Cognitive, Behavioral, and Emotive Factors
Trust and social relationships help people share what they know, but group agreement can also discourage scrutiny. Organizational learning requires room for different perspectives, explicit discussion of assumptions, and a willingness to examine evidence that challenges the group’s view.
THE IDEA
Banasiewicz dates early interest in massive open online courses (MOOCs) to around 2006 and describes how traditional universities became less concerned about them over the following decade. His proposed explanation concerns the social side of learning: people value interaction with knowledgeable people they trust. That does not draw a simple boundary between learning from people and learning online; the relevant question is what opportunities a setting offers for interaction and trust.
These relationships matter when organizations share experiential knowledge, one of the two broad evidence categories in the 3E framework. A colleague’s experience is easier to examine and apply when people can ask questions, explain context, and discuss uncertainty without embarrassment. Individual judgments can become shared understandings and eventually established practice. Agreement alone, however, does not make those judgments true. A supportive environment should make it possible to challenge them as well as transmit them.
Social identity also affects participation. People who value belonging to an organization may be more willing to contribute and learn. The same attachment can make criticism uncomfortable if questioning a practice feels like questioning the group itself.
Empirical evidence, the other broad category in the 3E framework, is also affected by how groups work. People may differ in how they collect data, choose methods, and interpret findings. Bayesian analysis combines a prior distribution with a likelihood to obtain a posterior distribution. Frequentist methods use the behavior of procedures under repeated sampling rather than assigning prior probabilities to the parameters. Both require choices about models, data, and assumptions. Their results can differ, but that difference calls for examining those choices rather than labeling one perspective subjective and the other free of judgment.
Discussion can increase a group’s confidence without improving its conclusions. Groupthink pressures members to maintain agreement and can make dissent seem disloyal. Biased information search then favors material that supports the shared position. Conflicting findings may be dismissed before anyone has examined the assumptions behind them.
As groups develop stronger identities, they establish norms about whose views count and how disagreement is handled. Useful learning norms preserve diverse perspectives while giving the group ways to evaluate them. Trust should help people raise doubts, explain their reasoning, and revise a conclusion when the evidence warrants it.
When to use it
When implementing a new organizational strategy, be aware of groupthink tendencies and encourage open debate.
When evaluating evidence from diverse sources, consider biases that might shape interpretation and seek out dissenting views.
Design learning environments that encourage trust and open communication to enhance knowledge transfer.
In interdisciplinary projects, have team members explain their methods and assumptions so disagreements can be examined rather than suppressed.
FROM THEORY TO EVERYDAY LIFE
In practice
Boardroom Decision-Making
A corporate board discussing a new strategic direction becomes overconfident in its collective judgment, suppressing dissenting opinions to maintain harmony. This groupthink leads to a flawed decision that ignores critical market data.
Interdisciplinary Research Team
An interdisciplinary team gets different results from Bayesian and frequentist analyses of the same data. Rather than treating the difference as a dispute to win, members compare the questions, assumptions, and uncertainty measures behind each analysis before deciding what the evidence supports.
A MOMENT TO REFLECT
Put it to work.
How might groupthink affect decision-making in your organization or team?
How can you foster cognitive diversity while avoiding forced uniformity?
In what ways do social and emotional factors influence your learning from others?
Often confused with
CONTINUE THE CONVERSATION
Source texts
- Evidence-Based Decision-Making How to Leverage Available Data and Avoid Cognitive Biases (Andrew D. Banasiewicz)