Revision:Groupthink - Irving Janis (1972;1982)

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Janis was interested by major policy-making decisions, such as

• The Bay of Pigs
• The Invasion of Pearl Harbour
• Appeasement in the 1930's

After analysing a variety of these events, he concluded that a set of small group processes were at work. He called these processes Group Think. He defined group think as such:

"A mode of thinking that people engage in when they are deeply involved in a cohesive group, when the members' strivings for unanimity override their motivation to realistically appraise alternative courses of action."

One thing to bear in mind is that we should not assign a primacy to psychological processes to the detriment of other factors such as political pressure, economic interests or institutional mechanisms.

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