“History and the daily newspaper provide examples of policy deci- sions made by groups that resulted in fiascoes. the making of such decisions is frequently attributed to the groupthink phenomenon. a different perspective on the occurrence of policy fiascoes, prospect polarization, is offered. this approach employs, in addition to the pressures for uniformity of groupthink, the notions of framing effects, risk seeking in the domain of losses, and group polarization. the applicability of these theoretical mechanisms to several notorious decision fiascoes, past and present, is discussed.”

“The bay of pigs decision makers, as well as other major fiascoes such as the failure to be prepared for the attack on pearl harbour, the korean war stalemate and the escalation of the vietnam war cannot be explained by stupidity. the men involved in these decision making processes comprised some of the greatest arrays of intellectual talent in american history. janis looks at these fiascoes from the standpoint of group dynamics, as explored by kurt lewin, and later by a range of psychologists and behavioural scientists. janis proposes they survived from what he called ‘groupthink’. social psychological experiments have shown that powerful social pressures are often brought to bear by the members of a cohesive group whenever a dissident voice begins to voice his objections to group consensus. 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, and committing to decisions, even when it is clear that policies are working out badly or have unintended consequences. groupthink is a quick way to refer to a mode of thinking that person engage in when concurrence seeking becomes so dominant in a cohesive ingroup that it over rides all other considerations. so members of decision making groups become concerned with the avoidance of harsh judgements of their leaders’ or their colleagues’ ideas. paradoxically, soft headed groups are often hard hearted when it comes to dealing with outgroups or enemies, and find it easy to resort to dehumanzing solutions. they are unlike to pursue alternatives to the aggressive approach. nor are they inclined to raise ethical issues, due to the high levels of regard they hold for the group of which they may belong, that may 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 in inhumane and immoral’. norms: there is evidence that as the members of a group feel more accepted by others, which is a central feature of increased group cohesiveness, they display less over conformity to group norms. in contrast, the groupthink type of conformity tends to increase as group cohesiveness increases. groupthink involves nondeliberate suppression of critical thoughts as a result of internalization of the group’s norms, which is quite different from deliberate suppression on the b…”

“Although janis’s concept of groupthink is influential, experimental investigations have provided only weak support for the theory. experiment 1 produced the poor decision quality associated with groupthink by manipulating group cohesion (using group labels) and threat to group members’ self-esteem. self-reports of some groupthink and defective decision-making symptoms were independently, but not interactively, affected by cohesion and threat. experiment 2 confirmed the success of the cohesion manipulation. experiment 3 replicated the poor-quality decision making observed in experiment 1 and provided support for a social identity maintenance perspective on groupthink: groups who operated under groupthink conditions but who were given an excuse for potential poor performance produced significantly higher quality decisions than groups who worked under groupthink conditions alone. the results are used to interpret the groupthink phenomenon as a collective effort directed at warding off potentially negative views of the group.”

“This article investigates collective denial and willful blindness in groups, organizations, and markets. agents with anticipatory preferences, linked through an interaction structure, choose how to interpret and recall public signals about future prospects. wishful thinking (denial of bad news) is shown to be contagious when it is harmful to others, and self-limiting when it is beneficial. similarly, with kreps–porteus preferences, willful blindness (information avoidance) spreads when it increases the risks borne by others. this general mechanism can generate multiple social cognitions of reality, and in hierarchies it implies that realism and delusion will trickle down from the leaders. the welfare analysis differentiates group morale from groupthink and identifies a fundamental tension in organizations’ attitudes towards dissent. contagious exuberance can also seize asset markets, generating investment frenzies and crashes.”

“How should a group with different opinions (but the same values) make decisions? in a bayesian setting, the natural question is how to aggregate cre-dences: how to use a single credence function to naturally represent a collection of different credence functions. an extension of the standard dutch-book arguments that apply to individual decision-makers recommends that group credences should be updated by conditionalization. this imposes a constraint on what aggregation rules can be like. taking conditionalization as a basic constraint, we gather lessons from the established work on credence aggregation, and extend this work with two new impossibility results. we then explore contrasting features of two kinds of rules that satisfy the constraints we articulate: one kind uses fixed prior credences, and the other uses geometric averaging, as opposed to arithmetic averaging. we also prove a new characterisation result for geometric averaging. finally we consider applica-tions to neighboring philosophical issues, including the epistemology of disagreement.”

“Http://www.nationalforum.com/electronic%20journal%20volumes/lunenburg,%20fred%20c.%20group%20decision%20making%20ijmba%20v13%20n1%202010.pdf one dysfunction of highly cohesive groups that has received considerable attention is a phenomenon known as groupthink. essentially, groupthink is the tendency of cohesive groups to reach consensus on issues without offering, seekin g, or considering alternative viewpoints. as a result, groupthink has been blamed for decision making fiascoes in politics , the military, as well as in business. in this article, i discuss some famous examples of political and military fiascoes associated with groupthink, some symptoms of groupthink, and ways to avoid groupthink when making group decision s . ___________________________”

“2nd ed. rev. and enl. ed. of: victims of groupthink. 1972. fiascoes. introduction: why so many miscalculations? ; a perfect failure: the bay of pigs ; in and out of north korea: ‘the wrong war with the wrong enemy’ ; pearl harbor revisited: or, why the fortress slept ; escalation of the vietnam war: how could it happen? — counterpoint. the cuban missile crisis ; the making of the marshall plan. — theory, implications, and applications. the groupthink syndrome ; the watergate cover-up: how clever manipulators can get caught in an avoidable quagmire ; generalizations: who succumbs, when, and why ; preventing groupthink.”

“I. l. janis’s (1982b) discussion of groupthink is examined to clarify the nature of social influence leading to poor decision making. beginning from janis’s definition of groupthink as premature consensus seeking, the question raised here is whether compliance (public without private agreement) may be as important as internalization (private acceptance of group consensus) in this phenomenon. analysis of the conditions hypothesized by janis to be conducive to groupthink suggests that, contrary to some of janis’s discussion, these conditions conduce to compliance as well as internalization. consistent with this suggestion, a review of the historical examples cited by janis indicates that compliance was an important part of poor decision making in at least two of these cases. the review also indicates that structural conditions, notably promotional leadership and group insulation, predict occurrence or nonoccurrence of groupthink in janis’s examples, but that neither cohesion nor any situational condition is predictive. experimental studies of groupthink are reviewed in light of this analysis, and suggestions are offered for future research. (psycinfo database record (c) 2012 apa, all rights reserved)”