Groupthink
The Basic Idea
Imagine you’re part of a team managing the launch of a new space shuttle. You work on the project for years and bond with your team, heavily publicizing the projected launch. When engineers are brought to examine the shuttle only a few months before the planned take-off date, they point out some faulty parts. Hoping to avoid any negative press, your team decides to push ahead with the launch - after all, you know best and if everyone in the group agrees, then it must be the correct decision. This is exactly what happened in the 1986 NASA Challenger explosion, a famous example of groupthink.1
Groupthink is a psychological phenomenon in which people strive to maintain cohesion and reach consensus within a group.2 This can mean that consensus is achieved without critical thinking or an evaluation of the possible consequences or alternatives. Groupthink tends to happen when there’s a strong and persuasive leader, a high level of group cohesion, and external pressure to make the “right” decision. People may set aside their personal beliefs and adopt the majority opinion, either voluntarily or as a result of group pressure. Ultimately, the desire to avoid conflict often stifles individuality and results in conformity.
When we all think alike, no one thinks very much.
– Albert Einstein, Nobel Prize winning German physicist
About the Authors
Dan Pilat
Dan is a Co-Founder and Managing Director at The Decision Lab. He is a bestselling author of Intention - a book he wrote with Wiley on the mindful application of behavioral science in organizations. Dan has a background in organizational decision making, with a BComm in Decision & Information Systems from McGill University. He has worked on enterprise-level behavioral architecture at TD Securities and BMO Capital Markets, where he advised management on the implementation of systems processing billions of dollars per week. Driven by an appetite for the latest in technology, Dan created a course on business intelligence and lectured at McGill University, and has applied behavioral science to topics such as augmented and virtual reality.
Dr. Sekoul Krastev
Dr. Sekoul Krastev is a decision scientist and Co-Founder of The Decision Lab, one of the world's leading behavioral science consultancies. His team works with large organizations—Fortune 500 companies, governments, foundations and supernationals—to apply behavioral science and decision theory for social good. He holds a PhD in neuroscience from McGill University and is currently a visiting scholar at NYU. His work has been featured in academic journals as well as in The New York Times, Forbes, and Bloomberg. He is also the author of Intention (Wiley, 2024), a bestselling book on the science of human agency. Before founding The Decision Lab, he worked at the Boston Consulting Group and Google.
