Roderick Kramer

Who they are

The vault holds no biography for Kramer beyond the paper itself, and this page does not supply an institution or a career it has not verified. The publication record gives his name as Roderick M. Kramer and places the paper in volume 73, issues 2 and 3, of Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, at pages 236 to 271, with a publication date of February 1998.

What the paper does is distinctive among the sources behind this site's article on groupthink. Most of the other work discussed there tests the theory's claims with experiments or pools such experiments. Kramer's paper tests it where it began. Janis's theory was built largely on case studies of the Bay of Pigs invasion and the escalation of the Vietnam War, and a case study can be reread when the evidence about the case improves.

By 1998 the evidence had improved. Declassified documents, oral histories and the memoirs of participants had become available that Janis could not have used when he wrote in 1972. Kramer's abstract describes these newer sources as casting doubt on the hypothesis. They suggested that group cohesion pressures played a smaller causal role than Janis argued. In the abstract's account, Presidents Kennedy and Johnson mainly judged their options by their political consequences, in particular the risk of political loss and of damage to their reputations.

Key papers

• Kramer, R. M. (1998). Revisiting the Bay of Pigs and Vietnam decisions 25 years later: How well has the groupthink hypothesis stood the test of time? Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 73(2-3), 236-271. doi:10.1006/obhd.1998.2762.

This page was written from the abstract, read on the publication record of the Stanford Graduate School of Business, and not from the full paper.

Key ideas

Reread the founding cases. The strength of the paper is its choice of target. A theory built on two famous episodes stands or falls partly on whether those episodes happened as the theory says they did. By going back to the Bay of Pigs and Vietnam with better evidence, Kramer tests the theory against its own origin story.

A smaller causal role for cohesion. The abstract's central finding is that cohesion pressures contributed less than Janis claimed. This does not say that the groups were free of conformity or that nobody went along. It says that the factor the theory leaned on hardest was not the main driver.

Political consequences as the driver. In Kramer's account the two presidents mainly judged their options by the political costs and benefits they saw. That is a different mechanism with different implications. If a president is weighing the political cost of cancelling an operation, an advisory group may go along without any need for the illusion of unanimity that Janis described. The article on this site draws that reading, and states it as a reading.

Political psychology against social psychology. The abstract concludes that groupthink overstates small-group dynamics and underweights political considerations, so that the flawed decisions are better explained by political psychology than by social psychology. The practical consequence is that the remedy follows the mechanism. If the cause is the group's internal pressure, the fixes are about how the group deliberates. If the cause is a leader's reading of political risk, the fixes include changing what the leader stands to lose from changing course.

Where it sits in the literature. The paper appeared in the same issue as James Esser's review, which judged it too early to pass judgment on groupthink theory. A 1994 meta-analysis led by Brian Mullen found no significant overall effect of cohesiveness on decision quality, and Robert Baron's 2005 chapter proposed that the processes Janis described are common to groups in general. Kramer's paper is the case-study counterpart to those experimental and review-based assessments, and it points in the same general direction.

---