Thinking and Deciding

226 ACTIVELY OPEN-MINDED THINKING
By contrast, when good thinking occurs in groups, there is a commitment of the
group to a friendly (and sometimes not so friendly) interchange of arguments pro and
con, not to a decision already tentatively made. Loyalty to the group is defined in
terms of loyalty to the process of making the best decision, not loyalty to a decision
already made. Visitors to President Kennedy’s inner circle during the Cuban missile
crisis were often surprised at the freedom that members had to bring up seemingly
irrelevant ideas and suggestions. (Kennedy apparently had learned something about
group decision making from the Bay of Pigs.) Information was sought out from a
variety of sources, especially people expected to disagree with the group, and these
people were questioned thoroughly. (Janis suggests that assigning one member of
the group to be devil’s advocate can help to prevent groupthink.)
Janis does not deny that there were other causes of poor decision making in
his examples. For instance, he noted an excessive concern not to appear “soft on
communism,” for domestic political reasons. Had Presidents Kennedy and Johnson
considered the possible outcomes of their poor decisions motivated in this way, Janis
argues, they would have realized that they were ultimately undercutting even this
goal. One of the advantages of Janis’s analysis is that it can explain poor decision
making while allowing that very good decision making could occur in similar circumstances.
Decision makers are not simply the victims of their political biases, and
the purported existence of these biases does not provide a full explanation of poor
decisions. In good decision making, questioning is always possible.
Conclusion
This chapter has provided the main evidence for my claim that we tend to be biased in
favor of our initial ideas. I showed this by comparing our responses to evidence with
normative principles such as the order principle and the neutral-evidence principle.
The prescriptive policy to avoid these biases is actively open-minded thinking. We
have explored some of the factors that facilitate and inhibit such thinking.
Many of the biases discussed in this chapter are prevalent in conflict situations
between two groups: for example, the Bosnians and the Serbs, the Israelis and their
Arab opponents, each nation and its trading partners (or would-be partners), and the
advocates and opponents of abortion, free trade, and many other public policies. 3 If
people learned to think more rationally — to consider counterevidence and to form
their ideologies with more sympathy for the variety of goals that people pursue —
such conflicts could be reduced. We often suppose that only the other side thinks
poorly, that they, not us, are the ones in need of education. Even if this is true, no
harm is done by making sure that our own house is in order. Careful attention to the
quality of our own arguments can even uplift — by example — the reasoning of our
opponents.
3For those interested in further reading on biases and conflict, Jervis (1976) provides an excellent
discussion.