Groupthink

Groupthink, subtitled Psychological Studies of Policy Decisions and Fiascoes, is Irving Janis's revised and retitled version of his 1972 book, and it argues that cohesive decision-making groups fail in a characteristic way. Janis, an American research psychologist at Yale University, used the term for the mode of thinking people engage in when concurrence-seeking becomes so dominant in a close-knit group that it tends to override realistic appraisal of alternative courses of action. He coined it by analogy with the newspeak vocabulary of George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, and intended the unflattering sense, since he held that group pressures produce a deterioration in mental efficiency, reality testing and moral judgement. His main principle was that the more amiability and esprit de corps there is among the members of a policy-making ingroup, the greater the danger that independent critical thinking will be replaced by groupthink. Janis built the case from studies of American foreign-policy disasters, above all the failure to anticipate the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941 and the Bay of Pigs invasion of 1961, together with the prosecution of the Vietnam War, concluding that in each case the process prevented contradictory views from being expressed and evaluated.

Written from the wikipedia article on groupthink.

What this vault takes from it

Reliability

Not audited here. 15 notes in this vault draw on it.

People

• Colin M. Fisher
• Irving Janis
• Jerry Harvey