"Lennart Kiil"  wrote in
news:cl7d8c$nct$1{at}darwin.ediacara.org: 

>   Hi SBE
> 
>     Groupthink is a concept that was identified by Irving Janis and
>     refers 
> to faulty decision-making in a group. Groups experiencing groupthink
> do not consider all alternatives and they desire unanimity at the
> expense of quality decisions.
> 
>     I think it it a useful concept and a very real problem, for
>     instance in 
> politics. I am writing a piece on groupthink and the almost universal 
> propensity to indoctrination in humans. Anybody has some thoughts on
> the evolutionary significance of the two?


You may have noticed the tendency towards becoming less flexible in one's 
ideas later in life. This could be argued as being an adaptation. For 
most of our history old age correlated with accumulated wisdom. This 
wisdom would have done little good if the elderly did not insist they 
were right in group discussions. In such discussions, at least three 
factors come into play in the weight given to an opinion - how common it 
is in the group, what the status is of those who hold it, and how 
strongly it is held by any single individual. Remember that decisions by 
consensus are much more likely to be right than individual decisions if 
all individuals are more than 50% correct, but much less likely to be 
right than individual decisions if all individuals are less than 50% 
correct. The addition of weights to the opinions helps make correct 
decisions if the weights are correctly assigned, which in turn depends on 
the participants honestly weighting their inputs based on their 
certainty, or alternatively on good historical experience with the 
likelihood of an individual having correct information. 

Giving considerable weight to a strongly held opinion has an additional 
advantage if the strength of an opinion is an honest indicator of the 
likelihood of its being correct - it keeps the group from making a 
decisive mistake. 

The phenomenon of groupthink is an example of how in some situations the 
advantages of consensus can become disadvantages. These situations tend 
to be those in which the current organization is not working, probably 
due to changed circumstances. In this case those in the group with the 
most experience (and therefore the most certainty) may be most likely to 
be wrong. Those who recognize the problem will likely be presenting a 
number of alternatives (brainstorming), so no one alternative gets enough  
collective weight to be adopted. The result is the "tried and false" 
solution. Now if I could only figure out why this is so prevalent in 
politics, where it would seem that "fresh ideas" might be more likely to 
be espoused simply because they do represent an alternative.


Yours,

Bill Morse
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