Groupthink

Janis, a Yale psychologist, coined the term groupthink and defined it as a mode of thinking that occurs when the desire for concurrence in a cohesive group overrides the realistic appraisal of alternatives. His method is the analysis of specific policy failures through the available records. The cases include the Bay of Pigs invasion, the failure to anticipate Pearl Harbor, the escalation in Vietnam, and the Korean War decision to cross the thirty-eighth parallel. His contrasting cases, where the same institutions produced good decisions, are the Cuban missile crisis and the Marshall Plan.

He identifies eight symptoms grouped into three types: overestimation of the group, including an illusion of invulnerability and a belief in its inherent morality; closed-mindedness, including collective rationalisation and stereotyped views of opponents; and pressure toward uniformity, including self-censorship, an illusion of unanimity, direct pressure on dissenters and self-appointed mindguards who protect the group from contrary information.

His prescriptions include that the leader should withhold their own preference until others have spoken, that the group should assign someone to argue the opposing case, that subgroups should work separately and reconvene, that outside experts should be brought in to challenge, and that a second-chance meeting should be held after a preliminary decision to air remaining doubts.

The Kennedy administration adopted several of these after the Bay of Pigs, and Janis attributes the different quality of the missile crisis decisions to them. The methodology is retrospective case analysis, and experimental support for groupthink as a unified construct has been weak. The individual mechanisms including self-censorship and conformity pressure are well supported separately.