Anthony R. Pratkanis

Who they are

Pratkanis is named on two publications that matter to the groupthink literature. The first is a 1992 paper in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology with Marlene E. Turner, P. Probasco and C. Leve, which tested a social identity maintenance perspective on groupthink. The second is a 1998 article with Turner in Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes titled Twenty-five years of groupthink theory and research: Lessons from the evaluation of a theory.

Key papers

Turner, M. E., Pratkanis, A. R., Probasco, P., & Leve, C. (1992). Threat, cohesion, and group effectiveness: Testing a social identity maintenance perspective on groupthink. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 63(5), 781-796. doi:10.1037/0022-3514.63.5.781 https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.63.5.781

Turner, M. E., & Pratkanis, A. R. (1998). Twenty-five years of groupthink theory and research: Lessons from the evaluation of a theory. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 73(2-3), 105-115.

Key ideas

The 1992 paper starts from the observation that experimental support for Janis's account of groupthink had been weak, and it builds the conditions for groupthink in the laboratory in three experiments. In the first, cohesion and threat to members' self-esteem were manipulated, and groups under both conditions made poor decisions. The second experiment confirmed that the cohesion manipulation had worked. In the third, the poor decisions appeared again, and groups under groupthink conditions that were given an excuse for possible poor performance made significantly better decisions.

The authors interpret these results through a social identity maintenance perspective. On that reading, groupthink is a collective effort to ward off negative views of the group. The reading places the source of the pattern in how members feel about their group, alongside the shared wish for agreement that Janis emphasised, and it accounts for the effect of the excuse: an excuse offers the group a way to explain a poor outcome without looking bad.

The article What is groupthink? reports these experiments as one of three tests of the ingredients of Janis's theory. The other two concern one-sided information search in groups that already agree and the link between identification and speaking up. The earlier article Does Groupthink Explain Bad Decisions covers the case studies and the reviews of the research.

Janis's own account, in Victims of Groupthink (1972) and Groupthink (1982), is built on reconstructions of decisions. Colin Fisher's The Collective Edge credits Janis for the concept and argues for structural remedies in how groups are organised. The 1992 experiments sit between those two: they test the conditions directly and offer a different account of why the conditions matter.

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