Thinking and Deciding

FACTORS THAT MODERATE BELIEF PERSISTENCE 225
view. On the other hand, the individual members may be too willing to assume that
this has been done when it has not been done. A group consensus sometimes seems
much more obviously “right” than the same conclusion reached by an individual,
even though the members of the group are all alike in sharing the characteristics that
lead to the consensus. Would it be any surprise if a group of automobile workers in
the United States “agreed” that importing of Japanese cars should be stopped, or if a
group of Toyota dealers agreed that importing should not be stopped?
Janis (1982) studied the rationality of group decision making and the biases that
distort group decisions by reviewing the history of major foreign-policy decisions
made by the president of the United States and his advisers. Some of these decisions
displayed poor thinking, and others displayed good thinking. As it turned out, the
former led to poor outcomes and the latter led to good outcomes. It is to be expected
that better thinking will lead to better outcomes on the average, but Janis is aware
that the correlation is not perfect. He tried to select his cases according to the kind
of thinking that went into them rather than according to the outcome. The examples
include what he regarded as the poorly made decision of President Kennedy and his
advisers to attempt the Bay of Pigs invasion in Cuba in 1961; the well-made decisions
of practically the same group during the Cuban missile crisis in 1962; the
poorly made decisions of President Johnson and his advisers to escalate the Vietnam
War over several years; and the poorly made decisions of President Nixon and his
advisers to withhold information concerning White House involvement in the Watergate
break-in from 1972 to 1974.
Janis’s selection of cases was supported by Tetlock’s study (1979) analyzing the
“integrative complexity” of public statements by prominent decision-making groups.
Tetlock found that the poorly made decisions were associated with statements at
or near the lowest level, but the well-made decisions were associated with welldifferentiated
statements. (Other recent studies of groupthink include those of Mc-
Cauley, 1989, and Tetlock, Peterson, McGuire, Chang, and Feld, 1992. These studies
deal with the nature of conformity in groupthink and with its causes, respectively.)
Janis characterized poor group thinking as “groupthink” (borrowing the term
from George Orwell). He identified three major causes of groupthink, presented
here in outline form:
Type I. Overestimation of the group
1. Illusion of invulnerability
2. Belief in the inherent morality of the group
Type II. Closed-mindedness
3. Collective rationalization
4. Stereotypes of out-groups
Type III. Pressures toward uniformity
5. Self-censorship
6. Illusion of unanimity
7. Direct pressure on dissenters
8. Self-appointed mind-guards