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