Advisors’ inflated collective efficacy, not just groupthink bias, drives foreign policy fiascoes

Evidence

Groupthink theory focuses heavily on the psychological processes that bias decision making in insular groups. However, the makeup of the advisors in the inner circle also is a factor in causing bias. Government advisors usually have had previous successful careers in academia or the corporate world, sometimes with stints in various governmental bureaucracies. But they rarely have any battlefield experience and often inadequately understand the culture in which they are intervening. Great achievements build a strong sense of personal efficacy. However, in a new context, inadequate assessment of the challenges and risks of interventions can foster overcon-fident judgments regarding how easily desired sociopolitical changes can be achieved (Bandura, 1997). White’s (1998) revision of groupthink theory underscores the role of advisors’ faulty collective efficacy in foreign military fiascoes. — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 2322

Categorization

• XREF: Mechanism of overconfident elites underestimating an unfamiliar culture parallels how insulated advisors rationalize harmful policy toward out-groups, connecting to vault claims about Islamophobic policy support.
• CANDY: Sam Rayburn’s line about wishing ‘just one of them had run for sheriff once’ is a delightful, self-contained quotable about the gap between intelligence and hard-won experience.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement: How People Do Harm…, 2322