What Is Groupthink? Symptoms and Prevention

Groupthink is what happens when a close-knit group wants agreement so badly that it stops judging its options carefully. The APA Dictionary of Psychology defines it as “a strong concurrence-seeking tendency that interferes with effective group decision making.” It lists the symptoms as apparent unanimity, illusions of invulnerability and moral correctness, biased views of outsiders, interpersonal pressure, self-censorship and poor decision strategies, and its suspected causes as cohesion, isolation, poor leadership and the stress of the decision (APA). The psychologist Irving Janis developed the idea in his 1972 book Victims of Groupthink (Rose, 2011).

Where the term comes from

In the 1982 second edition, titled Groupthink, Janis defined it as a way of thinking that people fall into “when they are deeply involved in a cohesive in-group,” when members’ push for unanimity overrides their motivation to weigh the alternatives realistically (Rose, 2011).

The word itself is older than Janis’s theory. William H. Whyte Jr. used it in a March 1952 Fortune article, which calls “groupthink” a coinage and describes it as “a rationalized conformity” (Fortune). The 2004 Senate Intelligence Committee report on Iraq says the term was coined by Janis in the 1970s (Senate Intelligence Committee, 2004). The report is the more official source, but Whyte’s article is the primary record and came about 20 years earlier. Whyte coined the word, and Janis turned it into a theory of group decision-making.

What sets groupthink up

Janis described conditions that make groupthink more likely. A 2011 review groups them like this (Rose, 2011):

• Cohesion: members value the group highly. This is the core condition.
• Structural faults: the group is insulated from outsiders, its leader isn’t impartial, it has no methodical procedure for making decisions, and its members are similar in background and outlook.
• A provocative situation: high stress from an outside threat, or a dip in members’ self-esteem after recent failures, hard problems or moral dilemmas.

Course notes from the University of Oregon stress isolation in the same way: a group that is cut off fails to get the evidence that would show where its judgments are wrong (University of Oregon).

Janis’s eight symptoms

Janis listed eight symptoms in three types (Rose, 2011; University of Oregon).

Overestimating the group

1. An illusion of invulnerability, the sense that the group can’t fail.
2. An unquestioned belief in the group’s own morality.

Closed-mindedness

3. Collective rationalization, explaining away warnings.
4. Stereotyped views of rivals and outsiders.

Pressure toward uniformity

5. Self-censorship, where members keep their doubts to themselves.
6. An illusion of unanimity, where silence is read as agreement.
7. Direct pressure on anyone who dissents.
8. Self-appointed “mindguards” who shield the group from information that might disturb its consensus.

These symptoms show up as poor decision-making. The group discusses only a few alternatives, doesn’t recheck its preferred choice for drawbacks, never goes back to options it rejected, doesn’t consult outside experts, takes in information selectively, and makes no contingency plans (University of Oregon).

Cases Janis studied

Janis built the theory from historical decisions he called fiascoes: the Bay of Pigs invasion, Pearl Harbor, the escalation of the Korean War into North Korea, and the escalation of the Vietnam War. He contrasted them with two decisions where he found no groupthink, the Marshall Plan and the Cuban missile crisis (Rose, 2011). Later researchers applied the model to other cases, including the Challenger and Columbia space shuttle accidents and the Iran hostage crisis (same source).

Groupthink in an official inquiry

In its July 2004 report on prewar intelligence about Iraq, the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence concluded that the intelligence community “suffered from a collective presumption” that Iraq had an active and growing weapons of mass destruction program. The committee called this a “group think” dynamic. It led analysts, collectors and managers to read ambiguous evidence as proof of a weapons program and to ignore or minimize evidence that there wasn’t one (Senate Intelligence Committee, 2004).

The report found several of Janis’s patterns at work: examining few alternatives, gathering information selectively, pressure to conform or hold back criticism, and collective rationalization. It added that the presumption was so strong that formal mechanisms set up to challenge assumptions and group think went unused (same source, conclusion 3). The analysts tended to see what they expected to see, which is close kin to confirmation bias.

What research says about the theory

Groupthink is famous, but the evidence for Janis’s full model is limited. Reviewing 25 years of work in 1998, James Esser said groupthink research had real value for generating ideas. He described “a small, but growing, body of empirical literature” and noted that most of the theoretical proposals it had produced had yet to be tested (Esser, 1998).

Other researchers are harsher. A 2011 literature review notes that only two of Janis’s conditions, cohesion and impartial leadership, had been tested extensively in experiments. It cites Robert Baron’s 2005 conclusion that the evidence has largely failed to support the model’s more ambitious predictions, and Sally Fuller and Ramon Aldag’s 1998 description of groupthink as a “compelling myth” (Rose, 2011). The same review also cites supporters, including Esser’s conclusion that case studies have tended to confirm the model (same source).

So the case studies it inspired generally find groupthink, but controlled experiments haven’t confirmed that Janis’s specific chain of causes and symptoms works the way he described. The individual warning signs, such as self-censorship and ignored warnings, are still useful to watch for.

How Janis said to prevent it

Janis gave nine recommendations in the 1982 edition (Rose, 2011):

1. Make everyone a critical evaluator. Each member’s job includes airing objections and doubts, and the leader encourages an open climate for criticism.
2. Keep the leader impartial. Leaders shouldn’t state their own preferences early on.
3. Run parallel groups. Have more than one group, each with its own leader, work on the same question.
4. Split into subgroups. Break the group up to test proposals separately.
5. Check with trusted outsiders. Members discuss the group’s thinking privately with people outside it and report back.
6. Invite outside experts. Bring in people who aren’t core members to challenge the group’s views.
7. Appoint a devil’s advocate. Give at least one member the job of arguing against the majority at every meeting.
8. Study the rivals. When a decision involves a rival, spend extra time on warning signals and on alternative scenarios of what the rival intends.
9. Hold a second-chance meeting. Once there’s a tentative consensus, meet again to reconsider the decision before it goes public.

Many of these work on your own thinking too. Asking what would prove you wrong, and seeking out people who disagree, are habits covered in how to improve your critical thinking. Groups that have put a lot into a plan can also stick with it past the point of sense, which is the sunk cost fallacy at work.