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| We enjoy independent thought, they suffer from ‘groupthink’ | We enjoy independent thought, they suffer from ‘groupthink’ |
| (2 months later) | |
| There is an intellectual plague spreading among us, and only a few heroic souls are able to spot it. It is called groupthink, and it is everywhere. We are routinely told that there is groupthink in our universities, at the Bank of England and the BBC. Campaigning for leave last year, David Davis pronounced: “The Establishment groupthink on the central issues of the day has too often got it not just wrong, but spectacularly wrong.” In this he echoed Owen Jones, otherwise not a likely rhetorical comrade, who writes of “the Establishment’s groupthink”, and who recently diagnosed a fellow journalist on Twitter as suffering from “media groupthink”. Christopher Booker, meanwhile, flexibly perceives “groupthink” both in the original arguments to join the EU and in the present rush towards a no-deal cliff-edge, as well as in the consensus on global warming, tolerance of transgender people, and “political correctness”. It is as well to be warned about all this. Evidently we would be in a sorry state without such giants of independent thought. But what exactly is groupthink, and where did it come from? | There is an intellectual plague spreading among us, and only a few heroic souls are able to spot it. It is called groupthink, and it is everywhere. We are routinely told that there is groupthink in our universities, at the Bank of England and the BBC. Campaigning for leave last year, David Davis pronounced: “The Establishment groupthink on the central issues of the day has too often got it not just wrong, but spectacularly wrong.” In this he echoed Owen Jones, otherwise not a likely rhetorical comrade, who writes of “the Establishment’s groupthink”, and who recently diagnosed a fellow journalist on Twitter as suffering from “media groupthink”. Christopher Booker, meanwhile, flexibly perceives “groupthink” both in the original arguments to join the EU and in the present rush towards a no-deal cliff-edge, as well as in the consensus on global warming, tolerance of transgender people, and “political correctness”. It is as well to be warned about all this. Evidently we would be in a sorry state without such giants of independent thought. But what exactly is groupthink, and where did it come from? |
| Most people credit the idea of “groupthink” to the social psychologist Irving Janis, who saw it as an organisational problem. In his 1972 paper, Victims of Groupthink: A Psychological Study of Foreign Policy Decisions and Fiascoes, he addressed the social dynamics operating in the way government groups make specific decisions, such as the ill-fated Bay of Pigs invasion and the escalation of the Vietnam war. For him, “groupthink” indicated “the deterioration in mental efficiency, reality testing, and moral judgments as a result of group pressures” towards conformity, unanimity and so on. But, he thought, organisational systems and structures could be improved to help groups make better decisions than individuals on their own. There was no sense here, as yet, of the modern sense of “groupthink” in which everyone is defenceless against being infected by the same opinion. | Most people credit the idea of “groupthink” to the social psychologist Irving Janis, who saw it as an organisational problem. In his 1972 paper, Victims of Groupthink: A Psychological Study of Foreign Policy Decisions and Fiascoes, he addressed the social dynamics operating in the way government groups make specific decisions, such as the ill-fated Bay of Pigs invasion and the escalation of the Vietnam war. For him, “groupthink” indicated “the deterioration in mental efficiency, reality testing, and moral judgments as a result of group pressures” towards conformity, unanimity and so on. But, he thought, organisational systems and structures could be improved to help groups make better decisions than individuals on their own. There was no sense here, as yet, of the modern sense of “groupthink” in which everyone is defenceless against being infected by the same opinion. |
| Meanwhile, the word “groupthink” had actually been coined two decades earlier, in an article for Fortune magazine by William H Whyte. For him, it was the pernicious idea that what mattered in business and other realms was not the individual but “the harmonious function of the group”: groupthink was a kind of creeping cultural-scientific communism, which freed people from moral decision-making because “the system” would manage things better than the individual. | Meanwhile, the word “groupthink” had actually been coined two decades earlier, in an article for Fortune magazine by William H Whyte. For him, it was the pernicious idea that what mattered in business and other realms was not the individual but “the harmonious function of the group”: groupthink was a kind of creeping cultural-scientific communism, which freed people from moral decision-making because “the system” would manage things better than the individual. |
| What this original definition and the modern one have in common is the crucial idea that, once part of a group, a person becomes incapable of thinking for herself. But while neither Whyte nor Janis believed this to be inevitable, the modern wielders of “groupthink” as a critique simply assume it to be true. So it is primarily an empty boo-word designed to dismiss alternative views as emanating from a homogeneous herd. Names for specific groups are used in the same way – for example, as we saw earlier with “the Establishment”, or with “metropolitan”, as when David Goodhart recently tweeted: “Harassment story bringing out worst in BBC: unhistorical, one-sided, obsessive, metropolitan”. Goodhart thinks it is better to be a person from somewhere than a person from nowhere, so as a Londoner, I idly wonder whether it is acceptable to be metropolitan if you are literally from the metropolis. It is probably kinder not to inquire too much into possible links between “metropolitan” used as an insult and the historical uses of “cosmopolitan”; notice simply the remarkable idea that millions of people in a big city all think the same way because they can be defined as belonging to the city. | What this original definition and the modern one have in common is the crucial idea that, once part of a group, a person becomes incapable of thinking for herself. But while neither Whyte nor Janis believed this to be inevitable, the modern wielders of “groupthink” as a critique simply assume it to be true. So it is primarily an empty boo-word designed to dismiss alternative views as emanating from a homogeneous herd. Names for specific groups are used in the same way – for example, as we saw earlier with “the Establishment”, or with “metropolitan”, as when David Goodhart recently tweeted: “Harassment story bringing out worst in BBC: unhistorical, one-sided, obsessive, metropolitan”. Goodhart thinks it is better to be a person from somewhere than a person from nowhere, so as a Londoner, I idly wonder whether it is acceptable to be metropolitan if you are literally from the metropolis. It is probably kinder not to inquire too much into possible links between “metropolitan” used as an insult and the historical uses of “cosmopolitan”; notice simply the remarkable idea that millions of people in a big city all think the same way because they can be defined as belonging to the city. |
| To call your opponent a victim of groupthink, then, is to ascribe their views solely to their upbringing, area of residence or social associations, and to deny that they are capable of coming to reasoned conclusions on their own. It should hardly need pointing out that consensus on robust scientific theories such as evolution is not groupthink, or that thinking in groups – the ancient philosophical academies, or the 18th-century Republic of Letters, or the modern global academic network – is what has enabled most of the advances of human civilisation. But the modern user of “groupthink” ignores such truths, the better to paint his opponents as intellectual zombies. As used today, the word is therefore a classic example of Unspeak: a rhetorical intervention designed to shut down argument before it starts. | To call your opponent a victim of groupthink, then, is to ascribe their views solely to their upbringing, area of residence or social associations, and to deny that they are capable of coming to reasoned conclusions on their own. It should hardly need pointing out that consensus on robust scientific theories such as evolution is not groupthink, or that thinking in groups – the ancient philosophical academies, or the 18th-century Republic of Letters, or the modern global academic network – is what has enabled most of the advances of human civilisation. But the modern user of “groupthink” ignores such truths, the better to paint his opponents as intellectual zombies. As used today, the word is therefore a classic example of Unspeak: a rhetorical intervention designed to shut down argument before it starts. |
| What is really going on when someone complains of “groupthink” is a kind of bovine attempt at self-glamorisation. You follow the herd and parrot groupthink, whereas I am a superior maverick able to think for myself and unmask the nonsense that everyone else believes. This implicit claim, however, is quite severely undermined by the cliche of using the term “groupthink” itself. After all, given that it’s so lamentably common, to accuse others of groupthink is about the most groupthinky thing you can do. | What is really going on when someone complains of “groupthink” is a kind of bovine attempt at self-glamorisation. You follow the herd and parrot groupthink, whereas I am a superior maverick able to think for myself and unmask the nonsense that everyone else believes. This implicit claim, however, is quite severely undermined by the cliche of using the term “groupthink” itself. After all, given that it’s so lamentably common, to accuse others of groupthink is about the most groupthinky thing you can do. |
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