The Groupthink Psychodemic, Part I: Danger in Numbers
In this three-part series, we peer into the history and nature of ‘groupthink’, in both its damaging effects on decision-making and its emerging life as a technique of mass indoctrination.
Groupthink is as old as humanity itself, enabling the strong of mind to rule the weak and frequently endangering the capacity of human beings to arrive at balanced decisions under the influence of the internal dynamics of the affected group.
‘Groupthink’ is one of a handful of words that we have perhaps heard — even used — thousands of times over the course of recent decades, maybe only half-understanding them. With related terms like ‘propaganda’, ‘mass entrancement’ and ‘menticide’ — interesting in a certain academic sense but seeming to pertain to particular schemozzles, imbroglios, fiascos or curiosities, dark moments of the past, aberrations of history or of ideological fanaticism — ‘groupthink’ belonged to theoretical treatises about strange phenomena that swept across the consciousnesses of our ancestors, or infected cultlike bodies inoculated against reason or civilising values due to their closed and unmodern natures. Now, as though by dint of some hidden psychic explosion, they erupt into our everyday lives, demanding that we pay them the attention we had withheld. Now they become as though commonplace concepts — not exactly banal, but nevertheless necessary implements of understanding the everyday. Or at least they now appear so to those who are not infected (as opposed to ‘affected’, which just about everyone is), while remaining inscrutable to those who have overnight succumbed to them, as though to some kind of virus.
Suddenly, just over a year ago, their meanings began to acquire life-or-death significance. They no longer belonged exclusively to fusty textbooks, or black-and-white documentaries on YouTube — interesting topics to explore in dissertations and cautionary lectures about the pitfalls of the past. Round about April 2020, they started to transcend theory and become real, to come into their own, infecting our neighbours and friends, brothers and wives, as well as the cop on the beat and the barman down the local. Those fragments of understanding we had grasped about these conditions made them, for a moment, almost intoxicatingly fascinating — ‘Oh look! Real brainwashing!’ — but rapidly became worrying, and then terrifying. As our world plummeted towards totalitarianism, our early ironic fascination rapidly turned to horror. Was it possible that people could know about such things and yet not know what they actually mean? Was it possible to have read Orwell, seen the movies, and yet not recognise the real thing when it rattlingly turned the corner at the end of your street, churning the tarmac with its caterpillar treads?
We need, therefore, at a popular level of our societies, urgently to begin parsing, plumbing and penetrating all those concepts which have lain all around us all our lives in books and journals with archaic covers and voluminous footnotes. Already, on this platform, we have explored in depth the concepts of propaganda, hypnosis and mass entrancement, the role of surveillance and Big Data, all of which have become everyday elements of our daily burdens of concerns,. But there is a concept that brings all of these together in what is almost a definition of the conditions that have been imposed on us for the past year and a half. It is called ‘groupthink’.
‘Groupthink’ has multiple definitions, osscilating around the same idea:
— ‘a pattern of thought characterized by self-deception, forced manufacture of consent, and conformity to group values and ethics.’
— ‘a psychological phenomenon in which people strive for consensus within a group. (In many cases, people will set aside their own personal beliefs or adopt the opinion of the rest of the group.)’
— ‘a phenomenon that occurs when a group of well-intentioned people makes irrational or non-optimal decisions spurred by the urge to conform or the belief that dissent is impossible.’
— ‘a phenomenon whereby the natural desire for harmony within a group ensures that members will set aside their personal beliefs and adopt instead (at least in their engagement with the group) the beliefs and perspectives of the group.’
— ‘the process in which bad decisions are made by a group because its members do not want to express opinions, suggest new ideas, etc. that others may disagree with.’
— ‘A psychological phenomenon that occurs within a group in which the desire for harmony or conformity results in an irrational or dysfunctional decision-making outcome. (Cohesiveness, or the desire for cohesiveness, may produce a tendency among group members to agree at all costs.)’
It will immediately become clear that each of these definitions appears to hint at the situation humanity in general now finds itself in: not just a condition of likemindedness but a condition of induced or cultivated concurrence on what amounts to the core, if not totally defining condition of our time: belief in and fear of Covid-19. The mentions within those definitions of states of ‘self-deception’, ‘irrationality’, ‘desire for harmony’, ‘conformity’ might be deemed emblematic labels for the condition of our culture over the past year and a half. Yet, it is striking that these definitions relate primarily to descriptions of processes of decision-making, to conditions that risk leaving participants prone to dangerous error.
To begin with, then, ‘groupthink’ relates to forms of power at the point of exercise, but the tendency, having been identified and diagnosed in its essential form, is no longer merely something ‘found’ or ‘noticed’ in reality. More and more, it has the facility to become weaponised, cultivated and imposed on enormous numbers of passive bystanders, which means that whole populations may now be deliberately impressed with erroneous or mendacious forms of belief or understanding, often to an extent that no longer qualifies as ‘thought’ by any conventional definition. Both ends of this spectrum may be observed at work in the Covid horror show.
It may be useful, then, to divide the concept in the first instance into two distinct (for the moment) categories: that of error-generating conditions within decision-making bodies and the ultimate form of groupthink capable of gripping entire societies.
The first might be characterised as groupthink as a kind of possession (in the occult sense): where a group succumbs to the loudest voices in its midst, following tramlines of bad thinking for want of hearing the alternatives. Here we might refer to such episodes as the Bay of Pigs, the fictional tale of the Emperor’s New Clothes, and, closer to home, the infamous libelling of Fr Kevin Reynolds by RTÉ’s Prime Time Investigates programme in 2011.
There is also the concept of full-blown cultural groupthink as a kind of spell, an imposition of likemindedness on a whole population or part thereof. This is of the kind that does not lend itself to the label ‘thought’, amounting more closely to something like hysteria, imposed by propaganda and mass entrancement. In this latter category, we might include examples like Nazism, various outbreaks of what is dubbed ‘McCarthyism’, the witch trials of Salem, and — most dramatically of all — the Cult of Covid.
The first form of groupthink — the possession kind — is more likely to be unearthed or identified in retrospect, when an investigation of the circumstances of some policy or decision-related calamity is undertaken. The second — the spell — is capable of being perceived and diagnosed while it is occurring, but only by those who have remained immune. As C.G. Jung observed in Psychology and National Problems, ‘[a}s long as one is within a certain phenomenology, one is not astonished and no one wonders what it is all about. Such philosophical doubt only comes to one who is outside the game.’
The Covid plandemic has hints of the first — in the convergence of thinking and the deadly pursuit of a singularity of purpose and policy across the globe. This may be misleading, since it is as likely to arise as a deliberate policy from the centralised orchestration of the logistics of the plandemic. But it also exhibits enormous and as yet largely unremarked overtones of the second, imposed forms of groupthink, in the grotesque misleading of literally billions of people into believing that their lives were in deadly danger from what was, at most, a routine respiratory condition such as they might expect to experience multiple times in a lifetime, and suffer no undue consequence or effect.
Groupthink is invariably, it appears, to be regarded as a bad thing, restricting, inhibiting and stultifying the human mind — both in infecting individually each of the constituent minds of a group, and blocking the channels of potential cross-fertilisation, and also in the sense of imposing a collective mesmerism on a whole people.
It has been a commonplace of human understanding for millennia that ‘two heads are better than one’. This is the principle underlying the ‘ask the audience’ element of the classic TV quiz show Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? But this, noticeably and invariably, relates to processes involving facts, figures, information, rather than thought or analysis, and works best in the absence of any overt means of inter-communication. In a decision-making process requiring a singular, straightforward choice of answer, the more minds in the mix, the greater seems to be the volume and scope of available knowledge. But something like the opposite happens in a process requiring discernment, discretion, balance, nuance, subtlety and, above all, mutual openness to the complexity of the issues involved. In other words, when processes of communication, consultation and interaction are necessary, there enters a risk of contaminating the common pool of wisdom. The ‘wisdom of crowds’ relates to matters of fact rather than insight.
And there is a countervailing and much older idea that appears to have gained increasing traction on reality as political life and communications became more ’sophisticated’. This idea is summarised in the titles of two books, separated by nearly two centuries — the 1841 book by the Scottish journalist Charles Mackay, Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, and the 2019 book of the English journalist Douglas Murray, titled more economically The Madness of Crowds. Mackay’s book focusses on the baneful and dangerous nature of the herd mind, essentially developing Nietzsche’s aphorism that ‘madness is the exception in individuals but the rule in groups.’ Douglas Murray’s book has a narrower focus than its distant inspiration: the eruption of Woke ideas in the late twentieth century and beyond, and might more accurately be described as a dissection of cultural groupthink, or mass entrancement by ideology and reductive ideas.
Mackay’s study preceded by more than half a century a more famous work by the French philosopher Gustave Le Bon, who in 1895 published his now classic work The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind. Le Bon despised the democratic idea, suspecting any kind of group charged with making decisions, including juries and parliaments. Any gathering of highly intelligent people assembled to make decisions relating to the general welfare, he wrote, would do no better than ‘a gathering of imbeciles’.
Le Bon was the first significant thinker to identify that a herd has a different psychology to that of an individual and that this is capable of infecting each constituent member. He observed that the consciousness bestowed by membership of a crowd can be transformative of the person, putting individual members in possession of ‘a sort of collective mind which makes them feel, think and act in a manner quite differently from that in which each individual would feel, think and act were that person in a state of isolation.’ In such a ‘psychological crowd’, individual personality disappears, brain activity is replaced by reflex action, resulting in a collective lowering of intelligence and a complete transformation of sentiments. ‘The ascendency of crowds,’ wrote Le Bon, ‘indicates the death throes of a civilisation.’ The upward climb to civilisation is an intellectual process driven by individuals; the descent a herd in stampede. ‘Crowds are only useful for destruction.’ This might be called the first coherent diagnosis of what we nowadays call ‘groupthink’.
A 2005 book, The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shape Business, Economics, Societies and Nations, by New Yorker business columnist James Surowiecki, posits something that at first sight seems the opposite idea: that decisions taken by a large group, even if the individuals within the group aren't smart, are always better than decisions made by small numbers of ‘experts’. In decision-making processes, Surowiecki argues, the larger the group, the better chance of groupthink being eliminated; danger enters when the group is smaller and more cohesive.
Surowiecki starts off with the case of the British scientist Francis Galton, into his 80s at the start of the twentieth century, who from believing that, since ‘the stupidity and wrong-headedness of many men and women being so great as to be scarcely credible’, power and decision-making ought to remain in the hands of the ‘select, well-bred few,’ dramatically changed his mind and did a 180-degree twirl. Attending the West of England Fat Stock and Poultry Exhibition in 1906, and observing a competition to guess the weight of an ox when slaughtered and dressed, Galton discovered reason to doubt his own prejudice. There were 800 entrants, some of them farmers and experienced butchers, but the generality were laypersons with no particular expertise. Following the contest, Galton retrieved the entry slips and analysed them, and discovered that the mean of the total guesses of the total group was just one pound amiss of the correct weight — and never looked back. This is, you might say, the foundational assumption of democracy: that ‘the People’ are capable — at least as much as any individual or smaller group — of organising their own affairs.
This principle can appear to operate as a form of alchemy. ‘Even if most people within a group are not especially well-informed or rational,’ Surowiecki declares, ‘it can still reach a collectively wise decision.’ Surowiecki squarely opposes the (parallel) theses of Mackay and Le Bon, parodying the latter’s declamatory verdicts: ‘If you put together a big enough and diverse enough group of people and ask them to “make decisions affecting matters of general interest,” that group’s decision will, over time, be “intellectually [superior] to the isolated individual,” no matter how smart or well-informed he is,’ he defiantly declares. He cites numerous incidences whereby markets (and also bookies!) tend to be above-average ‘smart’, often displaying an enhanced success rate to their judgments and ‘predictions’.
Of course, this principle depends on a number of factors not necessarily to be taken for granted: the elimination of background noise — i.e. the absence of interference or ‘nudging’ from outside, or disproportionately from inside the group — and by extension the individual independence of group members. Once the group begins to function as a group, to the logic of group dynamics as identified by Le Bon, danger enters in. The vital principle is that each individual’s integrity of thought be protected and respected. This is the principle underlying the closed, secret and private conditions of the polling booth — though, of course, modern elections, being attended by endless preliminary supplication, submissions, entreaties and petitions, many of these driven home by underhanded behavioural techniques, amount to an entirely different phenomenon than was the case in Le Bon’s or Galton’s day.
It is not, as may at first appear, a matter of ‘you pays your money and you takes your choices’. It is possible to perceive that both theses are true — that a crowd can in certain circumstances be ‘smarter’ than an individual, and in certain others the opposite.
Surowiecki presents some persuasive evidence, gleaned via markets, gambling trends, voting systems and other viewfinders.
‘The wisdom of crowds,’ he writes,’ has a far more important and beneficial impact on our everyday lives than we recognize, and its implications for the future are immense. But in the present, many groups struggle to make even mediocre decisions, while others wreak havoc with their bad judgment. Groups work well under certain circumstances, and less well under others. Groups generally need rules to maintain order and coherence, and when they’re missing or malfunctioning, the result is trouble. Groups benefit from members talking to and learning from each other, but too much communication, paradoxically, can actually make the group as a whole less intelligent. While big groups are often good for solving certain kinds of problems, big groups can also be unmanageable and inefficient. Conversely, small groups have the virtue of being easy to run, but they risk having too little diversity of thought and too much consensus.’
According to Surowiecki, reliable decisions by a group depend on the existence of four factors: diversity of opinion (or interpretation of information); independence from the opinions of others; ‘decentralisation’ (from the group mentality — preferably involving a connection to and/or knowledge of the locus of the problem); and aggregation — i.e. a mechanism for turning the full complement of individual opinions into a collective decision.
Mackay, he maintains, was right about the extremes of collective behaviour. There are times — a riot, or a stockmarket bubble — when aggregating individual decisions produces irrational collective outcomes. Collective decision-making carries the same risks, which is why diversity and independence are crucial conditions, because the best decisions are the product of debate and disagreement, not compromise or consensus.
‘An intelligent group, especially when confronted with cognition problems, does not ask its members to modify their positions in order to let the group reach a decision everyone can be happy with. Instead, it figures out how to use mechanisms — like market prices, or intelligent voting systems — to aggregate and produce collective judgments that represent not what any one person in the group thinks but rather, in some sense, what they all think. Paradoxically, the best way for a group to be smart is for each person in it to think and act as independently as possible.’
Surowiecki says that, generally speaking, in assessing a factual situation, possibly requiring estimates or guesswork, the bigger the group the better, since this enables the largest possible number of inputs, which appear to mysteriously ‘close in on’ the problem and in some instances achieve a mean answer that is not the specific answer of any individual member. It is important that, in arriving at their ‘group’ decision, the members not talk to one another to compare notes. What works best is when the group’s guesses are aggregated and averaged, but this method, by definition, relates to precise, narrowly defined kinds of questions and problems. The communication issue is vital: According to Surowiecki, you can have too little or too much; the group requires to enjoy good internal relationships and yet not be so familiar as to enable a hierarchy to emerge.
A group observing these criteria will make sound decisions. The principle at work is a quasi-mathematical one: In consulting a large number, the errors of individual group members tend to cancel one another out, leaving the clean information behind. One individual leaning erroneously in one direction will cancel out another leaning erroneously in another. Strike out the errors against each other and the reliable facts remain.
‘Now,’ Surowiecki concedes, ‘even with the errors cancelled out, it's possible that a group's judgment will be bad. For the group to be smart, there has to be at least some information in the "information" part of the "information minus error” equation. . . What is striking, though — and what makes a phrase like the wisdom of crowds meaningful — is just how much information a group's collective verdict so often contains.’ The important thing, he maintains, is that the group is capable of holding ‘a near complete picture of the world in its collective brain.’
The functionality of this method ought not be surprising. ‘After all, we are the products of evolution, and presumably we have been equipped to make sense of the world around us. But who knew that, given the chance, we can collectively make so much sense of the world?
‘{A]sk a hundred people to answer a question or solve a problem, and the average answer will often be at least as good as the answer of the smartest member. With most things, the average is mediocrity. With decision-making, it's often excellence. You could say it's as if we’ve been programmed to be collectively smart.’
A central argument of Surowiecki’s book is that ‘chasing the expert is a mistake and a costly one at that’. We should stop hunting, he says, and ‘ask the crowd (which, of course, includes the geniuses as well as everyone else) instead.’
The key to the apparent conundrum (Which is it? — crowds are thick or crowds are quick) appears to reside in the nature of relationships between group members, and in particular the difference between a ‘group’ comprising a series of independent individuals and a ‘herd’ that is subject to central, or contagious, or, on the other hand, externally directed control or conditioning. Yes, a group of the first kind is likely to be much ‘wiser’ than each or any of its constituent members, but this quality of wisdom depends on allowing each member to remain unfettered by the forces and dynamics that tend to govern groups engaged in decision making, usually arising from distortions stemming from internal leadership or external pressure or (even subtle) coercion.
In a group or collective, however large or small, where decision-making is not the issue, but rather receptivity to a proposal or set of ideas, the dangerous elements usually have to do with external manipulation — the use of the behavioural ‘sciences’, propaganda, hypnosis and other kinds of distorting mechanisms. Then, and especially in a culture fitted with a cohesive system of mass communication, it becomes easy to flip the ‘channel’ of each member to the collective band, transporting individual members into the wavelength of the hive mind, where they become susceptible to group emotions, intense feelings and responses, especially anger and fear that close out or down all rational processing. (This is why bodies like ‘constitutional conventions’ and ‘citizens’ assemblies’ are such a bad idea, democratically speaking). In such a situation, any capacity for reason and balance is lost, the reposeful accessing of individual experience is blocked by hysteria and noise, and the group becomes a receptor for the basest, least thoughtful forms of thinking.
In Surowiecki’s description of the pitfalls and dynamics we can make out the general shape of a manifestation of groupthink that is at once concentrated within power structures but also capable of acquiring a wider cultural penetration. Covid may be the first instance of actual groupthink cultivation on a global scale, whereby a condition, previously spotted mainly in the wild, was actually produced in a hothouse atmosphere and on a quasi-global basis. It is, however, likely to be one of many unless we come to understand, diagnose, deconstruct and counteract it.
The concept of ‘groupthink’ was first crystallised by Irving Lester Janis, in his 1973 book, Victims of Groupthink: A Psychological Study of Foreign Policy Decisions and Fiascos. Janis was a research psychologist at Yale University and a professor emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley.
It was he who coined the term ‘groupthink’ and his interest in it was chiefly to do with the influence of the phenomenon in decision-making in particular iconic moments in history, especially in the operation of power. His work in this area is essentially that of a cultural anthropologist, digging specimens out of the debris.
His analysis focussed mainly on a theory of ‘groupthink’ that described the systematic errors that occurred when the members of decision-making bodies abandoned critical thinking and fall into wrongheaded consensus, and the consequences of these errors. To this end, he conducted a study of various notorious high-level decision-making incidents — ‘fiascos’, as he called them — in which groupthink had surfaced with adverse results, adapting ideas from small-group analysis to the explaining of major policy disasters. His examples including the Bay of Pigs debacle of 1961 (in which the US president John F. Kennedy tried to overthrow the Castro-led government of Cuba), the Watergate cover-up and the Challenger disaster of 1986.
He wrote:
‘The 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 man like John F. Kennedy and his advisers be taken in by the CIA's stupid, patchwork plan? I began to wonder whether some kinks 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.
On re-reading Schlesinger's account, he was struck by some observations that earlier had escaped his notice. ‘These observations began to fit a specific pattern of concurrence-seeking behaviour that had impressed me time and again in my research on other kinds of face-to-face groups, particularly when a “we-feeling” 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.’
Groupthink arises, according to Janis, because group members have come to value the group (and their belonging to it) higher than anything else. These inclinations causes them to strive for unanimity on matters the group is required to confront and deal with. In his book he sets out symptoms and characteristics that can arise within cohesive groups with significant negative influences on the decision making process.
He derived the concept of ‘groupthink’ from George Orwell’s Dictionary of Newspeak, in particular the term ‘doublethink’, elaborating on his coinage of the word as follows:
‘I use the term groupthink as a quick and easy way to refer to the mode of thinking that persons engage in when concurrence-seeking becomes so dominant in a cohesive in-group that it tends to override realistic appraisal of alternative courses in action.
‘Groupthink is a term of the same order as the words in the Newspeak vocabulary George Orwell presents in his dismaying 1984 — a vocabulary with terms such as “doublethink” and “crimethink”. By putting groupthink with those Orwellian words, I realise that groupthink takes on an Orwellian connotation. The invidiousness is intentional: groupthink refers to a deterioration of mental efficiency, reality testing and moral judgment.’
It is interesting that Janis perceived this sinister dimension of the groupthink concept, even though his explorations are confined to the ‘possession’, or ‘fiasco’-related kind of groupthink. He has little or nothing to say about the idea of enspelling populations with the techniques derived form the investigation of incidences of groupthink as a detrimental influence on decision-making. However, his insights into the process at the micro level are highly instructive as to the possibilities of groupthink ‘technique’ as an instrument of mass social control.
‘The symptoms of groupthink arise when the members of decision-making groups become motivated to avoid being too harsh in their judgments of their leaders' or their colleagues' ideas. They adopt a soft line of criticism, even in their own thinking. At their meeting all the members are amiable and seek a complete concurrence on every important issue, with no bickering or conflict to split the cozy, “we-feeling” atmosphere.’
The danger arises when individual members of the group, mindful of peer pressure, discount their own experience and perspectives in favour of the emerging. consensus. To preserve the clubby atmosphere, group members suppress personal doubts, silence dissenters, and follow the group leader’s suggestions.
Leaders, by definition, become such by virtue of being ‘alphas’ who command respect from more timid creatures, having climbed to the top by being confident and competent people. These are generally found to be positive attributes, but like many qualities become problematic beyond a certain point: For example, precisely the qualities of decisiveness and authority that put them in charge to begin with are also those that generate an atmosphere of undue deference among their underlings. Janis proposes that leaders should occasionally leave the decision table so that this effect may be overcome.
The absence of critical discussion or dissent can lead to members believing that their opinions don’t hold as much weight as those of their peers, leading to a failure by the group to consider possible pitfalls, and take steps to minimise risks, leading to the growth of an unjustified confidence in the group as to what is logical and correct. A form of collective rationalisation takes over, by which the group becomes more and more solidified in its consensus, leading to a sense of immunity from error or baneful consequences. Janis describes an afflicted group of people who respect each other’s opinions so much that they arrive at a unanimous view, leaving each member certain that the belief must be true. The group acquires a strong belief in the inherent morality of its own procedures and thought processes, and also a countervailing sense that putative opponents or critics are in some sense less moral, weaker or incompetent. The results can be devastating, leading the group to develop a distorted view of reality, with excessive optimism producing hasty and reckless decisions, and a neglect of ethical questions. The combination of these deficiencies makes such groups particularly vulnerable to initiating or sustaining projects that will turn out to be policy fiascos.
Irving Janis set out three ‘defining rules of groupthink’, which when present together can create potentially lethal conditions:
1. That a group of people come to share a common view, opinion or belief that in some way is not based on objective reality. They may be convinced intellectually, morally, politically even scientifically that it is right. They may be sure from all the evidence they have considered that it is so. But their belief cannot ultimately be tested in a way which could confirm it beyond doubt. It is based on a picture of the world as they imagine, or would like it to be. In essence, their collective view will always have in it an element of wishful thinking or make-believe.
2. That, precisely because their shared view is essentially subjective, they need to go out of their way to insist it is so self-evidently right that a 'consensus' of all right-minded people must agree with it. Their belief has made them an 'in-group’, which accepts that any evidence which contradicts it, and the views of anyone who does not agree with it, can be disregarded.
3. The most revealing consequence of this. To reinforce their in-group conviction that they are right, the group needs to treat the views of anyone who questions it as wholly unacceptable. They are incapable of engaging in any serious dialogue or debate with those who disagree with them. Those outside the bubble must be marginalized and ignored, although, if necessary, their views must be mercilessly caricatured to make them seem ridiculous. If this is not enough, they must be attacked in the most violently contemptuous terms, usually with the aid of some scornfully dismissive label and somehow morally discredited. The thing which most characterizes any form of groupthink is that dissent cannot be tolerated.
Janis stressed the inclination of groups to develop stereotyped images that dehumanise out-groups with which they are engaged in competitive struggles, and also a tendency for the collective judgments arising out of group discussions to become polarised, sometimes shifting toward either extreme conservatism (of response) or riskier courses of action than the individual members would otherwise be prepared to take.
In an early draft of his book, he related:
‘“How could we have been so stupid?” President John F. Kennedy asked after he and a close group of advisors had blundered into the Bay of Pigs invasion. For the last two years I have been studying that question, as it applies not only to the Bay of Pigs decision-makers but also to those who led the United States [into] such other major fiascos as the failure to be prepared for the attack on Pearl Harbor, the Korean War, and the escalation of the Vietnam War. Stupidity is certainly not the answer. The men who participated in making the Bay of Pigs decision, for example, comprised one of the greatest arrays of intellectual talent in the history of the American Government — Dean Rusk, Robert McNamara, Robert Kennedy, Douglas Dillon, McGeorge Bundy, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., Allen Dulles, and others. It also seemed to be that explanations were incomplete if they concentrated only on disturbances in the behavior of each individual within a decision-making body: temporary emotional states of elation, fear, or anger that reduce a man's mental efficiency, for example, or chronic blind spots arising from a man's prejudices or idiosyncratic biases. I preferred to broaden the picture by looking at the fiascos from the standpoint of group dynamics as it has been explored over the past three decades, first by the great social psychologist, Kurt Lewin, and later in many experimental situations by myself and other behavioral scientists. My conclusion after poring over hundreds of relevant documents — historical reports about formal group meetings and informal conversations among the members — is that the groups that committed the fiascos were the victims of what I call “groupthink”
‘In each case study, I was surprised to discover the extent to which each group displayed the typical phenomena of social conformity that are regularly encountered in studies of group dynamics among ordinary citizens . . . For example, some of the phenomena appear to be completely in line with findings from social-psychological experiments showing that powerful social pressures are brought to bear by the members of a cohesive group whenever a dissident begins to voice his objections to a group consensus. Other phenomena are reminiscent of the shared illusions observed in encounter groups and friendship cliques when the members simultaneously reach a peak of “groupy” feelings. Above all, there are numerous indications pointing to the development of group norms that bolster morale at the expense of critical thinking. One of the most common norms appears to be that of remaining loyal to the group by sticking with the policies to which the group has already committed itself, even when those policies are obviously working out badly and have unintended consequences which disturb the conscience of each member. This is one of the key characteristics of groupthink.
‘Paradoxically, soft-headed groups are often hard-hearted when it comes to dealing with out-group or enemies. They find it relatively easy to resort to dehumanizing solutions —they will readily authorize bombing attacks that kill large numbers of civilians in the name of the noble cause of persuading an unfriendly government to negotiate at the peace table. They are unlikely to pursue the more difficult and controversial issues that arise when alternatives to harsh military solutions come up for discussion. Nor are they inclined to raise ethical issues that carry the implication that this fine group of ours, with its humanitarianism and its high minded principles, might be capable of adopting a course of action that is inhumane and immoral.’
Groupthink arises when the normative conditions of friendship, collegiality and camaraderie — all of which make for good decision-making — become perverted by often unseen dynamics of the group. Hence, this paradox: A little cohesiveness is good; a little more begins to be dangerous.
‘There is evidence from a number of social-psychological studies that as the members of a group feel more accepted by the others, which is a central feature of increased group cohesiveness, they display less overt conformity to group norms. Thus we could expect that the more cohesive a group becomes, the less the members will feel constrained to censor what they say out of fear of being socially punished for antagonizing the leader or any of their fellow members. In contrast, the groupthink type of conformity tends to increase as group cohesiveness increases. Groupthink involves non-deliberate suppression of critical thought as a result of internalization of the group's norms, which is quite different from deliberate suppression on the basis of external threats of social punishment. The more cohesive the group, the greater the inner compulsion on the part of each member to avoid creating disunity, which inclines him to believe in the soundness of whatever proposals are promoted by the leader or by a majority of the group's members.
‘I do not mean to imply that all cohesive groups necessarily suffer from groupthink. All in-groups may have a mild tendency toward groupthink, displaying one or another of the symptoms from time to time, but it need not be so dominant as to influence the quality of the group's final decision.Neither do I mean to imply that there is anything necessarily inefficient or harmful about group decisions in general. On the contrary, a group whose members have properly defined roles, with traditions concerning the procedures to follow in pursuing a critical inquiry, probably is capable of making better decisions than any individual member working alone. The problem is that the advantages of having decisions made by groups are often lost because of powerful psychological pressures that arise when all members work closely together, share the same set of values, and, above all, face a crisis situation that puts everyone under intense stress. The main principle of groupthink, which I offer in the spirit of Parkinson's law, is this: The more amiability and esprit de corps there is among the members of a policy-making in-group, the greater the danger that the independent critical thinking will be replaced by groupthink, which is likely to result in irrational and dehumanizing actions directed against out-group.’
In his studies of high-level governmental decision-makers, both civilian and military, Janis identified a number of key symptoms of groupthink: illusion of invulnerability, illusion of unanimity, suppression of individual doubts, illusions of moral certainty, concurrence-directed pressures, excessive stereotyping of rivals and opponents, lack of in-house research, confirmation bias, self-censorship by individual group members, lack of deliberation about obstacles, internal or external, to the preferred decision and undue influence of self-appointed thought guardians who seek to protect the group from inconvenient information.
Groups, Janis held, are more prone to error than individuals, exhibiting particular dynamics that relate to the interactions of constituent members. The deficiencies about which we know the most, he wrote, pertain to ‘disturbances in the behavior of each individual in a decision-making group — temporary states of elation, fear, or anger that reduce a person's mental efficiency; chronic blind spots arising from a person's social prejudices; shortcomings in information-processing that prevent a person from comprehending the complex consequences of a seemingly simple policy decision.’ These tendencies become magnified within the overall dynamic of the group. ‘A considerable amount of sociai science literature shows that in circumstances of extreme crisis, group contagion occasionally gives rise to collective panic, vịolent acts of scapegoating, and other forms of what could be called group madness,’ he wrote. ‘Much more frequent, however, are instances of mindless conformity and collective misjudgement of serious risks, which are collectively laughed off in a clubby atmosphere of relaxed conviviality.
‘Lack of vigilance and excessive risk-taking are forms of temporary group derangement to which decision-making groups made up of responsible executives are not at all immune. Sometimes the main trouble is that the chief executive manipulates his advisers to rubber-stamp his own ill-conceived proposals.
‘During the group's deliberations, the leader does not deliberately try to get the group to tell him what he wants to hear but is quite sincere in asking for honest opinions. The group members are not transformed into sycophants. They are not afraid to speak their minds. Nevertheless, subtle constraints, which the leader may reinforce inadvertently, prevent a member from fully exercising his critical powers and from openly expressing doubts when most others in the group appear to have reached a consensus.’
The more cohesive the group, Janis’s examination confirmed, the more likely it is to court disaster. ‘The greater a group's cohesiveness the more power it has to bring about conformity to its norms and to gain acceptance of its goals and assignment to tasks and roles.
‘In studies of social clubs and other small groups, conformity pressures have frequently been observed. Whenever a member says something that sounds out of line with the group's norms, the other members at first increase their communication with the deviant. Attempts to influence the nonconformist member to revise or tone down his dissident ideas continue as long as most members of the group feel hopeful about talking him into changing his mind. But if they fail after repeated attempts, the amount of communication they direct toward the deviant decreases markedly. The members begin to exclude him, often quite subtly at first and later more obviously, in order to restore the unity of the group.’ The more cohesive the group and the more relevant the disputed issue to the goals of the group, the greater is the inclination of the members to reject a nonconformist. Just as the members insulate themselves from outside critics who threaten to disrupt the unity and esprit de corps of their group, they take steps, often without being aware of it, to counteract the disruptive influence of inside critics who are attacking the group's norms.’
Groupthink Case Study
The Libelling of Fr Kevin Reynolds by RTÉ
The Fr Kevin Reynolds case belongs to the ‘possession’ category of groupthink, although it also has intimations of cultural contagion within it.
The libelling of Fr Kevin Reynolds by the RTÉ programme Prime Time Investigates, a decade ago, presents as one of the most graphic examples of groupthink of the first type we have identified in this series of articles: the capturing of a group of responsible adults involved in decision-making by a wrongheaded understanding of reality, and the pursuit of this understanding, in the face of overwhelming evidence of its mistakenness, right to the bitter end. The error provoked what was probably the highest libel settlement in the history of Irish journalism, with Fr Reynolds receiving a seven-figure sum in damages once the extent of the error became clear.
On May 23rd 2011, RTÉ broadcast a Prime Time special investigation programme, A Mission to Prey, which accused Father Kevin Reynolds, parish priest at Ahascragh, County Galway, of raping a minor while a missionary in Kenya decades before, and of having fathered a child as a result. Before the broadcast, Father Reynolds had made repeated but fruitless efforts to alert the Prime Time journalists to the falsity of the allegations, even offering to undergo a paternity test. The Prime Time team would later claim that they believed the offer of a paternity test was not ‘completely genuine’, and that, had they agreed to allow Fr Reynolds time to have such a test carried out, they would have had ‘no way of enforcing it’, that it would not happen and therefore someone whom they believed to be responsible for a very serious crime would have not been exposed. In this can be observed the classic symptoms of groupthink as a form of thought ‘possession’: absolute certainty as to the correctness of the course already decided upon, deep suspicion of and hostility towards the ‘out-group’ subject of their documentary, and resistance to all evidence to the contrary — with momentous results.
At the heart of the debacle was the firm belief among the production team that they were right about the paternity allegation. They believed that they had checked and verified the facts, despite the lack of any documentary evidence and the failure to obtain full, on-the-record documentation of what they believed was corroborative evidence from other individuals. They were convinced that their chief witness, the alleged female victim, was reliable and credible. The team also made highly subjective assumptions which served to reinforce their certainty: For example, some members of the team were convinced that there was a striking likeness between Fr Reynolds and the person said to be his child. Fr Reynolds’ demeanour in a doorstep interview was deemed to endorse the team’s view of his guilt and to be consistent with the demeanours of others previously accused of abuse by Prime Time Investigates. There had never previously been a whiff of a suggestion of any impropriety on the part of Fr Reynolds, but that appeared to count for nothing.
The Broadcasting Authority of Ireland (of which I was at the time a member, though I had to recuse myself from most of the deliberations in this matter, having already publicly expressed a view), commissioned a television producer from Northern Ireland, Anna Carragher, to conduct a thorough investigation of the circumstances in which the programme was permitted to go ahead in such dubious circumstances. Carragher observed: ‘I believe that the team got into a position of “group think” where all evidence was interpreted as pointing only in one direction. There was a distinct lack of challenge . . .’
The full Carragher report can be read here:
https://cdn.thejournal.ie/media/2012/05/BAI-Report-Mission-to-Prey.pdf
In the title of the broadcast documentary, A Mission to Prey, the allegations against Father Reynolds and the groupthink concerning their reliability acquired an added dimension of toxicity, imputing to him, and implicitly to other Catholic missionaries, an abominable premeditation. Behind the priestly vocation and outward altruism of church initiatives in foreign countries, that title insinuated, resided a grotesque design to abuse and exploit. This title echoed a malevolent mentality by then rampant in the Irish media, which, where the Catholic church is concerned, no longer considers it sufficient to state facts — the case must be beefed up with sneers and vicious innuendos. Carefully nurtured public prejudice has ensured that, when condemning a Church figure, it is impossible to go too far. This, precisely, was the core nature of the groupthink that was the undoing of Prime Time.
In Part II of this series, we examine how the ‘organic’ form of groupthink, devised and refined on the basis of the understandings explored in this article, is being weaponised to persuade whole populations of dubious ideas, and subject them to forms of mass delusion.