Groupthink: A Study in Self Delusion

By Christopher Booker

In Groupthink, his final book, the late, eminent journalist and bestselling author Christopher Booker seeks to identify the hidden key to understanding much that is disturbing about the world today.

With reference to the ideas of a Yale professor who first identified the theory, and to the writings of George Orwell from whose 'newspeak' the word was adapted, Booker sheds new light on the remarkable – and worrying – effects of 'groupthink', and its influence on our society.

Booker defines the three rules of groupthink: the adoption of a common view or belief not based on objective reality; the establishment of a consensus of right-minded people, an 'in group'; and the need to treat the views of anyone who questions the belief as wholly unacceptable. He shows how various interest groups, journalists and even governments in the twenty-first century have subscribed to this way of thinking, with deeply disturbing results.

As Booker shows, such behaviour has led to a culture of fear, heralded by countless examples throughout history, from Revolutionary Russia to Napoleonic France and Hitler's Germany. In the present moment it has caused countless errors in judgement and the division of society into highly polarised, oppositional factions. From the behaviour of the controversial Rhodes Must Fall movement to the sacking of James Damore of Google, society's attitudes towards gender equality, the Iraq war and the 'European Dream', careers and lives have been lost as those in the 'in-group' police society with their new form of puritanism.

As Booker argues, only by examining its underlying causes can we understand the sinister power of groupthink which permeates all aspects of our lives.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
• Release date: Mar 19, 2020
• ISBN: 9781472959089

Christopher Booker

Christopher Booker was a founding editor of Private Eye, to which he regularly contributed, and also wrote a longstanding column for the Sunday Telegraph. His bestselling books include The Seven Basic Plots: Why We Tell Stories, The Real Global Warming Disaster, The Great Deception, The Mad Officials, Scared to Death and The Neophiliacs. Booker died in July 2019.

Book preview

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It is becoming more and more obvious that it is not starvation, it is not microbes, it is not cancer, but man himself who is his greatest danger: because he has no adequate protection against psychic epidemics, which are infinitely more devastating in their effect than the greatest natural catastrophes.

C. G. Jung, Modern Man in Search of a Soul

Contents

Preface

   Introduction: The Rules of Groupthink

Part I Political Correctness – A First Case Study

1 The Origins of Political Correctness

2 Hatred and Make-believe Rule, OK?

3 The Real Nature of ‘Political Correctness’

Part II Groupthink and Times of Change – A Detour into History

4 Times of Change: How Dreams Become Nightmares

5 The ‘Fantasy Cycle’ and the ‘Swinging Sixties’

6 Groupthink and the ‘European Project’

7 Global Warming

8 The Strange Story of Darwinism

   A Conclusion by Richard North

Afterword by Nicholas Booker

Index

Preface

It is only by obtaining some sort of insight into the psychology of crowds that it can be understood . . . how powerless they are to hold any opinions other than those which are imposed upon them.

Gustave Le Bon, The Crowd

As I write this in the early months of 2019, few would deny that the world around us is in many ways in a peculiarly odd and far from happy state. Wherever we look, there is scarcely a single country, society or continent which is not wracked by strains, stresses and divisions which even a decade ago would have been hard to imagine.

What, for instance, do all these familiar features of our time have in common?

1 The spectacular rise in our time of Islamic terrorism, extending its shadow over almost every continent, with its fanatical adherents so possessed by the rightness of their cause that it justifies them killing anyone who does not subscribe to it, and even themselves.

2 The rise of ‘identity politics’ and the peculiar social and psychological pressure to conform with a whole range of views deemed to be ‘politically correct‘, marked out in those caught up in it by their aggressive intolerance of anyone who or anything which differs from their own beliefs.

3 The omnipresent influence of ‘social media’, again too often marked out by intolerant abuse of other people and their views.

4 The belief that the greatest threat facing the planet is man-made global warming, from which it can only be saved by eliminating the use of the fossil fuels on which modern civilization was built and continues to rely. Again, this is marked out by a peculiar intolerance of anyone who fails to share that belief, or of any factual evidence which seems to challenge it.

5 The conspicuous alienation of so many governments and political elites from the people they rule over, giving rise to populist movements which can be scorned or ignored.

6 The unprecedentedly divided state of American politics in the age of President Trump, again marked out by the inability of either side to tolerate the views of the other.

7 The similarly divided and chaotic state of politics in the UK following its referendum on leaving the European Union, again marked out by the inability of the multiple factions to understand or tolerate any views which differ from their own.

8 The other strains emerging across the European Union itself, resulting from the belief driving its evolution for over 70 years, that Europe’s future must lie in integrating all its individual nations under a unique form of government such as the world had never seen before.

To these we could add countless other examples, from the fanatical intolerance of ‘animal rights activists’ to the peculiarly unquestioning bias shown on these and many other issues by most of the mainstream Western media, most conspicuously led in Britain by the BBC.

The purpose of this book is to provide the missing key to understanding much about these bewildering times that so many people have found increasingly alarming. We shall be looking at all these examples and more in the light of a remarkable thesis put forward in a book published more than 40 years ago by a professor of psychology at Yale University, Irving Janis.

Janis’s field of study was the workings of collective human psychology, and specifically the way in which groups of people can behave when they are taken over by a kind of ‘group mind’. Others had written books about this kind of human herd behaviour before, such as Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, by a Scottish journalist, Charles MacKay, in 1841. A rather more profound work was The Crowd, by a Frenchman, Gustave le Bon, in 1895. But what made Janis’s The Victims of Groupthink (1972) quite different from these was that, as a disciplined scientific study, it showed for the first time how this kind of collective behaviour operates according to certain consistent and identifiable rules.

A group of people comes to be fixated on some belief or view of the world which seems hugely important to them. They are convinced that their opinion is so self-evidently right that no sensible person could disagree with it. Most telling of all, this leads them to treat all those who differ from their beliefs with a peculiar kind of contemptuous hostility.

When I first read Janis’s book, one of my first thoughts was how well it helped to explain and illuminate so much that I had been writing about through most of my professional life. Again and again, I had found myself analysing instances of how groups of people had got carried away en masse by some powerfully beguiling idea which was not properly based on reality. It had invariably turned out to be rooted in some way in a kind of collective make-believe. And in each case, they had displayed a particular form of dismissive intolerance towards anyone who did not share their mind-set.

We are never more aware of groupthink at work than when we come up against people who hold an emphatic opinion on some controversial subject, but who, when questioned on it, turn out not really to have thought it through. They have not looked seriously at the facts or the evidence. They have simply taken their opinions or beliefs on trust, ready-made, from others. But the very fact that their opinions are not based on any real understanding of why they believe what they do only allows them to believe even more insistently and intolerantly that their views are right.

These are the ‘victims of groupthink’ Janis was writing about all those years ago. Today they are around us more obviously than ever. We meet them socially, we hear and read them incessantly in the media, we see our politicians speaking in the clichés of groupthink all the time. The psychological condition from which they are suffering is contagious, extremely powerful and increasingly showing itself to be potentially very dangerous.

This book is about learning how to recognize the nature and power of groupthink in all its guises. But before we look at a wide range of examples, we need first to establish a more detailed picture of what Janis’s analysis tells us about the rules governing the way groupthink works.

INTRODUCTION

The Rules of Groupthink

I use the term ‘groupthink’ as a quick and easy way to refer to a mode of thinking that people engage in when they are deeply involved in a cohesive in-group, when the members’ strivings for unanimity over-ride their motivation to realistically appraise alternative courses of action.

Groupthink is a term of the same order as the words in the Newspeak vocabulary George Orwell presents in his dismaying 1984 – a vocabulary with terms such as ‘doublethink’ and ‘crimethink’. By putting groupthink with those Orwellian words, I realise that groupthink takes on an Orwellian connotation. The invidiousness is intentional: groupthink refers to a deterioration of mental efficiency, reality testing and moral judgment.

Irving Janis, Victims of Groupthink (1972)

Of course, we hear people casually using the word groupthink all over the place, usually to dismiss those with whose opinions they disagree. But in consciously adapting this word from George Orwell, Janis was the first person to show that there is a consistent structure to the way the concept operates, which is why his work deserves to be recognized as such a valuable contribution to science. Nevertheless, there is an obvious reason why his book published in 1972 (revised in 1982 as just Groupthink) is not better known than it might be. This is that Janis based his theory only on a very specific and limited set of examples.

His particular concern was with several notorious failures of US foreign policy between the 1940s and the 1960s. These included the failure of America to heed intelligence warnings of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941; General MacArthur’s fateful decision to advance into North Korea in 1950; President Kennedy’s backing for the CIA’s disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba in 1961; and President Johnson’s decision in 1965 to escalate the war in Vietnam. In a later edition he added the conduct of President Nixon and his closest advisers in the Watergate scandal.

What he showed through each of his carefully researched case studies was that all these fiascos had essentially come about for the same reason. Those behind them had been driven by groupthink which failed to take proper account of all the realities of the situation they were faced with. And although Janis several times in his book made lists of the ‘symptoms of groupthink’, we can draw out the three which are absolutely basic to the way groupthink works, and relevant to all the other examples we are about to look at in this book.

The three defining rules of groupthink

1 That a group of people come to share a common view, opinion or belief that in some way is not based on objective reality. They may be convinced intellectually, morally, politically or even scientifically that it is right. They may be sure from all the evidence they have considered that it is so. But their belief cannot ultimately be tested in a way which could confirm it beyond doubt. It is based on a picture of the world as they imagine to be, or would like it to be. In essence, their collective view will always have in it an element of wishful thinking or make-believe.

2 That, precisely because their shared view is essentially subjective, they need to go out of their way to insist it is so self-evidently right that a ‘consensus’ of all right-minded people must agree with it. Their belief has made them an ‘in-group’, which accepts that any evidence which contradicts it, and the views of anyone who does not agree with it, can be disregarded.

3 The most revealing consequence of this. To reinforce their ‘in-group’ conviction that they are right, they need to treat the views of anyone who questions it as wholly unacceptable. They are incapable of engaging in any serious dialogue or debate with those who disagree with them. Those outside the bubble must be marginalized and ignored, although, if necessary, their views must be mercilessly caricatured to make them seem ridiculous. If this is not enough, they must be attacked in the most violently contemptuous terms, usually with the aid of some scornfully dismissive label, and somehow morally discredited. The thing which most characterizes any form of groupthink is that dissent cannot be tolerated.

Janis showed how consistently and fatally these rules operated in each of his examples. Those caught up in the ‘consensus’ rigorously excluded anyone putting forward evidence which might raise doubts about their view. Such people were aggressively shut out from the discussion. And in each case, the refusal to consider any evidence or arguments which contradicted their ‘consensus‘ eventually led to disaster.

But Janis then contrasted this with two examples of US foreign policy initiatives which provided a complete contrast: the Marshall Plan in the late 1940s and the ending of the Cuban missile crisis which had threatened a new world war in 1962. He showed how these were driven by the very opposite of groupthink. In each case, those responsible had deliberately canvassed the widest range of expert opinion, to ensure that all relevant evidence was brought to the table. They wanted to explore every possible consequence of what was being proposed. In each case the policy was outstandingly successful.

Once we recognize how these three elements make up the archetypal rules defining the workings of groupthink, we shall begin to see just how very much more widely they apply than just the narrow set of examples that were the focus of Janis’s study. Indeed, they turn out to be one of the most valuable guides to collective human behaviour we have ever been given. We can see how they give us a clearer understanding of innumerable other examples of groupthink in all directions, not least in its various historical manifestations all down the ages.

Groupthink in history, politics and fiction

One of the more obvious examples of Janis’s rules in action can be seen chequering the history of most organized religions. These by definition are belief systems which, once established, have often tended to become ruthlessly intolerant of anyone who does not share them. Such outsiders are labelled as ‘heretics’, ‘infidels’ or ‘unbelievers’. To protect the established orthodoxy, they must be marginalized, excluded from society, persecuted, punished or even in countless examples put to death. None of the world’s great religions has been immune to this tendency, even where it appears to contradict their core beliefs: the followers of Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism and Buddhism have all at different times exhibited this tendency, as have different sects within those religions.

But no religion has remained more consistently prone to it through the centuries than Islam. And of course, there is no more extreme example in our world today than the rise of Islamic terrorist movements such as Isis or al-Qaeda, which are possessed by a form of groupthink so extreme that it turns those carried away by it into merciless killers, prepared not only to murder at random anyone they can see as ‘infidels’ (chiefly other Muslims), but even to commit suicide themselves in furthering their cause.

Another very obvious instance has been those totalitarian political ideologies such as Communism or Nazism, which likewise showed ruthless intolerance towards any ‘subversives’, ‘dissidents’ or anyone not in total obedience to ‘the party line’ (what in the Soviet Union was termed ‘correct thinking’). Again, these outsiders had to be excluded from society, imprisoned, shut away in camps or physically eliminated.

In much less extreme fashion, the divisive world of politics is in fact, by its very nature, constantly prone to groupthink to a greater or lesser degree. Each political in-group has its own ideologically selective slant on the issues of the day and its own tendency to deride and caricature the views of its rivals. This becomes all the more pronounced the further any party or group moves towards the ‘hard-left’ or ‘hard-right’ ends of the political spectrum.

But politics also provide plenty of examples more akin to those analysed by Janis, where a small group of senior politicians becomes fixated on some particular policy or project doomed to end in failure because it is based on a flight from reality. One obvious instance Janis could certainly have added to his own case studies was the hubristically obsessive fashion in which George W. Bush and Tony Blair launched their invasion of Iraq in 2003. So fixated were they just on toppling Saddam Hussein that they had never given any practical thought to what might follow once their goal had been achieved. By ruthlessly over-riding any questioning of their strategy, and failing to plan for what might happen next when all the country’s administrative infrastructure was destroyed, they plunged Iraq into years of bloody sectarian chaos.

But apart from politics, once we recognize the rules of groupthink, we can identify numerous other examples through the ages. Few episodes in the history of science, for instance, are more famous than the treatment accorded to Galileo for his questioning of the Church’s ‘consensus’ that the earth was the centre of the universe and that the sun moved round it.

Around the same time, Europe was being carried away by as bizarre an example of groupthink as any: the great ‘witch craze’, based on the hysterical belief that tens of thousands of women and some men should be burned to death or drowned because they had become possessed by the devil. As Hugh Trevor-Roper showed in his account of this extraordinary phenomenon, which endured for more than 200 years, some of the most fanatical cheerleaders for this ‘moral panic’ were among the foremost intellectuals of the age.

A more recent and much more short-lived example, often described at the time as a ‘witch-hunt’, was the hysteria whipped up in the USA in the early 1950s by Senator Joseph McCarthy and his Senate Un-American Activities Committee, against anyone who could be demonized as a ‘Communist’ and therefore a traitor. There were indeed a handful of genuine traitors in America at the time, prepared to betray their country’s secrets to the Soviet Union. But as a classic demagogue, McCarthy briefly came to dominate American politics by blowing this up out of any relation to the facts, to the point where he floated off into such obvious make-believe as to bring his own downfall.

In fiction, two of the best-known novels of the twentieth century, George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, both centred on an imaginary totalitarian state of the future which attempted to brainwash all its citizens into a rigidly intolerant state of groupthink which obeyed all the familiar rules. It was no accident that Janis adapted his term ‘groupthink’ from Orwell’s thinly disguised picture of life in Stalin’s Soviet Union, where the sense of a ‘group mind’, personified in ‘Big Brother’, was ruthlessly reinforced by means of endlessly repeated slogans, and ritualized ‘hate sessions’ directed at anyone daring to dissent in any way from the Party’s line.

But fiction contains no more perfect short parable of groupthink in action than Hans Christian Andersen’s story ‘The Emperor’s New Clothes’. When the emperor parades through the streets in what he has been talked into imagining is a dazzling new suit, all his obsequious subjects rush to acclaim it as handsome beyond compare. Only the little hero of the story points out that the emperor is not wearing any clothes at all. He is stark naked. The idea that he is wearing any clothes is wholly imaginary. But by Janis’s third rule, of course, those caught up in the ‘consensus’ make-believe angrily turn on the boy for pointing out nothing less than the truth.

Before we see how Janis’s rules apply to some of the more obvious examples of groupthink at work in the world today, however, we must also add one more very important element in the way it comes to exercise its power which Janis didn’t touch on, because it wasn’t relevant to the specific examples on which he based his study.

The power of second-hand thinking

Great power is given to ideas propagated by affirmation, repetition and contagion by the circumstances that they acquire in time that mysterious force known as ‘prestige’.

Whatever has been a ruling power in the world, whether it be ideas or men, has in the main enforced its authority by means of that irresistible force we call prestige.

Gustave Le Bon, The Crowd

Janis’s book was really concerned only with how groupthink affected small groups of men in charge of US policy at the highest level. But the forms of groupthink which are the subject of this book are often shared by countless other people, who come to make up what Le Bon called ‘the crowd’. The vast majority of these only get carried along by groupthink because they have taken it on ready-made from others. They accept as true what they have been told or read without ever seriously questioning it, which means that they don’t really know why they think as they do.

Of course, we all accept much of what we believe or think we know without bothering to check the reliability of whatever source we first learned it from: such as that the Earth is 93 million miles from the Sun, or that Tokyo is the capital of Japan. We take on trust that such things are true because everyone else does, and assume that, if necessary, they can be confirmed by practical evidence. But when it comes to most examples of groupthink, another factor is at work. Although in many cases the belief system behind it begins only with a small group of people, what allows it to catch on much more widely rests on the authority that can be attributed to those who originated it.

Long before Janis came up with his theory of groupthink, similar ideas had been explored less scientifically by Le Bon. One of his shrewdest observations was the crucial part played in changing the opinions of huge numbers of people by ‘prestige’: the particular deference paid to those taking the lead in putting them forward. We shall see examples of how this principle operates over many different issues and causes, and in each case the power of second-hand thinking, and the crucial role played in shaping it by those who have been accorded some position of ‘prestige’.

We shall be looking at instances as varied as the ‘Modern Movement’ in architecture, which did such immense social and aesthetic damage to Britain’s cities in the Sixties; the hysteria worked up over a whole sequence of what turned out to be entirely bogus health scares in the Nineties; and how the belief in global warming was then manipulated by dodgy science into the biggest, most expensive scare the world has ever known. We shall see how the creation of the European Union was itself ultimately a product of the make-believe