Janis calls for greater critical assessment of proposals lest they be adopted for reasons other than merit. Since his description of groupthink has received great popular approval—perhaps because we’re fascinated with colossal failure, it seems only fair to note that efforts to validate the theory have been sparse and not particularly successful.
Most students of groupthink pick a high-profile case of decision making where things went terribly wrong and then use Janis’s model as a cookie cutter to analyze the disaster—much as I’ve done with the Challenger and New Era. They seem to take the existence of groupthink for granted and employ the theory to warn against future folly or suggest ways to avoid it. This kind of retrospective analysis is great for theory construction, but provides no comparative basis for accepting or rejecting the theory. For example, is the lack of evidence that NASA managers formed a cohesive in-group when they approved the Challenger launch a good reason to drop or revise the theory? Or does my report of extensive ‘‘due diligence" of New Era invalidate the claim that groupthink was a reason so many people fell for the fraud?
Janis thought it made sense to test the groupthink hypothesis in the laboratory prior to trying to prove it in the field. His suggestion is curious, however, because a minimal test of his theory that controls for the antecedent conditions would require over 7000 willing participants. As it is, the few reported groupthink experiments have tended to focus on cohesiveness—a quality that’s hard to create in the laboratory. The results are mixed at best. Janis’s quantitative study of nineteen international crises is problematic as well. When he and two co-authors linked positive outcomes with high-quality decision-making procedures during international crises, they never assessed the cohesiveness of the groups in charge.
Janis calls for greater critical assessment of proposals lest they be adopted for reasons other than merit. Since his description of groupthink has received great popular approval—perhaps because we’re fascinated with colossal failure, it seems only fair to note that efforts to validate the theory have been sparse and not particularly successful. Most students of groupthink pick a high-profile case of decision making where things went terribly wrong and then use Janis’s model as a cookie cutter to analyze the disaster—much as I’ve done with the Challenger and New Era. They seem to take the existence of groupthink for granted and employ the theory to warn against future folly or suggest ways to avoid it. This kind of retrospective analysis is great for theory construction, but provides no comparative basis for accepting or rejecting the theory. For example, is the lack of evidence that NASA managers formed a cohesive in-group when they approved the Challenger launch a good reason to drop or revise the theory? Or does my report of extensive ‘‘due diligence" of New Era invalidate the claim that groupthink was a reason so many people fell for the fraud? Janis thought it made sense to test the groupthink hypothesis in the laboratory prior to trying to prove it in the field. His suggestion is curious, however, because a minimal test of his theory that controls for the antecedent conditions would require over 7000 willing participants. As it is, the few reported groupthink experiments have tended to focus on cohesiveness—a quality that’s hard to create in the laboratory. The results are mixed at best. Janis’s quantitative study of nineteen international crises is problematic as well. When he and two co-authors linked positive outcomes with high-quality decision-making procedures during international crises, they never assessed the cohesiveness of the groups in charge.
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