Group Decision-Making PDF

Chapter 6 Group Decision-Making On January 28, 1986, the space shuttle Challenger took off from Cape Canaveral in Florida after many delays. Successive launches had been scrapped due to technical issues, and people at NASA were anxious to get going. But the shuttle exploded in the air only seventy...

Chapter 6 Group Decision-Making On January 28, 1986, the space shuttle Challenger took off from Cape Canaveral in Florida after many delays. Successive launches had been scrapped due to technical issues, and people at NASA were anxious to get going. But the shuttle exploded in the air only seventy-three seconds after takeoff, to the great horror of those watching on the ground and around the world. All seven astronauts on board died. Few students today remember the explosion personally—you have to be about the author’s age to remember seeing it live on TV—but many of you will have seen documentaries about it or viewed the terrible footage on YouTube. A stunned television audience looked on in horror as the shuttle blew up in the sky. The crew were not killed instantly, but were probably unconscious as what was left of the shuttle plummeted into the Atlantic Ocean. It was an absolutely devastating day for many people, especially of course for those who had given the go ahead for the shuttle to fly, but few of the decision-makers at NASA and Morton-Thiokol can have felt as bad as Roger Boisjoly did when a subsequent commission found that the explosion was caused by the disintegration of an “O-ring” in the shuttle’s right solid rocket booster. This was the very calamity he had predicted and had repeatedly tried to warn his colleagues about. At the time, Boisjoly was an engineer who worked for Morton-Thiokol, then a sub-contractor to NASA. He was an expert on O-rings, the seals that connected the space shuttle to the solid rocket booster which was used to propel the shuttle into space. Before the launch, Boisjoly was a deeply worried man. The weather was unseasonably cold for the time of year in Florida, and he knew that the O-rings had not been tested at the kind of low temperatures the shuttle would likely face that day. So he had done what most people would do. He had urged his colleagues to wait until temperatures at Cape Canaveral climbed. He warned his boss of what he thought would happen, but the latter waved Boisjoly’s objections away. He thought Roger worried too much about  Group Decision-Making 77 O-rings because that’s what he happened to work with. “Look at the bigger picture,” the boss told him. Boisjoly tried to warn others at the company, but most reacted the same way, saying the scientific data about temperatures were inconclusive. One even compared Boisjoly to the fictional children’s character “Chicken Little,” forever hollering that “ the sky is falling.” There was a final conference-call meeting before the launch, between Morton-Thiokol and NASA officials. The latter were keen to go ahead with the launch, and so were the vast majority of the people around the conference table in Boisjoly’s own company. But he was still gravely worried about the O-rings and the potential for catastrophe. One by one, the chair of the meeting asked the chief participants for their views—should we go ahead?— and one by one each participant answered in the affirmative. Then the chair asked “ is there anyone here who feels that we should not go ahead?” Everyone in his own company knew full well that Boisjoly had strong reservations, and all eyes turn warily and impatiently towards him. But then something remarkable happened: he said nothing. He didn’t press the issue of the O-rings, even though everyone expected him to “ harp on” about it yet again. By his silence, he implicitly gave his consent to something that he felt to be wrong. A combination of factors held him back from saying what he really thought. Foremost among them was the pressure of the group bearing down on him. Why Groups Have an Impact on Us When we think about the decisions made by our government, we typically imagine a single individual—usually a president or prime minister—sitting at a desk and reviewing various options. We often also imagine decisions being made in an idealized fashion, in the manner envisioned by the Homo economicus approach. After suitable deliberation, the leader then selects the option that seems most likely to meet whatever political and policy objective has been set. And on some occasions, this scenario does at least resemble how decisions are made at the highest levels. When Ronald Reagan was president, for instance, he reportedly liked to be handed a single sheet of paper with a list of alternatives on it. He would then tick the box next to his preferred option. Reagan rarely delved down into the lower levels of his administration or read lengthy memo- randa. Though he had a far greater appetite for information than Reagan did, President Richard Nixon would also reportedly make decisions largely in isola- tion from others, hunkering down in the Oval Office away from most of his Cabinet colleagues. His “ loner” personality led him to select a system of White House management that reinforced his solitude, a factor which many believe contributed to his ultimate downfall. 78 The Situation There are other times, however, when even chief executives like Reagan and Nixon find it useful to make decisions in groups. Indeed, group decision- making seems to be more typical than its unilateral variation. There are a number of reasons for this.1 First, working collectively gives the eventual decision reached greater legitimacy than if a decision were reached in unilateral fashion, after minimum consultation with others. Second, this provides leaders with a measure of political cover; if others have “signed onto” a decision, it becomes harder for them to go public with criticism after the fact if the policy leads to significant failure. Third, group decision-making ensures (at least in principle) that the leading decision-maker is exposed to a variety of differing and possibly dissenting opinions, minimizing the possibility that a leader takes a decision without considering all available facts. As Yaacov Vertzberger notes: Decisionmakers operating in a group are likely to be exposed to new information and interpretations more rapidly than if they were operating alone and to arguments they might not have been aware of as independent decisionmakers; both exposure and arguments improve the quality of group members’ problem solving and learning... argumentation in the process of group decision-making clarifies ambiguities and inconsistencies by disseminating information and alternative perspectives and can illumi- nate weaknesses in the logical structure of accumulated knowledge and beliefs.2 Fourth, some leaders may prefer to work in groups where they are not well informed about the policy area concerned. LBJ, for instance, knew relatively little about foreign policy issues coming into the presidency, and relied heavily on what he called his “Harvards” (trusted policy advisers like Robert McNamara and Dean Rusk). Group decision-making also has the added benefit of reducing psychological strain on leaders who are uncomfortable with a given policy question or area. Last, making decisions in groups may actually be mandated by the legislature under some circumstances, as is the case with the National Security Act of 1948 in the United States.3 However, it doesn’t necessarily follow that groups make better decisions than individuals working alone. As Vertzberger notes, the potential benefits of group decision-making can sometimes be outweighed by other processes, “ pathologies of the group [which] act to narrow the scope and complexity of information processing operations and encourage parochialism and con- formity.”4 There is an old joke that “a camel is a racehorse designed by a committee.” The serious point behind this witticism is that in groups where power is dispersed—that is, where power is widely shared among a number of its members—compromises have to be made in order to reach a consensus  Group Decision-Making 79 position. Suppose that racehorses did not exist and that we gave such a group the task of designing one. One member might propose making it sleek and aerodynamic, with no humps. Another might disagree, saying that a single hump would give the rider something to hang onto during the race. “Why not give it three humps, so that several people can ride it?” another might say. Eventually, they might only be able to agree on an animal with two humps, something that resembles a camel, but which looks rather odd and dys- functional. A classic example in the legislative sphere is the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), which was ratified by the United States Senate in 1993. In order to pass, the legislation transferring it into U.S. law had to be backed up with so many exemptions—added on by various lobbying groups, such as orange-growers in Florida, sugar-growers in Louisiana, and environmental lobbyists—that it only partially resembled the original treaty. In their book Essence of Decision, Graham Allison and Philip Zelikow develop a famous model of decision-making—the governmental politics approach or Model III—in which power is dispersed in precisely this way, and decision outcomes are the product of bargaining and compromise. Each member holds sufficient power to thwart the wishes of other members, so whatever decision they come up with will by necessity have to involve a process of give-and-take. If this is so, however, an interesting possibility arises: the eventual decision they reach may reflect no one’s real preferences. Any decision arrived at may simply reflect the “ least common denominator,” that thing which they can all agree upon. But that may not actually be something which anyone wanted, at least not as their first choice.5 This is just one way in which groups can actually produce dysfunctional or sub-optimal outcomes, decisions that might well be inferior to those taken by an informed individual acting alone. For most of this chapter, however, we will examine another well-known theoretical approach which deals with group decision-making: Irving Janis’s “groupthink” theory. As we shall discover, this approach also departs from the rational actor or Homo economicus approach in significant ways, and it does so by highlighting the fact that individual decision- makers often behave differently—that is, differ in the extent to which they openly express their views and preferences—when acting singly from the way they do when they form part of a larger group. The premise here is that our behavior changes in subtle ways in groups, so that people behave differently in them from how they would when acting on their own. Again—in keeping with the theme of this section of the book—the power of “ the situation” is so great in some circumstances that it effectively overrides the power of the individual. How might this occur? To start with, consider again Solomon Asch’s interesting findings about group conformity. In Chapter 4 we saw that majority 80 The Situation influence can exert a powerful impact on the judgments of the minority; when subjects were placed in a room on their own and asked to match the lengths of lines, they generally did so accurately. But they made mistakes 75 percent of the time when placed in a room full of associates of the experimenter who deliberately gave the wrong answers. What was interesting about this experiment, of course, is that people were prepared to suspend their own judgments—even judgments that they knew to be objectively correct—in order to fall in line with the collective views of the group. This and other research on group conformity was the starting point not just for Stanley Milgram’s work on obedience to authority, but for Irving Janis’s fascinating work on group decision-making in American foreign policy. The Perils of Groupthink: Smart Guys Making Dumb Decisions In his path-breaking 1972 book Victims of Groupthink—revised ten years later simply as Groupthink—social psychologist Irving Janis defined the groupthink phenomenon as a process through which a group reaches a hasty or premature consensus and the group then becomes closed to outside ideas.6 In Janis’s own words, groupthink is “a mode of thinking that people engage in when they are deeply involved in a cohesive in-group, when the members’ strivings for unanimity override their motivation to realistically appraise alternative courses of action.”7 High group cohesion can develop, for instance, where the members have known each other for many years and/or think very much alike. While such a group can make effective decisions—group cohesion is a necessary but not sufficient condition for groupthink to occur—it can become prey to this pathology where members of the group come to prize “concurrence-seeking”—in other words, unanimity and agreement—over the full and rational consideration of all available courses of action. He contrasts this with vigilant decision-making—in which decision-makers do rigorously and thoroughly appraise all available options—and holds up the Cuban missile crisis as a notable instance of a case in which this kind of superior process occurred.8 According to Janis, groupthink has a number of elements (or “antecedent conditions” ), in addition to high group cohesiveness: Insulation of the group from outside advice—the group does not seek or permit outsiders to offer their own opinions. Aggressive and opinionated leadership—the leader makes his or her own opinions so evident at the outset or during the debate about options that meaningful discussion is stifled.  Group Decision-Making 81 A lack of norms requiring methodical procedures—there is no tradition within the group of encouraging the full consideration of options in a methodical way. Homogeneity of members’ backgrounds/ideology—most members of the group come from a similar social and educational background and/or think too much alike. High levels of stress—the group is challenged by a problem that induces stress in its members, such as the need to reach a decision quickly. Temporary low self-esteem.9 How do we know when groupthink is present? Janis identifies eight symp- toms which can be used as diagnostic criteria: An illusion of invulnerability—the group develops excessive optimism which then encourages risk-taking. Collective rationalization—members discount warnings and fail to recon- sider their core assumptions. A belief in the inherent morality of the group—members come to believe in the “moral rightness” of their cause and become blind to the ethical consequences of their decisions. Stereotyped views of outgroups—the group develops an excessively simplified and negative view of the “enemy.” Direct pressure is exerted on dissenters—members come under pressure not to dissent from the group’s opinions. Self-censorship—members fail to express their own doubts and deviations from the perceived group consensus. An illusion of unanimity—the majority view is assumed to be unanimous, but in reality some members may harbor personal doubts about it. Self-appointed “mindguards”—members emerge who take it upon themselves to protect the group and its leader from dissenting views and information that might challenge the group’s assumed consensus.10 As always, it is easier to see how a theoretical process operates by seeing it in action in a real-life historical case. Here we will provide two illustrations of examples where groupthink has been argued to have played a major role in the decision-making: the 1961 Bay of Pigs fiasco and the 1965 escalation of the Vietnam War. Janis gives these two cases pride of place in his book, arguing that both represent classic examples of the “groupthink syndrome.” New evidence since Janis wrote has emerged in recent years that challenges his interpretation of both cases, however, and we will highlight both the empirical and theoretical challenges that have been leveled at his theory. 82 The Situation We will conclude the chapter by examining another, newer approach— newgroup syndrome—which also emphasizes the pathologies of decision-making in groups. Example 1: The Bay of Pigs By 1961, Communist-controlled Cuba, led at that time by a young revolution- ary named Fidel Castro, had become a perceived thorn in the side of any U.S. administration. Although not considered a security threat in its own right, the arrival of a pro-Soviet regime in Cuba was troubling to American presidents for at least two reasons. First of all, it was politically embarrassing to have a former ally turn to Communism in “Uncle Sam’s backyard,” only 150 kilometers from the southernmost shores of Florida. More worrying at the time, though, was the prospect that Cuba’s conversion would be only the first step in a process in which Communism spread rapidly through all of Latin America. President Dwight D. Eisenhower had formulated the famous “domino theory,” whereby the fall of a single domino would lead the others to topple in swift succession, and other U.S. presidents—including Eisenhower’s successor, John F. Kennedy—became ardent believers in this powerful psychological metaphor as well (dubious though the theory now seems in hindsight). During the last year of the Eisenhower administration, a secret plan was hatched by the CIA to invade Cuba and depose Castro, using Cuban exiles as a front for direct U.S. involvement. This plan was implemented by the new Kennedy administration, which gave the go-ahead for an invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs (known on the island as Bahía de Cochinos or Playa Girón) in early 1961. The whole venture was a miserable failure, however, not least because Castro’s forces fully expected the invasion and were waiting for the exile forces. One hundred and fourteen of the exiles were killed, and nearly 1,200 men were captured. According to one authoritative report, around 1,800 deaths resulted from the invasion when Cuban civilian casualties are included.11 Embarrassingly, the Kennedy administration was also later forced to pay a ransom to Castro in order to get the prisoners back. Janis opens his discussion of John Kennedy’s decision to approve the plan by quoting Kennedy himself. “How could I have been so stupid?” the president is said to have asked his brother Robert and others when the invasion plan failed spectacularly.12 This was a huge military and political embarrassment for an administration which was only a few months old, and Janis is especially keen to understand why this particular government could have made such a colossal error. After all, Kennedy’s administration was filled with young, well-schooled, confident individuals, men whom JFK had carefully and very  Group Decision-Making 83 deliberately selected because he wanted the best talent in America from academia and business. In retrospect, Kennedy and his colleagues made six major errors, Janis argues.13 First of all, they reasoned that most ordinary people—both inside and outside the United States—would believe the CIA’s cover story that this was entirely a “Cuban exile operation.” The invasion plan called for the landing of an exile brigade, which would then link up with anti-Castro dissident groups within Cuba and storm Havana, deposing Castro in the process. It seemed unlikely that the hand of the United States could be dis- guised even at the time, however, since the details of the plan had not only leaked, but had even been published in The New York Times ahead of the invasion! Second, Kennedy and his advisers reasoned that the Cuban Air Force was wholly ineffective, and third, that this force could easily be knocked out by the elderly aircraft that the CIA had given to the invading exile brigade. Neither of these assumptions turned out to be accurate. JFK had canceled a U.S. air strike against the Cuban forces, largely out of a fear that this would make the participation of the United States in the invasion far too obvious, and this undercut the ability of the exile forces to immobilize Cuban air defenses. Fourth, they assumed that Castro’s army was simply so weak that the exile brigade would be able to establish a well-protected beachhead at their landing point. Fifth, they assumed that morale was so high among the invading force of 1,400 Cuban exiles that they would not need the support of U.S. land troops. Both of these expectations were problematic as well: morale was actually so low among some of the exiles that they had rebelled against their CIA handlers. Finally, the president and his colleagues made the critically flawed assumption that an invasion would somehow “ instantaneously” spark a popular uprising. This was perhaps the most dubious assumption of all, since—having got wind of the invasion plans—Castro had time to round up and imprison anyone he thought likely to join up with the invasion force. If the spontaneous uprising did not happen, JFK and his advisers reasoned that the forces could always retreat to the Escambray mountains and join anti-Castro guerrillas there. Apparently, no one had told the president that the original landing site had been moved, making any escape impossible if the assumption of an instantaneous uprising proved unfounded (as, in fact, turned out to be the case). In order to escape, the invaders would now have had to wade through hundreds of miles of swampland, but none of JFK’s advisers seems to have thought to look at a map. The result, Janis says, was “a perfect failure.”14 How and why did Kennedy and his advisers convince themselves that such a flawed operation would succeed? As in the Vietnam case discussed below, Janis traces this fiasco to a deeply flawed decision-making process. Applying 84 The Situation the theory to the case, he argues that the following symptoms manifested themselves: Illusion of invulnerability: as Janis sees it, the “New Frontier” people (a term used to describe Kennedy’s officials) thought that they “couldn’t fail.” Several of JFK’s advisers appear to have felt as if they possessed what Ted Sorensen has called “ the magic touch.” Certainly Kennedy himself was unaccustomed to losing anything in his life, as was the case with most if not all of his key advisers. Illusion of unanimity: no one raised doubts about the invasion plan in the many formal meetings that were held to discuss it. Suppression of personal doubts: some said afterwards that they harbored significant doubts which they failed to voice at the time, most notably Arthur Schlesinger. Self-appointed mindguards: Robert Kennedy and Dean Rusk in particular seem to have acted as the mindguards in this case. Robert Kennedy is said to have told Schlesinger not to voice his doubts in meetings, since the president had “already decided” to go ahead with the plan. Docility fostered by suave leadership: John Kennedy himself may have encouraged a sense of complacency and docility by allowing the CIA to dominate the discussion and failing to encourage his advisers to ask the tough questions that might have exposed the plan’s flaws. Taboo against antagonizing new members: CIA Director Allen Dulles and his Chief of Plans Richard Bissell were both strongly in favor of the plan—which had been formulated by the previous administration—and were held in high esteem by the group. Janis argues that in such a situation, it becomes socially difficult to challenge the wisdom of those who appear to know what they are doing.15 Example 2: Escalation of the Vietnam War Irving Janis argues that the decision to Americanize the war in Vietnam in 1965, made by Lyndon Johnson and his advisers, represents one of the clearest examples of the groupthink phenomenon at work. U.S. land troops went ashore that year, and would remain in Vietnam for the next eight years. The war would end with the collapse of Saigon in 1975, as the last Americans fled the U.S. embassy there by helicopter. In the meantime, more bombs were dropped on North Vietnam than had been dropped in all of World War II. Over 58,000 Americans lost their lives, and millions of Vietnamese: all in the vain attempt to stave off an outcome that could have been prevented back in 1945 if the United States had supported Ho Chi Minh’s declaration of  Group Decision-Making 85 independence from the French. Both on that occasion and at various points along the way, there had been various “ lost opportunities” which could have been taken to avoid war.16 One such opportunity came in the immediate aftermath of World War II. During the war, Ho’s Communist forces had allied themselves with the United States against Japan, and his organization (known as the Viet Minh) had actually assisted in the recovery of downed American pilots over Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos. In 1945 the British returned control of Vietnam to its French colonizers, but Ho unilaterally chose to declare Vietnam’s independence. As he did so, members of the American OSS—the pre- decessor of today’s CIA—looked on in approval, and Ho even began his declaration using the first few sentences of the American Declaration of Independence. Tragically, however, the decision was made in Washington to side with the French; many in the State Department reasoned that the U.S. should support France in its efforts to regain control of its former colonies, since failing to do so might jeopardize French support for NATO in Europe. At that time, moreover, Europe was considered a far more significant theater of interest than southeast Asia. Janis does not look at the war in this broader context, but instead chooses to examine Johnson’s discrete decision to commit land troops to the war.17 What was so interesting to Janis as a social psychologist was that Johnson and his advisers showed the same kinds of conformist behaviors in groups as those shown in numerous laboratory experiments. But these were the individuals whom David Halberstam called “ the best and the brightest,” experienced and highly regarded men Johnson had inherited from his predecessor John Kennedy. And yet the vast majority of these individuals wholeheartedly supported the escalation of a war that ultimately proved disastrous for the country. The primary forum for Johnson’s Vietnam decision-making, Janis argues, was the “ Tuesday Lunch Group.” This was a small, highly cohesive but informal collection of individuals whose judgment Johnson trusted the most, men like Secretary of State Dean Rusk and Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara. Within this group, Janis observes the presence of a number of tell-tale symptoms that can lead to the emergence of groupthink: A small, cohesive group of like-minded decision-makers who valued unity Over-optimism and a sense of invulnerability Homogenization of views within the “ inner circle” of advisers Avoidance of potentially useful outside advice (e.g. that of Senator William Fulbright, Senator Mike Mansfield) Emergence of mindguards (e.g. National Security Adviser Walt Rostow) and the suppression of personal doubts by group members 86 The Situation Gradual exclusion of those who threatened the group consensus The “domestification” or exclusion of dissenters. Even within Johnson’s inner circle, there was a handful of dissenters. Most notably, Undersecretary of State George Ball harbored significant doubts about Americanizing the war, and repeatedly expressed these doubts in meetings. However, Janis argues that the group defused Ball’s dissent by referring to him as a “devil’s advocate.” This term originates from the Catholic faith and refers to the cardinal within the Vatican who is traditionally chosen to argue against the beatification of a saint, in effect taking the “Devil’s side.” The other cardinals know that the advocate is not seriously converting to this position, but (much like a lawyer who must defend a notorious criminal in a court trial ) he is required to take this position. Similarly, many of those who favored escalating the war maintained that Ball was not serious in his dissent, but was merely arguing against the majority position in order to ensure that all positions were heard in the debate. For the rest of their lives, many of Johnson’s decision-makers on Vietnam— Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian Affairs William Bundy is a good example—would continue to maintain that Ball had been a devil’s advocate, but this was simply untrue. Ball harbored very real and heartfelt disagree- ments with the others. But dismissing or “domesticating” the dissenter in this way is exactly what one would expect if groupthink were present, Janis’s analysis suggests. Similarly, Lyndon Johnson himself would defuse the criti- cism of Press Secretary Bill Moyers by announcing “ here comes Mr. Stop the Bombing!” whenever Moyers walked into the room, thus blunting anything Moyers might say against the war before he even uttered a comment.18 And when one of the original architects of the war, Robert McNamara, began to have doubts about the wisdom of the war and began to express these outside the group, Johnson compared him to a son who had let slip to prospective buyers of a house that there are cracks in the basement.19 “He is just short of cracking up,” Johnson is reputed to have told advisers in 1967 when McNamara was not present. Criticisms of Janis’s Perspective The groupthink approach has been criticized from a variety of perspectives. Attempts to test the model more rigorously than Janis himself did have been met with mixed results.20 More generally, some have critiqued the theoretical coherence of the model Janis developed, while others have used more recently declassified materials to undermine the empirical arguments he made. As Philip Tetlock and his colleagues note, four broad criticisms  Group Decision-Making 87 have been raised against Janis’s work on the theoretical side: first of all, Janis relied on qualitative case studies, a method which frequently tempts the researcher to emphasize evidence which “fits” a theory and discard information which does not; second, there is a “suspiciously perfect correlation” between the presence of groupthink and flawed decision-making in Janis’s book, even though he himself concedes that process is not everything and that it is pos- sible ( by sheer luck) for a good decision to emerge from flawed procedures. Third, there is a suspicious “all-or-nothing” quality to the way that Janis’s cases fit so neatly into the categories of groupthink or vigilant decision- making; and last, there are various conceptual problems with the model itself, especially those having to do with distinguishing the causes from the consequences of groupthink.21 In their classic critique, for instance, Longley and Pruitt question (amongst other things) the inclusion of “a belief in the inherent morality of the group” and “stereotyped views of out-groups” in the list of the symptoms of groupthink, since unlike the other factors these appear to have little to do with consensus formation or concurrence-seeking.22 In short, one does not need to hold a simplistic view of one’s enemy or an exalted view of one’s own moral position to engage in hasty or premature decision-making that excludes minority views. On the empirical side, David Barrett has notably challenged the idea that Lyndon Johnson didn’t receive competing advice on Vietnam. Most of his advisers did argue for escalation, but a significant minority did not, Barrett notes. Six advisers in particular argued against escalation. There was George Ball as we know already, but Senator William Fulbright, Vice President Hubert Humphrey, Senator Mike Mansfield, Senator Richard Russell, and presidential adviser Clark Clifford all expressed their feelings against the war directly to Johnson as well.23 The picture of a president stubbornly ignoring outside advice and relying exclusively upon a tiny group of like-minded individuals therefore does not really fit what actually occurred, Barrett suggests. Of course, we have long known that it was not just Ball who expressed reser- vations about escalation; many in the CIA, Defense, and State Departments also harbored strong doubts, though it tended to be those lower down the hier- archy who felt this way. Even more significant, perhaps, is the evidence we now have that Johnson himself agonized over the decision to escalate quite extensively. Johnson secretly taped a large number of his phone calls, and the declassification of many of these calls since the late 1990s has shown a Johnson who was almost always pessimistic about the chances of success, rather than exhibiting any “ illusion of invulnerability.” We now know that Johnson and his colleagues were, as Barrett puts it, “uncertain warriors.”24 With regard to the Bay of Pigs, Robert McNamara has stated that the com- mon emotion among Kennedy’s advisers when they initially took office was not 88 The Situation one of omnipotence or “ the magic touch,” as Janis’s account suggests, but a strongly defensive feeling. Domestically, JFK had won by the narrowest margin in electoral history at the 1960 presidential election, but even more importantly in foreign policy terms the dominant feeling was one of being on the defense against an ever-expanding Communist threat.25 Roderick Kramer argues that Janis’s interpretation of Vietnam and the Bay of Pigs sits poorly with what we now know about both case studies: When making a case for the argument that Kennedy and his advisors dis- played symptoms of overconfidence and an “ illusion of invulnerability” when deciding to proceed with implementation of the CIA operation, Janis did not have access, of course, to the classified records of top secret briefings and meetings. This evidence, now available to scholars, indicates that Kennedy’s assessments were undoubtedly influenced not only by deliberately misleading intelligence assessments provided by the CIA, but also by disingenuous, and politically motivated comments made by President Eisenhower to the new president during private, top-secret briefings.26 Rather than being influenced by group processes, Kramer suggests, Kennedy may simply have had great difficulty believing that Dwight Eisenhower, “ the organizational genius behind the largest, most complex, and most successful amphibious military invasion in U.S. history,” would have supported a much smaller and less ambitious amphibiously based invasion that had little chance of success.27 In both the Vietnam and Bay of Pigs cases, moreover, the decisions each president reached may have had more to do with individual-level analogical reasoning processes (see Chapter 9 of this book) as opposed to group-level ones. For instance, the confidence that Kennedy and his advisers had in the CIA may have stemmed from the agency’s success in an apparently very similar case, the overthrow of Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala in 1954. JFK and his advisers seem to have expected that Castro would flee the country when presented with a U.S. plan for his overthrow, just as Arbenz had done seven years earlier. Newgroup Syndrome A number of recent scholars have noted—probably with a fair amount of justification—that there has been too much attention devoted in research and textbooks to groupthink. No chapter on group decision-making would be complete without devoting a good deal of space to groupthink, as this one has; Janis’s theory is always the elephant in the room, a perspective we simply  Group Decision-Making 89 cannot ignore whenever political groups are discussed. Equally, however, empirical and theoretical criticisms of the groupthink approach, such as the ones noted above, have prompted many analysts of foreign policy decision- making to look “ beyond groupthink,” re-examining the wider literature on group behaviors within social psychology for clues as to how other theo- retical frameworks might be developed.28 One such approach has become known as the newgroup syndrome.29 Eric Stern and Bengt Sundelius, the theory’s major advocates, have proposed this approach “ to capture a hypothesized pathological conformity dynamic liable to occur in newly formed policy groups... in ad hoc or newly institutionalized groups, that is, those in the forming stage.”30 As they further explain, in such groups: A common group subculture and well-developed procedural norms tend to be lacking. This vacuum creates uncertainty among the members who are likely to be anxious, tentative, dependent, and, therefore, particularly inclined to take direction from a leader or other assertive group members within the group. These conditions create incentives for both compliance and internalization on the part of the individual member, which in turn results in a tendency toward conformity in the group as a whole.31 Drawing in particular on the work of Bruce Tuckman, Stern and Sundelius hypothesize that groups go through a number of developmental stages during the lifetime of their existence—from their initial formation to the point where they formally “adjourn”—and that a differing kind of dynamic operates at each. Stern and Sundelius are especially interested in the beginning of a group’s life, however, where a new administration comes to power or a significant turnover in membership (through resignations, hirings, and firings) in effect creates a new group dynamic. While dysfunctional decision-making is not inevitable at this early stage—it all depends on the kind of norms that the group leader encourages at the outset—there is a tendency towards caution and conformity (and a corresponding lack of open, critical thinking) at this point. Stern applies this approach to the Bay of Pigs case study, and we may usefully contrast his own approach with that of Janis. Like Janis, he argues that conformity was a particular problem in the decision-making, but he traces this to the fact that Kennedy—having swept away Eisenhower’s decision-making structures and a foreign policy apparatus which is now highly regarded by many scholars32—operated in a way that was too informal and ad hoc. The major players did not know one another well and were only beginning to find their feet in their jobs. Moreover, the president himself had little manage- ment or executive-level experience, having been a member of Congress and then a senator. “Given Kennedy’s relatively laissez-faire management style, he 90 The Situation did not attempt to guide consciously and clarify the group decision culture in order to reduce uncertainty and promote critical interaction,” Stern concludes. He appears to have been unaware of the effect of his person and the weight of his office upon his colleagues. Similarly, the evidence suggests that he was insufficiently conscious of the emergent group norms (unwit- tingly reinforced by his own conduct) of deference to the president and to “experts.”33 The Individual in a Group Setting The group-level form of situationism suggests that groups are more than the sum total of the individuals who compose them: once policy-makers form a group, the resultant body can in a sense “overwhelm” its members and take on a life of its own. As Stern puts it, Kennedy does not appear to have appreci- ated this possibility at the outset. “He placed a premium on talent, believing that this quality was the key to achieving policy and political success,” Stern argues. “ In other words, he believed that it was enough to assemble a number of talented people, throw them in a room together, and wait for good things to happen.”34 This kind of perspective is akin to a belief in a kind of narrow dispositionism; in other words, Kennedy’s initial view ignored the group dynamic that occurs when we bring individuals together, and situationists like Janis would contend that these dynamics are not always positive in their effects (as we saw in the Bay of Pigs and Vietnam cases). By the time of the October 1962 Cuban missile crisis, however, JFK clearly recognized the effects that group norms and other factors can have on decision-making, taking various steps to ensure that his own presence (for instance) did not preordain the decisions reached. Fortunately for us, he seems to have been a quick learner. Conclusion We have seen how situationist arguments can take a number of different forms, though all of the main approaches we have discussed—Skinner’s behaviorism, Milgram’s obedience paradigm, Zimbardo “ bad barrel” theory, and the group- think approach of Janis—share in common the belief that our dispositions are less critical in shaping our behavior than the situation in which we find ourselves. Most of us, though not perhaps everyone, can reliably be expected to behave in predictable ways when placed in a certain situation. But there is, as we have occasionally noted in the criticism of various situationist approaches, another (rival ) way of looking at the underpinnings of political  Group Decision-Making 91 behavior: dispositionism. Dispositionist approaches dispute the notion that human beings generally behave similarly when placed in the same kind of situ- ation; as we saw in Chapter 1, dispositionists believe in the immense variability of human beings—their differing beliefs, attitudes, mindsets, and so on—and cite examples that highlight the variation in political behavior which results from these differences. Our next task, then, is to discuss various perspectives that take a dispositionist approach, and we begin that job in the next chapter with an examination of the oldest approach to political psychology, psycho- biography. As we shall see, this is a body of work which inherently assumes that individuals and their peculiarities “matter.” Notes 1 See Fritz Gaenslen, “Decision-Making Groups,” in Eric Singer and Valerie Hudson (eds.), Political Psychology and Foreign Policy (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1992). 2 Yaacov Vertzberger, The World In Their Minds: Information Processing, Cognition and Perception in Foreign Policy Decisionmaking (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990), p.223. 3 Alexander George, Presidential Decisionmaking in Foreign Policy: The Effective Use of Information and Advice (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1980), p.81. 4 Vertzberger, The World In Their Minds, p.224. 5 Graham Allison and Philip Zelikow, Essence of Decision: Explaining the Cuban Missile Crisis (New York: Longman, 1999). 6 Irving Janis, Victims of Groupthink: A Psychological Study of Foreign-Policy Decisions and Fiascoes (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1972); Janis, Groupthink: Psychological Studies of Policy Decisions and Fiascoes (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1982). 7 Janis, Groupthink, p.9. 8 Ibid., pp.132–58. 9 Ibid., pp.176–77. 10 Ibid., pp.174 –75. 11 Peter Kornbluh (ed.), Bay of Pigs Declassified: The Secret CIA Report on the Invasion of Cuba (New York: W.W. Norton, 1998), pp.2–3. 12 Janis, Groupthink, p.16. 13 Ibid., pp.19–27. 14 Ibid., p.14. 15 Ibid., pp.35– 47. 16 See Robert McNamara, James Blight, and Robert Brigham, Argument Without End: In Search of Answers To The Vietnam Tragedy (New York: Public Affairs, 1999). 17 Janis, Groupthink, pp.97–130. 18 Ibid., p.115. 19 Ibid., p.118. 20 See for instance Philip Tetlock, Randall Peterson, Charles McGuire, Shi-Jie Chang, and Peter Field, “Assessing Political Group Dynamics: A Test of the Groupthink Model,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 63: 403–25, 1992. 21 Ibid., p.404. 92 The Situation 22 Jeanne Longley and Dean Pruitt, “Groupthink: A Critique of Janis’s Theory,” in Ladd Wheeler (ed.), Review of Personality and Social Psychology (Beverly Hills, CA: Sage Publications, 1980), p.91. 23 David Barrett, “ The Mythology Surrounding Lyndon Johnson, His Advisers, and the 1965 Decision To Escalate the Vietnam War,” Political Science Quarterly, 103: 637–63, 1988. 24 David Barrett, Uncertain Warriors: Lyndon Johnson and His Vietnam Advisers (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 1993). For transcripts of many of the relevant phone calls, see Michael Beschloss’s two edited volumes, Taking Charge: The Johnson White House Tapes, 1963–1964 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997) and Reaching For Glory: Lyndon Johnson’s Secret White House Tapes, 1964 –1965 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2001). 25 McNamara, Blight, and Brigham, Argument Without End, pp.25–31. 26 Roderick Kramer, “Revisiting the Bay of Pigs and Vietnam Decisions 25 Years Later: How Well Has the Groupthink Hypothesis Stood the Test of Time?” Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 73: 236–71, 1998, p.245. 27 Ibid. 28 Paul t’Hart, Eric Stern, and Bengt Sundelius (eds.), Beyond Groupthink: Political Group Dynamics and Foreign Policy-Making (Ann Arbor, MI: The University of Michigan Press, 1997). 29 Eric Stern and Bengt Sundelius, “ The Essence of Groupthink,” Mershon Inter- national Studies Review, 1: 101–8, 1994; Eric Stern, “ Probing the Plausibility of Newgroup Syndrome: Kennedy and the Bay of Pigs,” in t’Hart, Stern, and Sundelius (eds.), Beyond Groupthink. 30 Quoted in Stern, “ Probing the Plausibility of Newgroup Syndrome,” p.165. 31 Ibid. 32 See for instance John Burke and Fred Greenstein, How Presidents Test Reality: Decisions on Vietnam, 1954 and 1965 (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1989). 33 Stern, “ Probing the Plausibility of Newgroup Syndrome,” p.182. 34 Ibid., p.177. Suggested Further Reading Irving Janis, Groupthink: Psychological Studies of Policy Decisions and Fiascoes (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1982). Film Groupthink (1991): Fairly short but very useful training video from CRM films which examines the concept of groupthink, using actors to recreate the Challenger decision- making (amusingly, Boisjoly is played by Peter Boyle, best known today for his part in the TV show Everybody Loves Raymond ). Very expensive to buy, but should be available in many university libraries.