\u201cHow could we have been so stupid?\u201d The question was posed by none other than John F. Kennedy in the aftermath of the 1961 Bay of Pigs fiasco, the a failed invasion of Cuba by CIA-backed Cuban exiles. The disastrous plan, strongly recommended by top advisors and approved the President himself, resulted in over three hundred deaths, including those of five Americans.<\/p>\n
Interestingly, key decision makers included four graduates of Harvard and one each from Oxford, Yale, Princeton, and the University of California, Berkeley. So how did some of the brightest minds of the twentieth century make one its worst decisions?<\/p>\n
In a word, groupthink<\/em>. That\u2019s the conclusion drawn by psychologist Irving L. Janis, who studied that question and coined the term. Groupthink is the tendency of group members to over-value conformity and acceptance by the team. It produces \u201ca deterioration in mental efficiency, reality testing and moral judgments as a result of group pressures.\u201d In homogeneous teams, loyalty and conformity become an impediment to sound thinking.<\/p>\n The solution? Diversity. Janis concluded that group members must deliberately seek outside opinions and other ways of thinking about a problem. It\u2019s impossible to make a good decision in an echo chamber.<\/p>\n\t\t