Groupthink: Definition, Signs, Examples, and How to Avoid It

Groupthink is a pattern of flawed group decision-making in which the drive for agreement overrides a realistic look at the alternatives.

Groupthink occurs when a cohesive group becomes so focused on reaching consensus that members stop critically evaluating alternatives and risks. The result is often a poor decision the group could otherwise have avoided.

Members may ignore information that contradicts the group’s chosen decision. They may also pressure anyone who disagrees to fall back in line.

Origin

Janis (1971, 1982) popularized the term groupthink; however, he did not originate the concept. That is generally accredited to George Orwell as he describes the psychological phenomenon as “crimethink” or “doublethink” in his famous dystopian novel titled 1984 (Orwell, 1949).

Janis described groupthink early on as “the mode of thinking that persons engage in when concurrence-seeking becomes so dominant in a cohesive ingroup that it tends to override realistic appraisal of alternative courses of action” (1972, p. 9).

Groupthink typically connotes a negative effect. Janis (1972, p. 9) described it in his book, Victims of Groupthink: A Psychological Study of Foreign-Policy Decisions and Fiascoes, as “a deterioration of mental efficiency, reality testing, and moral judgment that results from in-group pressures.”

Causes

• Lack of diversity: Groups whose members are very similar to one another miss outside perspectives and may develop more negative attitudes toward outgroups, both of which exacerbate groupthink.

• Impartial leadership: A powerful leader who does not seriously weigh other views can overpower members’ opposing opinions before the group even discusses them.

• Stress and low hope of a better option: Groupthink is most likely when a group faces high stress and has little hope that more discussion will beat the leader’s own plan (Janis, 1982). Simply endorsing that plan then feels like the easiest way out.

• Time constraints: Compressing a decision under artificial urgency raises anxiety and makes groupthink more likely; Janis’s own remedy is to allow adequate time for deliberation.

• Highly cohesive groups: Close-knit groups display more groupthink symptoms than looser ones, though later research has questioned how reliable this link actually is.

• Lack of outside perspectives: A group insulated from outside opinion, whether through secrecy or simply not consulting outsiders, loses the external check that might catch a flawed assumption early.

• Protecting members’ self-esteem: When members are motivated to maintain each other’s self-esteem, they may stay quiet rather than raise a view that breaks the group’s consensus.

Signs

Janis (1972) grouped eight recurring symptoms into three clusters: an overestimation of the group’s power and morality, closed-mindedness toward outside information, and pressure toward uniformity within the group.

1. Invulnerability: Groups begin to believe their decisions and actions are untouchable, so they ignore warnings or signs of danger that run contrary to their consensus.

2. Rationalization: Groups explain away warning signs and negative feedback rather than revisit the decision, because reopening it would cost members time, effort, and ego they have already invested.

3. Morality: Groups may believe that their cause is inherently morally correct, so they overlook the ethical or practical consequences of their decision.

4. Stereotypes: People or groups that oppose the group are dismissed as “stupid” or “weak,” which lets the group ignore their objections without genuinely evaluating them.

5. Pressure: Members who contradict the group’s emerging consensus face direct pressure to fall back in line, which discourages pushback and can lead to irrational decisions.

6. Self-censorship: Members hold back opinions that contradict the consensus, having judged in advance that raising them is not worth the friction it would create.

7. Unanimity: Because dissent goes unspoken, members come to believe everyone agrees, even when the apparent consensus conceals real private disagreement.

8. Mindguards: Certain members appoint themselves protectors of the leader, screening out information that contradicts the group’s popular opinion before it reaches full discussion.

Consequences

• Poor decisions: Groupthink’s biggest overall impact is that it makes poor decisions more likely, with especially harmful effects in military, medical, and political contexts.

• Self-censorship: Members hold back opinions that run contrary to the group’s popular view, so the group loses input that could have improved the decision.

• Inefficient problem solving: Because the group fails to consider alternative perspectives, it can miss ways to solve problems that deviate from its original plan.

• Harmful stereotypes: Believing their group is inherently right, members label others as an “out-group,” which can develop into harmful, irrational beliefs about outsiders.

• Lack of creativity: Self-censorship and pressure to conform discourage members from raising different ideas, so the group generates fewer creative solutions.

• Blindness to negative outcomes: Groups that believe they are inherently correct may fail to see the potentially negative outcomes of their decisions, and so fail to plan for them.

• Poor preparation for failure: Overconfidence in the decision leaves these groups more likely to be ill-prepared if their plan does not succeed.

• Inability to see other solutions: The group comes to view its own consensus as the only correct solution, overlooking other opinions or ideas.

• Unquestioning obedience: Members are more likely to follow their leaders blindly, never raising the question of whether the group’s actions are moral or correct.

Can Groupthink Ever be a Good Thing?

Groupthink is generally considered a negative phenomenon.

Groups generally can benefit from hearing a diverse set of perspectives and information, and failing to do so can result in suboptimal decisions being made.

Groupthink can help a group decide quickly, even if the decision isn’t the best one available.

Believing their decisions cannot be flawed also reduces the group’s anxiety (Janis, 1972).

Groups rationalize the decision they made, whatever its merits, convincing themselves the risks are smaller than they really are.

A belief in their own inherent morality can further help members avoid feeling shame or guilt about the decision.

Overall though, groups should take precautions to avoid groupthink as much as possible.

Real-Life Scenarios

Groupthink’s social and political consequences can be far-reaching. History offers many examples of major blunders that trace back to decisions reached this way.

Analysts have applied the theory to cases such as the 2003 invasion of Iraq (Badie, 2010) and the fraud at WorldCom (Scharff, 2005).

The Son Tay raid, a failed attempt to rescue American prisoners of war in Vietnam, is another commonly cited example (Amidon, 2005).

However, the original real-life scenarios of groupthink discussed by Janis were the escalation of the Vietnam War, the Bay of Pigs invasion, and the bombing of Pearl Harbor.

The Vietnam War

Elected United States (U.S.) government officials during Vietnam showed signs of invulnerability (Janis, 1972).

The U.S. suffered multiple failures and setbacks. Still, leaders continued the war effort, ignoring danger and warning signs because they believed they would win no matter what.

Furthermore, the U.S. leaders rationalized their escalated bombing campaigns ignoring the negative feedback that they continuously received.

The U.S. also viewed its decisions as inherently morally right. President Johnson considered the same four factors every Tuesday: the military advantage of the U.S., the risk to American aircraft and pilots, the danger of drawing other countries into the fighting, and the danger of heavy civilian casualties.

By reducing the decision to this fixed ritual, the administration failed to genuinely reconsider the morality of its actions.

President Lyndon B. Johnson’s domino theory was also an example of stereotyping. It treated the enemy and its surrounding countries as too incompetent to make their own decisions.

That assumption helped push the U.S. administration toward decisions that escalated the war.

Reportedly, Johnson once pressured former White House Press Secretary Bill Moyers to stop pushing back against the U.S. bombing campaign. Once, when Moyers entered a meeting, Johnson said of Moyers, “Well, here comes Mr. Stop-the-bombings.”

Bay of Pigs

President John F. Kennedy’s administration suffered from the illusion of invulnerability as well. Despite the plans to invade the Bay of Pigs leaking out, Kennedy’s administration proceeded with the plans ignoring the negative warning signs (Janis, 1972).

Historian Arthur J. Schlesinger privately raised strong objections to the invasion plan with both President Kennedy and Secretary of State Dean Rusk. Yet he stayed quiet once the group discussed the decision together.

Janis argued that Schlesinger had fallen prey to the belief that the ingroup was inherently moral, so he kept his doubts to himself.

Another symptom of groupthink that Kennedy and his group experienced was stereotyping (Janis, 1972). Kennedy and his team made three assumptions about the capabilities of Fidel Castro’s administration that proved to be incorrect.

Kennedy’s administration assumed that Castro’s forces were so weak that a small group of U.S. troops could establish a beachhead at the Bay of Pigs. Secondly, the U.S. administration thought that just a fleet of B-26s could knock out Castro’s entire air force. The third assumption was that Castro was not smart enough to stop any internal uprisings.

Kennedy and his team were wrong in all three assumptions because they negatively stereotyped the enemy and made faulty assumptions.

Many members of the group self-censored as well. There appeared to be a unanimous decision within the ingroup to continue with the invasion.

Yet Rusk failed to voice his contrary opinion, even after three government officials outside the group had separately raised concerns to him.

Pearl Harbor

Despite warning signs, the U.S. government failed to prepare for the attack on Pearl Harbor because they were subject to the illusion of invulnerability (Janis, 1972). They believed they were invincible against any attacks from the Japanese.

U.S. leaders also rationalized that the Japanese would never risk an act of war by attacking. They believed they would win any conflict, and assumed their opponent saw the odds the same way.

This stereotype and failure to view the situation from the enemy’s point of view led to the poor decision to not adequately prepare for the bombing of Pearl Harbor.

Opposition to the Theory

Despite decades of support, groupthink theory has drawn serious pushback. Sally Fuller and Ramon Aldag argue that its empirical support is weaker than Janis claimed, especially for cohesiveness (Aldag & Fuller, 1993; Fuller & Aldag, 1998).

Robert Baron reviewed decades of research on groupthink and reached a similar conclusion. The evidence largely fails to support cohesiveness as a cause, even though the symptoms themselves do tend to recur (Baron, 2005).

There has been a large body of experimental research conducted on groupthink, especially in the years directly following the introduction of the theory. Notably, one study found mixed support for the theory (Flowers, 1977).

Flowers’s (1977) results partly matched the theory: groups with directive leaders came up with fewer solutions, shared less information, and used fewer facts before deciding.

More surprisingly, the more cohesive groups did not perform worse than the less cohesive ones.

John Courtright (1978) found the same pattern: group cohesion had no effect on creativity, feasibility, significance, competence, or the number of solutions a group generated.

Fodor and Smith (1982) reported similar results for group cohesion.

Callaway and Esser (1984) likewise found that neither cohesion nor instructions to consider every alternative affected task performance.

However, despite the opposition, many researchers have advocated for the theory in their work as well, and groupthink is widely cited today (Hensley & Griffin, 1986; Tetlock, 1979).

The Challenger Disaster: An Independent Test

The clearest test of groupthink beyond Janis’s own cases came from the 1986 Space Shuttle Challenger disaster, which exploded 73 seconds after launch.

Aim: Esser and Lindoerfer (1989) tested NASA’s Challenger launch decision, made in a teleconference with Morton Thiokol engineers despite prior cold-weather O-ring concerns, against Janis’s predicted symptoms and antecedents.

Method: The researchers coded the published transcript of testimony gathered by the Presidential Commission that investigated the accident. They identified 88 statements that showed clear evidence of a groupthink symptom or antecedent.

Results: The analysis found clear evidence of an illusion of invulnerability, an illusion of unanimity, and direct pressure on dissenting engineers, but little evidence of cohesiveness, Janis considered central.

Conclusion: The result was mixed support rather than confirmation or refutation. Several symptoms reappeared in a disaster Janis never studied, but the missing cohesiveness challenged the model’s specific causal claims.

This finding later prompted social identity researchers to redefine cohesiveness around shared group identification rather than personal liking (Turner, Pratkanis, Probasco, & Leve, 1992), a reframing that found support even when interpersonal liking was low.

Contemporary Research

Riccobono, Bruccoleri, and Größler (2016) addressed a gap in the literature: earlier studies measured groupthink’s causes and its outcomes, but rarely measured the concurrence-seeking behavior itself.

Aim: The researchers set out to measure concurrence-seeking behavior directly, and to test whether its effect on team performance depended on team members’ personality traits and relationships.

Method: They ran a longitudinal field experiment with 18 business-process-reengineering project teams, made up of 71 first-year MBA students, each working on a real project over three months.

Results: Groupthink behavior had a clear negative effect on project performance. Perceived behavioral control, conscientiousness, and critical mutual evaluation softened this effect, while member confidence and prior relationships made it worse.

Conclusion: The study gave direct, prospective confirmation that concurrence-seeking behavior damages real project performance. It also showed that highly confident, familiar teams are, if anything, more exposed to groupthink’s costs, not less.

Fuller and Aldag (1998) reviewed a quarter-century of applied research and found the term had become a catch-all explanation for any failed group decision, symptoms present or not.

Several newer accounts try to fix this by placing groupthink inside a broader process. The group polarisation account (Myers & Lamm, 1975) treats groupthink as an extreme case of groups becoming more extreme through discussion, not a separate phenomenon.

Other reframings go further still.

The social identity account (Turner et al., 1992) redefines cohesiveness around shared group identity rather than personal liking. The ubiquity model (Baron, 2005) argues groupthink-style decision-making is a routine feature of everyday groups, not a rare pathology.

The General Group Problem-Solving model (Aldag & Fuller, 1993) replaces a binary “groupthink or not” judgment with a graded description of decision quality. The sociocognitive account (Tsoukalas, 2007) traces the symptoms to evolved, group-level self-protection mechanisms.

How to Avoid Groupthink

To avoid groupthink, leaders and group members alike can take a variety of steps to help prevent the phenomenon from occurring. Some potential solutions are below.

• Create a safe space: Leaders should be open to opposition, accept criticism, and encourage new ideas regardless of a member’s status (Janis, 1972, 1982).

• Withhold the leader’s opinion: Key members and leaders should hold back their own views initially, so they don’t unduly influence the group’s consensus.

• Seek outside opinion: An outside group can work on the same problem separately, or the ingroup can discuss its ideas with outside experts.

• Assign a devil’s advocate: Someone raises objections to the group’s emerging preference regardless of their own opinion, guaranteeing counter-arguments get an airing.

• Split into subgroups: Smaller groups can develop their own solutions separately, then reconvene to compare and discuss the options together.

• Hold a second-chance meeting: After reaching a preliminary decision, give every member one more explicit chance to raise objections before it is finalized.

• Allow adequate time: Avoid compressing the decision under artificial urgency, since time pressure is itself a condition that promotes groupthink.

• Educate the group: Simply teaching group members about the groupthink phenomenon can help them recognize and resist it.

• Build a diverse group: A membership that already shares similar backgrounds and assumptions is more prone to premature, uncontested consensus.