
nevertheless signs of poor decision-making as a result of concurrence-seeking
were unmistakable.
After noting the first few examples of grossly miscalculated policy decisions
that seemed at least partly attributable to group processes, I began
collecting instances of similar fiascoes from a variety of sources, such as
Harold Wilensky's Organizational lntelligence and Barton Whaley's Stratagem.
In a short time, with the help of suggestions from colleagues in political
science and library research by students in my seminars on group dynamics,
I compiled a list of several dozen fiascoes. I cut the list to about two
dozen that appeared appropriate for an analysis of group processes. I was
looking for instances in which a defective decision was made in a series of
meetings by a few policy-makers who constituted a cohesive group. By a defective
decision, I mean one that results from decision-making practices of
extremely poor quality. In other words, the fiascoes that I selected for analysis
deserved to be fiascoes because of the grossly inadequate way the policy-makers
carried out their decision-making tasks.
At least six major defects in decision-making contribute to failures to
solve problems adequately. First, the group's discussions are limited to a
few alternative courses of action (often only two) without a survey of the
full range of alternatives. Second, the group fails to reexamine the course of
action initially preferred by the majority of members from the standpoint of
nonobvious risks and drawbacks that had not been considered when it was
originally evaluated. Third, the members neglect courses of action initially
evaluated as unsatisfactory by the majority of the group: They spend little
or no time discussing whether they have overlooked nonobvious gains or
whether there are ways of reducing the seemingly prohibitive costs that had
made the alternatives seem undesirable. Fourth, members make little or no
attempt to obtain information from experts who can supply sound estimates
of losses and gains to be expected from alternative courses of actions. Fifth,
selective bias is shown in the way the group reacts to factual information
and relevant judgments from experts, the mass media, and outside critics.
The members show interest in facts and opinions that support their initially
preferred policy and take up time in their meetings to discuss them, but they
tend to ignore facts and opinions that do not support their initially preferred
policy. Sixth, the members spend little time deliberating about how
the chosen policy might be hindered by bureaucratic inertia, sabotaged by
political opponents, or temporarily derailed by the common accidents that
happen to the best of well-laid plans. Consequently, they fail to work out
contingency plans to cope with foreseeable setbacks that could endanger
the overall success of the chosen course of action.
I assume that these six defects and some related features of inadequate
decision-making result from groupthink. But, of course, each of the six can
1ntroduction 11
arise from other common causes of human stupidity as well-erroneous intelligence,
information overload, fatigue, blinding prejudice, and ignorance.
Whether produced by groupthink or by other causes, a decision suffering
from most of these defects has relatively little chance of success.
The four foreign policy fiascoes I have selected for intensive case studies
are the ones of greatest historical importance among the defective decisions
by the United States government I have examined. Each clearly
meets two important criteria for classifying a decision as a candidate for
psychological analysis in terms of group dynamics: Each presents numerous
indications that (I) the decision-making group was cohesive and that
(2) decision-making was extremely defective. (Other fiascoes in my original
list also meet these criteria and are discussed briefly in the last part of the
book, where I talk about candidates for subsequent investigations bearing
on the generality of groupthink phenomena.)
When the conditions specified by these two criteria are met, according
to the groupthink hypothesis there is a better-than-chance likelihood that
one of the causes of the defective decision was a strong concurrence-seeking
tendency, which is the motivation that gives rise to all the symptoms of
groupthink.
The irnperfect link between groupthink and
fiascoes
Simply because the outcome of a group decision has turned out to be a
fiasco, I do not assume that it must have been the result of groupthink or
even that it was the result of defective decision-making. Nor do I expect
that every defective decision, whether arising from groupthink or from
other causes, will produce a fiasco. Defective decisions based on misinformation
and poor judgment sometimes lead to successful outcomes. We do
not necessarily have to accept at face value the well-known thesis-eloquently
put forth by Leo Tolstoy in War and Peace and elaborated by Norman
Mailer in The Naked and the Dead-that the decisions made by military
commanders have nothing to do with military success. But we must
acknowledge that chance and the stupidity of the enemy can sometimes
give a silk-purse ending to a command decision worth less than a sow's ear.
At the outset of World War I, the French high command made incredible
errors, repeatedly ignoring warnings from their military intelligence officers
about the Schlieffen plan. But the German high command made even
grosser errors while executing the plan, preventing the Germans from capitalizing
on the French rout and depriving them of the quick victory that was
within their grasp.
Groupthink is conducive to errors in decision-making, and such errors
JANIS, Irving L. Victims of groupthink : a psychological study of foreign-policy decisions and fiascoes. Boston : Houghton Mifflin company, 1972. 277 s. ISBN 0395140021.
Tento materiál je určen pouze pro studijní účely.
12 FIASCOES
increase the likelihood of a poor outcome. Often the result is a fiasco, but
not always. Suppose that because of lucky accidents fostered by absurd
command decisions by the Cuban military leaders, the Kennedy administration's
Bay of Pigs invasion had been successful in provoking a civil war
in Cuba and led to the overthrow of the Castro regime. Analysis of the decision
to invade Cuba would stili support the groupthink hypothesis, for the
evidence shows that Kennedy's White House group was highly cohesive,
clearly displayed symptoms of defective decision-rnaking, and exhibited all
the major symptoms of groupthink. Thus, even if the Bay of Pigs decision
had produced a triumph rather than a defeat, it would stili be an example of
the potentially adverse effects of groupthink (even though the invasion
would not, in that case, be classified as a fiasco).
Hardhearted actions by softheaded groups
At first I was surprised by the extent to which the groups in the fiascoes
I have examined adhered to group norms and pressures toward uniformity.
Just as in groups of ordinary citizens, a dominant characteristic appears to
be remaining loyal to the group by sticking with the decisions to which the
group has committed itself, even when the policy is working badly and has
unintended consequences that disturb the conscience of the members. In a
sen se, members consider loyalty to the group the highest form of morality.
That loyalty requires each member to avoid raising controversial issues,
questioning weak arguments, or calling a halt to softheaded thinking.
Paradoxically, softheaded groups are likely to be extremely hardhearted
toward out-groups and enemies. In dealing with a rival nation, policymakers
comprising an amiable group find it relatively easy to authorize dehumanizing
solutions such as large-scale bombings. An affable group of
government officials is unlikely to pursue the difficult and controversial issues
that arise when alternatives to a harsh military solution come up for
discussion. Nor are the members inclined to raise ethical issues that imply
that this "fine group of ours, with its humanitarianism and its high-minded
principles, might be capable of adopting a course of action that is inhumane
and immoral."
Many other sources of human error can prevent government leaders
from arriving at well worked out decisions, resulting in failures to achieve
their practical objectives and violations of their own standards of ethical
conduct. But, unlike groupthink, these other sources of error do not typically
entail increases in hardheartedness along with softheadedness. Some
errors involve blind spots that stem from the personality of the decisionmakers.
Special circumstances produce unusual fatigue and emotional
Introduction 13
stresses that interfere with efficient decision-making. Numerous institutional
features of the social structure in which the group is located may also
cause inefficiency and prevent adequate communication with experts. In
addition, well-known interferences with sound thinking arise when the decision-rnakers
comprise a noncohesive group. For example, when the mernbers
have no sense of loyalty to the group and regard themselves merely as
representatives of different departments, with clashing interests, the meetings
may become bitter power struggles, at the expense of effective decision-
making.
The concept of groupthink pinpoints an entirely different source of
trouble, residing neither in the individual nor in the organizational setting.
Over and beyond all the familiar sources of human error is a powerful
source of defective judgment that arises in cohesive groups-the concurrence-seeking
tendency, which fosters overoptimism, lack of vigilance, and
sloganistic thinking about the weakness and immorality of out-groups. This
tendency can take its toll even when the decision-rnakers are conscientious
statesmen trying to make the best possible decisions for their country and
for all mankind.
.I do not mean to imply that all cohesive groups suffer from groupthink,
though all may display its symptoms from time to time. Nor should we infer
from the term "groupthink" that group decisions are typically inefficient or
harmfuJ. On the contrary, a group whose members have properly defined
roles, with traditions and standard operating procedures that facilitate critical
inquiry, is probably capable of making better decisions than any individual
in the group who works on the problem alone. And yet the advantages
of having decisions made by groups are often lost because of
psychological pressures that arise when the members work closely together,
share the same values, and above all face a crisis situation in which everyone
is subjected to stresses that generate a strong need for affiliation. In
these circumstances, as conformity pressures begin to dominate, groupthink
and the attendant deterioration of decision-making set in.
The central theme of my analysis can be summarized in this generalization,
which I offer in the spirit of Parkinson's laws: The more amiability and
esprit de corps among the members oj a policy-making in-group, the greater is
the danger lhal independent critical thinking will be replaced by groupthink,
which is likely to result in irrational and dehumanizing actions directed against
out -groups.
JANIS, Irving L. Victims of groupthink : a psychological study of foreign-policy decisions and fiascoes. Boston : Houghton Mifflin company, 1972. 277 s. ISBN 0395140021.
Tento materiál je určen pouze pro studijní účely.