In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

CHAPTER 2 From Groupthink to Contextual Analysis of Policy-making GroupsAlexander L. George Introduction Before going "Beyond Groupthink" and arguing in favor of an alternative approach to studying the role of small groups in foreign policy decision making, as this and the other essays in this volume do, I believe it is appropriate to make an attempt to clarify as best I can what Irving Janis meant by "groupthink" and to identify some of the novel and striking ideas he advanced in his seminal book, Victims ofGroupthink, over twenty years ago. It is well to recall that this book reflected Janis's long-standing interest in decision making on matters of great importance to individuals, the stresses that often accompany such decisions, ways in which individuals attempt to cope with decisional stresses, and suggestions for how the process of decision making and the quality of decisions might be improved. In Victims ofGroupthink, Janis shifted his focus from individual psychology to the ways in which groups make highly consequential decisions. In this work, as in so much of his research before and after its publication, Janis coupled efforts to design as rigorous an empirical method as possible with an openly espoused normative and policy-oriented viewpoint. He explicitly acknowledged and, indeed, cautioned readers of Victims of Groupthink to keep in mind that its scope was limited to advancing hypotheses that would have to be subjected to more rigorous assessment than was possible by means of the several historical case studies he presented (Janis 1972, 202, 206). Janis's stimulating and provocative book made several important contributions to the academic and policy-oriented literature that should be recognized at the outset. Janis challenged the view, then predominant in theoretical and applied social psychology, that group cohesion always results in better 35 36 Beyond Groupthink performance. Under certain conditions and when a group engages in stressful decisional tasks, Janis argued, strong group cohesion can contribute to defective decision making which, in tum, may lead to a policy disaster.1 The potentially detrimental effects of group cohesiveness had not received much attention in the earlier work of Kurt Lewin and his students who had been more interested in the positive effects of group cohesiveness.2 To explain why and how decisional stress experienced by a cohesive group led to defective policy-making Janis, drawing on the work of Wilfred Bion, a group therapist, and his own observations of other groups, identified a different type of group dynamic which he called concurrence-seeking, a concept which I will examine more closely below. Noteworthy in Victims ofGroupthink as in his other research was Janis's emphasis on the importance of emotional factors in decision making.3 This reflected his long-standing conviction that a narrow or exclusive focus on cognitive processes is inadequate and that attention must be given to how psychodynamic processes in individuals and groups affect their decisionmaking behavior. While unfashionable among mainstream social psychologists during most of his career, Janis's position anticipated and helped to lay a foundation for the exciting wave of research into social cognition which has gained momentum since the early 1980s. Like Janis, much of this more recent work acknowledges the importance ofemotionally charged "hot" cognition so common in real-world decision making (see, e.g., Lebow 1981; Abelson 1985; Marcus and Zajonc 1985; Tetlock 1985; Fiske 1993, 175-79; Lebow and Stein 1993). More broadly, one of Janis's major purposes which the book certainly accomplished was, as he put it, "to increase awareness of social psychological phenomena in decisions of historic importance, so that group dynamics will be taken into account" (vi; original emphasis omitted). It is testimony to his success in this respect that since its publication over twenty years ago Victims of Groupthink has stimulated and encouraged a great deal of follow-up research on these questions (see, e.g., 't Hart 1990/1994, 1991; Fuller and Aldag, this volume, for thorough reviews) and that it leads us now to the present task of moving Beyond Groupthink. The rest of this essay will be structured as follows. First, I will provide further clarification of and some critiques addressing Janis's (1972) seminal contribution and discuss some of the critiques raised against it. Then I will take a similar look at the neo-groupthink approach developed by Paul 't Hart in Groupthink in Government (1990/1994) and subsequent writings. In the last part of the chapter, I will sketch out some arguments in favor of...

Share