Senator Pat Roberts is blaming "group think" for the alleged intelligence failures re Iraq's WMD programs:
The group concluded that the intelligence community suffered from "collective group think" which led to the presumption that Iraq had an active and growing weapons of mass destruction program.
"This group think caused the community to interpret ambiguous evidence such as the procurement of dual use technology" to mean Iraq had an active weapons program, Roberts said. "It is clear that this group think also extended to our allies" and other nations, "all of whom did believe that Saddam Hussein did have active WMD program."
I don't buy it. Whatever caused the intelligence failures, it probably was not group think.
I discussed group decision making in my article Why a Board? Group Decisionmaking in Corporate Governance. In it, I dicussed at some length Irving Janis's famous groupthink concept:
Highly cohesive groups with strong civility and cooperation norms value consensus more than they do a realistic appraisal of alternatives. In such groups, groupthink is an adaptive response to the stresses generated by challenges to group solidarity. To avoid those stresses, groups may strive for unanimity even at the expense of quality decision making.
... The downside ... is an erosion in the quality of decision making. The desire to maintain group cohesion trumps the exercise of critical judgment. Adverse consequences of groupthink thus include failing to examine alternatives, failing to be either self-critical or evaluative of others, and being selective in gathering information. Studies of meeting behavior, for example, conclude that people tend to prefer options that have obvious popularity.
Boardroom culture encourages groupthink. Boards emphasize politeness and courtesy at the expense of oversight. CEOs foster and channel groupthink through the exercise of their powers to control information flows, reward consensus, and discourage reelection of troublemakers. The groupthink phenomenon therefore demands close attention with respect to a variety of corporate governance issues.
The problem with invoking groupthink as an explanation for the intelligence failure should be apparent. Groupthink principally is a phenomenon small, discrete, insular groups, such as committees and boards. As I understand Roberts' report, however, there was a widespread failure by multiple actors spread across multiple agencies (indeed, even multiple countries). A decision- making process spread across such dispersed and diffuse actors is unlikely to be plagued by groupthink.
Instead, if there was a collective cognitive bias at work, herd behavior springs to mind as a much more plausible candidate. Why do lemmings leap off that cliff in Norway? What explains fads like Beanie Babies and Pok�mon? Herd behavior occurs when a decision maker imitates the actions of others, while ignoring his own information and judgment with regard to the merits of the underlying decision. Various explanations for herd behavior have been offered. For example, following the crowd may have a reputational pay-off even if the chosen course of action fails. Because even a good agent can make decisions resulting in a bad outcome, the market evaluates the agent by looking at both the outcome and the action before forming a judgment about the agent. If a bad outcome occurs, but the action was consistent with approved conventional wisdom, the hit to the manager?s reputation from an adverse outcome is reduced. (At the same time, when one?s decisions are publicly observable by peers, conformity has a positive psychic pay-off.)
Herding can also be seen as a response to bounded rationality and information asymmetries. Under conditions of complexity and uncertainty, actors who perceive themselves as having limited information and can observe the actions of presumptively better- informed persons may attempt to free-ride by following the latter?s decisions. Importantly, this explanation for herding suggests that the introduction of new information may alter the equation. Hence, herding motivated by an information asymmetry produces short-lived fads in which consumer preferences prove quite brittle.
