I have always found the theory of groupthink to be very interesting, because you would like to think that in a group people would work better, however that is not the case. In a group people tend to hold back on saying what they actually think, because they don’t want to be the only member of the group with a dissenting opinion, and they tend to stop critically analyzing themselves because they blatantly believe everything being said in the group is true. What is interesting to me is the fact that when the group is presented with information that contradicts with the original set of policies that the group has agreed upon, they ignore them. Additionally, I did not realize that group think causes the members of the group to not think of the consequences of their actions, as well as what the reaction of their enemy would be.
I thought that the movie Thirteen Days gave a great insight into groupthink actually occurring in action. I think that the movie showed what a great deal of pressure Kennedy and his team were under to make a decision. I think it was really obvious that at times people wanted to voice their opinions that were disagreeing with the group, but they decided against it. I also found it interesting how they took everything that the CIA told them as the absolute truth, because in the end they ended up having false intelligence. I think that this is where the solutions that Janis outlined in his piece about pulling in outside information and experts who are not under the same amount of pressure that the team was under. The solutions outlined all make perfect sense to me, but I think that in a time a crisis, such as the Bay of Pigs incident, that there would not be enough time for all of the solutions to be put into place. So when do you pick and choose what solutions a group implements in a time crunch?
I agree with you. The fact that we are always taught that group work is a good thing, and a good skill to have, it is interesting to see its pitfalls. My question is how are we supposed to tech peple way to not fall into groupthink other thansettting structure to the place with diverse points of veiw.
Something really interesting about 13 days is the fact that JFK did allow people to voice their opinions; however, he was never fully convinced that one decision was the best just purely based on what other people said. Instead, he took time to analyze the possible consequences of his choices. You brought up the fact that groupthink prevents individuals from visualizing consequences of their decisions, which is something that could be extremely harmful. If JFK had not seen that choosing violence against the Soviet Union, he would not have been able to prevent a World War.