Cohesive groups can unconsciously suspend critical faculties to preserve harmony

Evidence

Personality and political psychology more generally affect political processes not only through the actions taken by leaders more or less on their own, but also through group processes such as the collective suspension of reality testing manifested in what Irving Janis (1983) has characterized as groupthink. Groupthink occurs in highly cohesive decision-making groups. The members of such groups sometimes become so committed to their colleagues they more or less unconsciously suspend their own critical faculties in order to preserve group harmony. Janis, who is scrupulous about setting forth the criteria for establishing whether a group has engaged in groupthink, analyzes a number of historical episodes (the most striking example being the Bay of Pigs) in which a defective decision-making process appears to have led able policy-makers to make decisions on the basis of flawed assumptions and defective information. — John T. Jost and Jim Sidanius, Political Psychology, 1198

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines groupthink as cohesion-driven collective suspension of reality testing, with the Bay of Pigs as the canonical instance.
• XREF: Connects to social capital’s account of how strong in-group ties can impose conformity costs, and generally to conformity research. — connects to: Group cohesion can form through shared ironic distance from rituals, not shared beliefs. — Nina Eliasoph, Avoiding politics: how Americans…, 830
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — John T. Jost and Jim Sidanius, Political Psychology, 1198