Groupthink in decision making : testing for its existence, effects and prevention
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Groupthink is a theory concerning decision making developed by Janis (1972) on a case study basis. He uses the theory to explain several international fiascoes such as the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba. Highly cohesive, isolated groups operating in stressful circumstances, under highly assertive leaders may support the leader's position in the attempt to maintain group consensus. Experimental research reviewed by the present author is reinterpreted as not supporting the theory. Criticisms concerning the original development of the theory and the possibility of obtaining disconfirming evidence are outlined. The present experiment obtained for subjects 192 staff members from government and corporate organizations. Leadership style, cohesiveness and stress were manipulated to simulate the groupthink conditions. The four-person groups attempted to develop solutions to two current social problems: (1) Canadian immigration, and (2) capital punishment. The sessions were taperecorded and subjects were given post-experimental questionnaires. The questionnaires provided information for manipulation checks and the attempt to observe specific symptoms of groupthink. The audio-tapes were rated by two independent observers for the quality of the decision making discussions. The proposed solutions (in transcript form) were rated for their quality by experts from Immigration and law. Groupthink theory was not supported by the analyses at the various levels. The independent variable manipulations were moderately successful. The results indicated that leadership style played the dominant role in affecting both the group atmosphere and the quality of the decision making. These findings are interpreted as being consistent with earlier research on groupthink theory. It was also found that the time limitations employed in the study influenced the task oriented dimensions of the group processes It was suggested that the role of leadership may be more crucial to group-think theory than is the role of group cohesiveness. However, before reaching a decision on the validity of the groupthink theory based upon the current laboratory research, it is recommended that groupthink be tested in a fashion more appropriate to the level of analysis of the theory.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.134 | 0.219 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.009 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.012 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.004 | 0.008 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.010 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".