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ABSTRACT: This article applies the groupthink model of decision-making to the planning for Operation Market Garden in late 1944. It shows especially strong parallels between decision-making in the Market Garden case, and those of the Bay of Pigs, Vietnam, and the Challenger shuttle disaster.
In 1982, social psychologist Irving Janis-heir to a long line of others who had shown how social pressures and the power of the situation can combine to make us do things we never dreamed we would-published the second edition of his book Groupthink.1 Originally published a decade earlier, the book articulated the "groupthink" hypothesis, arguing certain tight-knit groups were especially prone to making policy errors. Some groups induce conformity or groupthink, a process through which a group reaches a hasty or premature consensus and then becomes effectively closed to outside ideas.
In Janis's groupthink model, the rationality of decisions is distorted by dysfunctional group and social forces because members come to prize unanimity and agreement over considering all courses of action rationally.2 Janis referred to this tendency as a "concurrence-seeking."3 Once the group has reached its decision, that decision cannot be revisited or reconsidered. Dissenters are progressively excluded or shunted aside altogether. "Self-censorship" occurs as those who disagree with the chosen course of action remain silent, often because they think changing the minds of others is hopeless. Furthermore, "mindguards" are apt to appear, individuals who take it upon themselves to police the decision taken and to dissuade dissenters from rocking the boat. This action can sometimes lead to the removal of a determined dissenter from the group altogether, or else to the effective silencing of the individual.
Janis discussed a number of the symptoms of groupthink as well as the antecedent conditions that could produce it.4 These conditions encourage the symptoms but do not necessarily produce them. Of these, an especially important factor is group cohesiveness, where a "clubbish" atmosphere develops between the members. Often this atmosphere occurs when the decision-makers have spent a great deal of time with one another or begin to socialize together. During the Kennedy/Johnson era, for example, many members of the administration stayed in the same posts for several years and came to know one another very well. While cohesiveness is critical to many teams...