Groupthink: The Bay Of Pigs, Or 1986 NASA Challenger Tragedy
628 Words3 Pages
• What is Groupthink? Explain this phenomenon in your own words and support with examples from scholarly sources.
• Choose one of the following situations and explain the ramifications of Groupthink: The Bay of Pigs, OR 1986 NASA Challenger Tragedy, OR 2012 Penn State Cover-Up of child abuse allegations (Joe Paterno).
Part One
Groupthink is a style of decision making that has an excessive tendency among group members to seek concurrence (Kassin, Fein, Markus, 2014). When looking at groupthink it is important to understand what is happening. It occurs when there is not a standard procedure or a guideline to making decisions. Groups that use groupthink tend to have people that have similar characteristics and similar backgrounds. Groupthink…show more content… Officers did not take the warnings or the signs seriously when they received word about the invasion (El-Najjar, 2010). Officers felt that the attempt was made just for a scare and Japanese would not actually bomb Pearl Harbor. This shows that action was not taken because the main officers in charge did not take the warning signs seriously when in fact they were very serious. Another example of groupthink can be seen through the 2003 Columbian space shuttle disaster. There was a team that was in charge of the space shuttle and refused to acknowledge the warning signs that something may have damaged their space shuttle (Schneider, Gruman, & Coutts, 2005, p. 36). The engineers that were aboard the shuttle suggested that the damage could be a potential problem and suggested that the damage should be repaired immediately. The crew decided to look past the warning and not fix the damage which eventually led to the explosion of the shuttle. Groupthink is portrayed in this example because the crew was made aware of a problem and they decided to not take the warning signs from the engineers (Schneider, Gruman, & Coutts, 2005, p. 36). By the crew not doing so it led to the explosion of the shuttle and killing the seven passengers that were