Groupthink ultimately is a lack in moral judgement, and clouds someones perception to make the correct decision while in a group. It in turn doesn't allow them to make a rational choice, rather something they feel is the right thing to do. That person is compelled to make a decision based on attempting to please everyone in the group instead of thinking about the issue at hand and making a decision that will benefit everyone in the long run.
This is the case in the Bay of Pigs invasion. The Groupthink concept describes Kennedy and many of his aides as a group working together, but not being able to act and think to their full capacity. As stated in the article, "Instead, they jumped to conclusions and then moved forward without an openness to new information and without considering changes in direction. By placing himself in the decision process, Kennedy's presence in a way caused this aides to come up with a strategy to overthrow Castro that was more towards pleasing Kennedy as opposed to the most rational and thought way of going about it. This unfortunately did not go as planned and was certainly a failed attempt.
Kennedy took a different approach with the Cuban Missile Crisis by allowing a committee to make the final decision on how to tackle the task at hand. "To help him decide what to do about the Cuban situation, and how much risk to run of a nuclear exchange, Kennedy assembled a small group that came to be called the Executive Committee of the National Security Council - or ExComm for short." In order for him not to make the same mistake as before by intervening the decision process, Kennedy in fact removed himself and played the other side, coming up with arguments and rebuttals as to why they shouldn't go through with the committees ideas in order to make sure that their decision is absolutely the right one to make. By taking this plan of action as opposed to the Bay of Pigs way, Kennedy was able to convince to Nikita Khrushchev to remove nuclear missiles from Cuba as can bee seen from the Guardian:
As the ExComm meetings were drawing to a close at 6pm on the 26 October, a letter arrived from Prime Minister Khrushchev, directly to President Kennedy. Khrushchev's "message seemed clear," Stern writes:
"The missiles would be removed if the US promised not to invade Cuba."
The next day, at 10am, the president again turned on the secret tape. He read aloud a wire service report that had just been handed to him:
"Premier Khrushchev told President Kennedy in a message today he would withdraw offensive weapons from Cuba if the United States withdrew its rockets from Turkey."
Studies such as this one can be applied to any level of organization and is in fact evidence that people will make irrational decisions solely based on the fact that they are trying to please someone in a group setting. Interactions like this is a great way to learn from others mistakes so that this country can continue to grow and prosper and maintain being a world leader and example for others.
This is an interesting psychological concept we can think of in our own lives starting from the halls of Elementary School. It is something that we all have been guilty of doing. Sometimes I feel we forget that political actors are humans as well, therefore prone to make the same tactical errors we make, too. In my brief research of Groupthink, the bombing of Pearl Harbor came into question. The article stated that many of the senior officers at Pearl Harbor did not take warnings from Washington DC about potential invasion seriously despite the fact that Japanese messages had been intercepted. In this example of Groupthink, they had the knowledge about an attack but the Groupthink reassured them that no one would be foolish enough to attack United States soil. With all due respect and cautiousness, I can attempt to equate this to the horrific occurrences of September 11th as former President Bush had knowledge of a potential attack from al-Qaeda from the FBI and chose to ignore it presumably with the same notion of Groupthink in that it would be unlikely that they would attack American soil. This is argued with the backing of the Illusion of Invulnerability concept, which is a symptom of Groupthink. Relating it back to Pearl Harbor, many of the military personnel believed that the Japanese would never risk attacking us, and there is evidence that the Admiral joked about the idea right before it happened.
ReplyDelete"Bush Warned of Hijackings Before 9-11 - ABC News." ABCNews.com - Breaking News, Latest News & Top Video News - ABC News. N.p., n.d. Web. 24 Sept. 2013. .
"Groupthink - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia." Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. N.p., n.d. Web. 24 Sept. 2013. .
“Groupthink” is a concept that has arisen many times in the history of the international system, yet there are instances in which actors still fail to perceive it as a problem-and to make the necessary adjustments to combat it. As argued by Stein in his article, Psychological Explanations of International Conflict (class reading for 9/25/2013), there is a problem with how decisions are made regarding international conflict. Stein argues that the structural hierarchy of decision-making disallows certain individuals, primarily those of lesser authority, to voice their opinion. As was stated in this week’s blog post, Kennedy’s advisers seemed less concerned with the actual Bay of Pigs problem at hand and instead tried to formulate a plan that would please Kennedy-despite the fact it was not a good plan. The optimal way in which to produce a foreign policy plan of action is to take into consideration every officials opinion or ideas regarding the matter-no matter their superiority. Another beneficial component to these wide-ranging discussions Stein observed was the “roughly equal balance of power” of officials; this equality among deliberating officials welcomes openness where the structural hierarchy way of decision-making at times may influence individuals to either “bandwagon” on a way of thought or keep their mouth shut.
ReplyDeleteI really enjoy how you related "group think" with the example of the Bay of Pigs. It is very relevant that during this time President Kennedy handled this problem was "ill structured." Of coarse at this time President Kennedy had no control or was capable of predicting what Cuba would do at this time. As we discussed in class, President Kennedy and is aides clearly had a difficult time making a rational and successful choices of what to do with Cuba at the time due to factors such as time, and psychological factors such as "emotion." By jumping to a conclusion and Kennedy's aides not speaking up with their own plans and just agreeing with him, history might of changed and the Bay of Pigs might of been a successful instead of a failed attempt.
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