Debunking Popular Psychology Myths #3: Groupthink
Issue 138: We revisit the origins of groupthink and challenge one of the biggest myths about group dynamics
In May of 2021, the CIA’s Twitter account shared a photo of a curious artifact. A small silver coin shows a man with knife in his belt and brandishing a rifle, striding past a dead body lying prostrate on the sand. It includes the slogan: “No habra mas fin que la victoria”—there will be no end but victory.
The coin, we learn, was minted to commemorate what the CIA account dryly described as “an anticipated (but never realized) Bay of Pigs victory”.
Never realized, indeed. This military action, undertaken in 1961, was not only a foreign policy disaster for the United States and a major embarrassment for President John F. Kennedy, but it also become synonymous with one of the most misunderstood concepts in social and organizational psychology—groupthink.
The Bay of Pigs operation, planned by the CIA and authorized by John F. Kennedy’s fledgling administration, was an attempt to overthrow Fidel Castro’s communist regime by landing a group of roughly 1,400 expatriate Cuban fighters at the Bay of Pigs on the southern side of the island of Cuba. The fighters were immediately confronted by much larger Cuban military forces. Within four days, more than sixty of the US-supported fighters were killed and over 11 hundred were captured.
It was particularly striking how Kennedy’s brilliant team with Ivy-league pedigrees could fail this badly. The Bay of Pigs incident was such a disaster that when psychologist Irving Janis later developed his hugely influential theory of groupthink, he used the botched invasion as his archetypal example of the phenomenon.
According to Irving Janis, groupthink emerges in tightly knit groups when pressures for unanimity and conformity override individual members’ better judgment. A desire for group cohesion causes people to self-censor their doubts. Unexpressed, the absence of divergent views causes groups to become too confident in the wisdom of their choices.
Looking at Kennedy’s leadership team, Janis saw an overly-confident group of advisors among whom doubts about the mission were suppressed in the presence of a charismatic young president. Viewed through this lens, the commemorative coin seems to perfectly symbolize their groupthink—so assured were they of success, the administration had cast into silver an image of victory before a single fighter set foot on Cuban soil.
This is the groupthink origin story. Grounded in case-studies like the Bay of Pigs and escalation of the Vietnam War, the groupthink idea took off. Big time. The notion that conformity pressures cause groups to make poor decisions is now a common wisdom, routinely invoked to account for bad outcomes (and sometimes just choices that people disagree with).
It’s a powerful story.
Unfortunately, however, it is incomplete—and Janis’ analysis of events like the botched Bay of Pigs invasion is in need of significant revision. It turns out that things didn’t happen quite as we’ve always been told! And in the retelling, people have created a myth of groupthink.
By the 1990s, significantly more information about JFK’s team’s decision-making was available than had been accessible to Janis. Psychologist Roderick Kramer reanalyzed how JFK and his advisors had reasoned about the Bay of Pigs invasion and he came to radically different conclusions about what had actually happened.
Far from being overconfident, JFK had significant reservations about the operation. Planning for the invasion of Cuba had begun under the previous administration of Dwight Eisenhower. JFK felt that he had inherited an awkward and potentially dangerous “hot potato”.
Asked what he thought about “this damned invasion idea”, JFK said, “I think about it as little as possible.”
JFK and his team did make some faulty assumptions. Among them may have been placing too much faith in the military acumen of Eisenhower, under whom the operation had been conceived. As Supreme Commander of the Allied Expeditionary Forces, Eisenhower had led the successful invasion of Normandy in 1944, the most logistically complex military campaign in US history. Despite his misgivings, Kennedy believed in Eisenhower’s instincts.
More importantly, however, Kramer concluded that JFK’s team hadn’t fallen prey to groupthink at all—but instead to a phenomenon he called “politicothink”.
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