James K. Esser

Who they are

The vault holds little biography for Esser, and this page does not supply what it cannot verify. The record available for this page establishes the author's name, the journal, the volume and issue, the page range of the review and its year. It does not establish an institution or a career, and none is asserted here.

What can be said is where the review sits. It appeared in volume 73, issues 2 and 3, of Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, at pages 116 to 141. Roderick Kramer's reappraisal of the Bay of Pigs and Vietnam decisions appeared in the same volume and issue, at pages 236 to 271, so a reader of that issue met two assessments of the groupthink hypothesis at the quarter-century mark of Janis's 1972 book: one that surveyed the laboratory and field research, and one that went back to the founding cases with newly available documents.

The review's title carries a claim of its own. Alive and well after 25 years suggests a research programme that had survived and remained active. Esser's stated conclusion, as the secondary literature reports it, is more guarded than the title. He judged it too early to attempt a verdict on groupthink theory, and he noted that the studies had produced as many questions, and as many methodological issues, as answers. The vault's earlier note, taken from the verification of another book, adds that the laboratory tests were too few and too partial to evaluate the antecedent conditions of the theory, let alone the theory as a whole.

Key papers

• Esser, J. K. (1998). Alive and well after 25 years: A review of groupthink research. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 73(2-3), 116-141. doi:10.1006/obhd.1998.2758.

The review is held behind a publisher paywall and no abstract was available to this read. The conclusions described on this page come from a secondary account that quotes pages 135 and 139, and from the vault's earlier verification notes, and they are paraphrased and not quoted for that reason.

Key ideas

Unresolved is not refuted. The review's main use is as a corrective to a tidy story in either direction. Janis's theory is often presented as established, and critics sometimes present it as finished. Esser's conclusion places the research in a third position. The tests available in 1998 were too few and too partial to settle the question, so the theory could be neither confirmed nor rejected on the laboratory evidence.

Antecedents and the whole theory. Groupthink theory is a chain: certain conditions, among them cohesion and directive leadership, are said to produce a set of symptoms, which are said to produce poor decisions. A review can test links in that chain separately. The vault's account of Esser is that the laboratory work was too limited even to evaluate the antecedent conditions, which is the first link, so the later links were further from being tested.

Methodological issues. The observation that the research had raised nearly as many methodological issues as answers points to a recurring problem. The founding evidence was a set of retrospective case studies, in which the outcome is known before the analysis begins. Laboratory work tries to replace that with controlled comparisons, but a laboratory group is not a cabinet, and what counts as cohesion or directive leadership can differ from study to study.

What came after. A 1994 meta-analysis led by Brian Mullen had already pooled tests of the hypothesis and found no significant overall effect of cohesiveness on decision quality, although cohesive groups did decide worse under directive leadership. Robert Baron's 2005 chapter, which proposed a ubiquity model, can be read as one response to the situation Esser described: if the specific antecedents do not reliably predict the symptoms, perhaps the underlying processes are common to groups in general.

How this site uses it. The article Does Groupthink Explain Bad Decisions treats the symptom vocabulary as usable and the causal account as undemonstrated, and it relies on Esser for the second half of that sentence.

---