10/11/2012
Groupthink
Kruse
In our lives we will have to work in groups throughout our whole school, work, and other occurrences beyond that for all kinds of different reasons. Sometimes it will go smoothly and then other times it will have a chance of being chaos. For these times the theory of Groupthink thought up by Irving Janis that essentially helps groups operate better.
Groupthink is when a group puts the desire of being more uniform and operational in front of their motivation to get the task at hand done. There were five matters that Janis used to develop her research. These were the preparedness policies of the U.S. Navy at Pearl Harbor, the pursuit of North Korean territory by President Eisenhower, the decision to invade Cuba by Kennedy, the decision to continue the Vietnam War, and the infamous Watergate cover-up. It is clear that all of these situations were not the best works of groups in the history of our country. According to Janis, “the groups failed to consider forewarnings, and their biases and desire for harmony overshadowed critical assessments of their own decisions” (West and Turner p.241). Sometimes with groups, if you do not have to right clientele within the group then the outcomes of the groups will be a negative one.
One of the problems that you run into with Groupthink, or as the text explains it, “symptoms of Groupthink”, is pressure toward uniformity. This means that when you group is operating, they focus more on getting along and doing everything right and not putting enough focus on getting the job done and making that job a success. There are four things that can contribute to this happening in a group. Those four things are self-censorship, illusion of unanimity, self-appointed mindguards, and pressures on dissenters. All of these can be broken down more to really see why they can hurt a group’s ability to get a job done successfully and efficiently.
The first symptom in the pressure for uniformity is...