Page 36 - The Social Animal

18 The Social Animal

But the top executives at Morton Thiokol were not so fortunate.
For them, more was at stake than a successful launch. They were in
great conflict. On the one hand, as engineers, they were sensitive to the
opinions of their fellow engineers. On the other hand, as executives,
they were dependent on NASA for a contract worth approximately
$400 million per year. Thus, in part, they tended to identify with the
same concerns that NASA administrators did. According to his testi-
mony before a presidential investigative commission, Robert Lund,
Thiokol’s vice president for engineering, at first opposed the launch
but changed his position after he was advised to “take off his engineer-
ing hat and put on one representing management.” How did the Mor-
ton Thiokol executives such as Lund deal with this conflict? Before
their last conference with NASA administrators, they polled Thiokol
employees but not the engineers—only other management personnel,
who voted to “go” with the launch. Thus, in a conference between
NASA officials and Thiokol executives the night before the fateful
launch, participants reinforced one another’s commitment to proceed.
Let’s take stock. What do Hitler’s inner circle, Nixon’s “palace
guard,” and NASA administrators have in common, aside from the
fact that they made tragic decisions? They were relatively cohesive
groups isolated from dissenting points of view. When such groups
are called upon to make decisions, they often fall prey to what social
7
psychologist Irving Janis calls groupthink. According to Janis,
groupthink is “the mode of thinking that persons engage in when
concurrence seeking becomes so dominant in a cohesive ingroup that
it tends to override realistic appraisal of alternative courses of action.”
Groups engaging in this maladaptive decision-making strategy typ-
ically perceive themselves as invulnerable—they’re blinded by opti-
mism. And this optimism is perpetuated when dissent is
discouraged. In the face of conformity pressures, individual group
members come to doubt their own reservations and refrain from
voicing dissenting opinions. Consensus seeking is so important that
certain members of the group sometimes become mindguards—peo-
ple who censor troublesome incoming information, as did the exec-
utives at Morton Thiokol.
By citing these examples, I do not mean to suggest that individ-
uals who make foolish, disastrous decisions should not be held ac-
countable. What I do intend to suggest is that it is a lot easier to
conduct an inquiry and assign blame than it is to understand the psy-