Groupthink

     The most infamous example of groupthink is found in the classic accounts put forward by social psychologist Elliot Aronson (Aronson & Aronson, 2010; Aronson, Wilson, & Akert, 1994). This example involved the disastrous crash of the space shuttle Challenger on January 28,1986 (Robillard, 2012). The event cost the lives of all seven persons on the shuttle and was witnessed live on TV by tens of millions of aghast viewers around the world. The event was viewed live in public school classrooms around America due to the presence on board the shuttle of science teacher Christa McAuliffe. McAuliffe was to have been the first civilian in space. Her presence on board returned the rapt attention of the world to an event, the launch of the space shuttle, which had become routine through repetition. The days when I and practically everyone else in the world that could get anywhere near a TV watched mesmerized as Neil Armstrong set foot on the surface of the moon and said “that is one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind” were long over by this point.

NASA had been to the moon and back several times by the time Richard Nixon, without a lot of public protest, canceled the last three moon missions even though the machinery had already been built and paid for. The third intended moon landing, Apollo 13, generated a great deal of attention only because it was a near disaster. Successful journeys to the moon and back were, by that time, not big news. Few people today could name the second astronaut to walk on the moon. This left NASA with a glorious past and an uncertain future in terms of public support and funding. In response, the agency came up with something that, like the Ford Edsel, had something for everyone but not much strong appeal to anyone. The Challenger flight with science teacher McAuliffe on board was intended to rekindle the strong public support NASA once enjoyed and save the agency from the slow budgetary starvation that had begun to eat away at NASA as the public’s interest waned.

The shuttle almost certainly would not have been launched under the conditions that prevailed that day if McAuliffe’s presence aboard had not made this flight so important to NASA as a public relations event. This pressure caused decisions to be made that, in the 20/20 hindsight after the disaster, clearly made no sense in light of what NASA engineers knew about the O rings that held the different stages of the shuttle launch system together. It was easy to explain after the fact what had occurred; O rings designed to function at temperatures of 40° F or higher failed catastrophically at 29° F. This event had a high probability of occurrence. The engineers who knew most about the O rings could and did predict the probable failure of a component designed to function under one set of conditions under the very different conditions that prevailed at launch. Aronson’s first law of social psychology states that people who do crazy things are not necessarily crazy. The Challenger disaster is the perfect example of this law in action because the event and its causes were so extensively documented after the fact.

The engineers most familiar with the O rings were, in the beginning, unanimous in their opposition to launch and shared this opposition and the solid engineering concerns behind it with their superiors. They were invited in response to “take off your engineering hat and put on your management hat” in response. In other words, the engineers were pressured to ignore what they knew in favor of being “team players” on a team that needed the launch to happen that day for reasons that had nothing to do with engineering. Many of the engineers self-censored in response by toning down their initially strenuous objections to launch in a strikingly pure and simple example of the way groupthink is described as working by Aronson.

Their supervisors in their meetings with the next layer of management did the same in response to exactly the same pressures to conform to groupthink in a classic example of “protecting” higher-ups from information that would compromise the messenger’s standing as a “team player” supportive of organizational goals. By this level\stage, strenuous original objections to launch based on extreme concerns about how the O rings would function at 29° F degrees had been transformed into “some of the engineers were concerned about the weather.” At the final level/stage where the decisions to launch was made, this had become “it is a little chilly, but we are good to go.”

Nobel Prize winning physicist Richard Feynman demonstrated the sheer insanity of launching the shuttle in 29° F degree weather with painful clarity with a simple experiment (Feynman, 2010). Feynman dropped the O ring material into a glass of ice water to demonstrate that it had no resilience at 32° F. Any NASA engineer familiar with the design specifications of the rings could have done the same demonstration and gotten the same obvious result in any of the meetings that took place at the low level where actual engineers had input. This silly prank would have had no impact on the final decision to launch. This demonstration, like every other argument against launch, only became compelling after a disaster had occurred and the question became why the launch took place in spite of what the engineers knew and initially tried hard to communicate to their supervisors about the criminal folly involved in launching the shuttle under conditions that made it very likely that the O rings would fail. The investigations after the fact revealed such a pure and perfect example of groupthink at work that the Challenger disaster has become the paradigmatic example of the concept.

References:

Aronson, E., & Aronson J. (2010). The social animal & readings about the social animal. New York: Worth Publishers.

Aronson, E., Wilson, T. D., & Akert, R. M. (1994). Social psychology: The heart and the mind. New York: HarperCollins.

Feynman, R. (2010, October 12). Richard Feynman: Challenger crash o-ring. Retrieved from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Rwcbsn19c0

Robillard, R. (2012). Groupthink: Challenger. Retrieved from http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLDw1MPIDBngdX0Yg8dQ6fdjK57eWqCTpX

Cognitive dissonance

      I had to sit and think for a while before I could come up with an example of a situation when cognitive dissonance caused a change in my attitudes based on a prior change in my behavior. Most people are enough focused on getting themselves accepted by other people or reaping the rewards of conformity to the demands embedded in various social situations that they will change attitudes that run counter to the behavior required to achieve these two goals rather than risk rejection by acting according to those attitudes or suffering the anxiety that results from a divergence between attitude and behavior.

The example that I will use is the changes to my presentation of self in interaction with others that I had to make in order to become a teacher. These changes initially went against the grain of the attitudes that had previously determined my self-presentation in other social domains. I developed a different self-presentation for interacting with students and was rewarded by better learning outcomes and much greater intrinsic motivation to do my job well based on the real joy I take in doing what I do.

I have always been inordinately curious. I became a voracious reader very early and have spent much more time since with my nose in a book or pressed up against a computer screen watching text scroll than even most other little boys and girls who grow up to be teachers. I ended up as a teacher because I loved to read and because this insatiable curiosity never left me. I was, in early life, less interested in the other people around me than most people are. I spent much more time alone, by choice, than most young people do. I never saw school as preparation for a career. I wanted to know for the sake of knowing and school was where you read books and talked to people who knew about the things that were in books. I never felt any burning desire to teach. I wanted to stay in school forever and was told along the way that the only real way to accomplish that was to “move to the other side of the desk” as a sociologist who was something of a mentor to me put it.

      I was not by temperament born to teach. I learned this the hard way in my first attempt to “move to the other side of the desk” as a teaching assistant in an English department. I went in naively assuming that my love of literature and my own passionate desire to learn to write as well as I could, perhaps well enough to end up in some Norton Anthology myself someday, were enough to make me fit to teach rhetoric and composition to freshman. Two semesters were enough to convince me otherwise.

This was a real crisis in my life that would have been much worse if I had not, during that same time, gotten to know a professor of Educational Psychology based on a number of shared interests. He convinced me that one could be taught to teach and, what was more, that I would need to learn how people learned and how to create and maintain the conditions under which learning was optimized in order to do so. This sounded like great fun so I transferred from the graduate program in English into the graduate program in Educational Psychology.

      I did learn to teach. I learned to be student-centered and developmentally oriented and to respect students as individual learners and to respond to student responses in ways that were intended to encourage a further articulation and unpacking of those original responses. I learned a thousand way to get students to tell me rather than telling them. This generated some cognitive dissonance at first. I had started out as an “I’m right and I don’t care what you think” sort of guy, exactly the kind of guy who would lecture for an hour, ask for questions, wait 30 seconds and then say “dismissed” before trotting out the door convinced that he had done his duty. I sometimes felt like Mr. T pretending to be Mister Rogers but, when that happened, I always reminded myself that Mr. T had no business being a teacher whereas I had decided that being a teacher was going to be my business and should do my best to act like the kind of person who was actually good at facilitating other people’s learning. 
     My student evaluations were typically good and I genuinely enjoyed teaching, something I could not have said during those two awful semesters years ago. My behavior in the classroom feels perfectly natural to me now and the contrast between my self-presentation in the classroom is not nearly as different from my self-presentation in other domains of interaction. Looking back, I’m amazed at how sharply my personality has diverged from my temperament based on changes in attitude that were initially driven by the pragmatic behavioral demands of functioning well in a particular line of work.