Groupthink : psychological studies of policy decisions and fiascoes

PrefaceThe main theme of this book occurred to me while reading Arthur M. Schlesinger's chapters on the Bay of Pigs in A Thousand Days. At first, I was puzzled: How could bright, shrewd men like John F. Kennedy and his advisers be taken in by the CIA's stupid, pat ch work plan? I began to wonder whether some kind of psychological contagion, similar to social conformity phenomena observed in studies of small groups, had interfered with their mental alertness, I kept thinking about the implications of this notion until one day I found myself talking about it, in a seminar of mine on group psychology at Yale University. I suggested that the poor decision-making performance of the men at those White House meetings might be akin to the lapses in judgment of ordinary citizens who become more concerned with retaining the approval of the fellow members of their work group than with coming up with good solutions to the tasks at hand.Shortly after that, when I reread Schlesinger's account, I was struck by some observations that earlier had escaped my notice. These observations began to fit a specific pattern of concurrence-seeking behavior that had impressed me time and again in my research on other kinds of face-to-face groups, particularly when a qwe-feelingq of solidarity is running high. Additional accounts of the Bay of Pigs yielded more such observations, leading me to conclude that group processes had been subtly at work, preventing the members of Kennedy's team from debating the real issues posed by the CIA's plan and from carefully appraising its serious risks.Then in Joseph de Rivera's The Psychological Dimension of Foreign Policy, I found an impressive example of excluding a deviant from Truman's group of advisers during the period of the ill-fated Korean War decisions. De Rivera's comments about the group's behavior prompted me to look further into that series of decisions and soon I encountered evidence of other manifestations of group processes, like those apparently operating in the Bay of Pigs decision.By this time, I was sufficiently fascinated by what I began to call the groupthink hypothesis to start looking into a fairly large number of historical parallels. I selected for intensive analysis two additional United States foreign-policy decisions and again found consistent indications of the same kind of detrimental group processes. Later I added a case study of a president's criminal conspiracy to obstruct justice, which I now regard as the most impressive example of groupthink.This book presents five case studies of major fiascoes, resulting from poor decisions made during the administrations of five American presidents' Franklin D. Roosevelt (failure to be prepared for the attack on Pearl Harbor), Harry S Truman (the invasion of North Korea), John F. Kennedy (the Bay of Pigs invasion), Lyndon B. Johnson (escalation of the Vietnam War), and Richard M. Nixon (the Watergate cover-up). Each of these decisions was a group product, issuing from a series of meetings of a small body of government officials and advisers who constituted a cohesive group. And in each instance, the members of the policy-making group made incredibly gross miscalculations about both the practical and moral consequences of their decisions.The second section, for comparative purposes, presents two case studies of well worked out decisions made by similar groups whose members made realistic appraisals of the consequences. One of these is the course of action chosen by the Kennedy administration during the Cuban missile crisis in October 1962. This decision, made by almost the same cast of characters that had approved the Bay of Pigs invasion plan in 1961, was arrived at very carefully, in a group atmosphere conducive to independent critical thinking, unlike that which prevailed in the earlier decision. Similarly, the second counterpoint example deals with the hardheaded way that planning committees in the Truman administration evolved the Marshall Plan in 1948. These two case studies indicate that policy-making groups do not always suffer the adverse consequences of group processes, that the quality of the group's decisionmaking activities depends upon current conditions that influence the group atmosphere.n n n n n n n n n