Models of Groupthink: A Search for a Proper Perspective of the Groupthink Causal Chain

Abstract

The attractiveness of any groupthink model lies in the prediction of its intuitively appealing causal chain that antecedent conditions would generally produce symptoms of groupthink which would lead to defective decision making and which in turn would result in unfavorable outcomes. While the results of the two quantitative studies of the same 19 cold war case histories could be interpreted to lend support to a part of the causal chain that symptoms of groupthink would result in information processing errors which in turn in would lead to unfavorable outcomes, they failed to sustain the relevance of both the primary and secondary antecedent conditions hypothesized by Janis (1972, 1982) to cause groupthink symptoms. This paper attempts to explore the groupthink models of Whyte (1998) and Baron (2005) to identify those antecedents that may probably be more appropriate and relevant to fit into the postulated groupthink causal chain.