“Groupthink” is a theory of how peer pressure affects communication.

Psychologist Irving Janis, a widely-recognized authority on the subject, defined groupthink as, “a mode of thinking that people engage in when they are deeply involved in a cohesive in-group, when the members' strivings for unanimity override their motivation to realistically appraise alternative courses of action.”

This phenomenon, said Janis, was strikingly evident among Lyndon Johnson’s inner circle of advisors during the Vietnam war.

“The members of this group,” Janis declared, “adopted a special vocabulary for describing the Vietnam war, using terms such as body counts, armed reconnaissance, and surgical strikes, which they picked up from their military colleagues. The Vietnam policy makers, by using this professional military vocabulary, we able to avoid in their discussions with each other all direct references to human suffering and thus to form an attitude of detachment similar to that of surgeons. But although an attitude of detachment may have a functional value for those who must execute distressing operations, it makes it all too easy for policy makers to dehumanize the victims of war and to resort to destructive military solutions without considering their human consequences.”

According to Janis, other characteristics of groupthink include:

-- a shared illusion of invulnerability, which leads to an extraordinary degree of over-optimism and risk-taking;

-- manifestations of direct pressure on individuals who express disagreement with or doubt about the majority view, making it clear that their dissent is contrary to the expected behavior of loyal group members;

-- stereotyped views of enemy leaders as evil, often accompanied by the assumption that they are too weak or too stupid to deal effectively with whatever risky attempts are made to outdo them;

-- an unquestioned belief in the inherent morality of the in-group, which inclines the members to ignore the ethical or moral consequences of their decisions; and

-- shared efforts to construct rationalizations in order to be able to ignore warnings and other forms of negative feedback, which, if taken seriously, would lead the members to reconsider the assumptions they continue to take for granted each time they recommit themselves to their past policy decisions.

Sounds a lot like the Bush White House, doesn’t it? But it could just as easily describe the in-group at Enron, an Internet chatroom of conspiracy theorists, or a group of people waiting in line to see Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth or a Michael Moore movie.

Janis maintained that one way to stop groupthink was to expose the in-group members to other points of view, either by regularly bringing in outside authorities, or appointing a group member to act as devil’s advocate.

Since speechwriters are rarely part of the inner-circle, our ability to influence policy is limited. Nevertheless, we are to some degree policymakers. The question is, what do we do when we see groupthink at work? Do we act devil’s advocates? Do we at least ask questions? Or do we exacerbate the problem by parroting the party line?