Victims of Groupthink

Victims of Groupthink, subtitled A Psychological Study of Foreign-Policy Decisions and Fiascoes, is the book in which Irving Janis first set out the theory he is best known for. Janis, a research psychologist who spent nearly forty years in the Yale University psychology department, had begun from work in the American Soldier Project on the effect of extreme stress on group cohesiveness, and remained interested in how people make decisions under external threat. The book describes the systematic errors that groups make when reaching collective decisions, arguing that the desire for harmony leads members to minimise conflict and reach consensus without sufficiently testing, analysing and evaluating their ideas. Pressures for conformity, on this account, restrict the thinking of the group, bias its analysis, promote simplistic and stereotyped thinking, and stifle individual creative and independent thought. Janis drew his evidence from a series of disasters in American foreign policy, principally the failure to anticipate the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941 and the Bay of Pigs invasion of 1961, concluding that these decisions occurred largely because groupthink prevented contradictory views from being expressed and subsequently evaluated. A revised edition appeared in 1982 under the shorter title Groupthink.

Written from the wikipedia articles on Irving Janis and on groupthink.

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