Avoiding Groupthink

By TIM HARFORD

In his acid parliamentary testimony recently, Dominic Cummings, the prime minister’s former chief adviser, blamed a lot of different people and things for the UK’s failure to fight Covid-19 —including ‘groupthink’. Groupthink is unlikely to fight back. It already has a terrible reputation, not helped by its Orwellian ring, and the term is used so often that I begin to fear that we have groupthink about groupthink.

So, let’s step back. Groupthink was made famous in a 1972 book by psychologist Irving Janis. He was fascinated by the Bay of Pigs fiasco in 1961, in which a group of perfectly intelligent people in John F Kennedy’s administration made a series of perfectly ridiculous decisions to support a botched coup in Cuba.


How can groups of smart people do such stupid things? An illuminating metaphor from Scott Page, author of The Difference, a book about the power of diversity, is that of the cognitive toolbox.

A good toolbox is not the same thing as a toolbox full of good tools: two dozen top-quality hammers will not do the job.… When you put three hammers on a hiring committee, they are likely to hire another hammer. This ‘homophily’ — hanging out with people like ourselves — is the original sin of group decisionmaking, and there is no mystery as to how it happens.

From “How Not to Groupthink”