Houghton David. Political Psychology: Situations, Individuals, and Cases
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For the rest of their lives, many of Johnson’s decision-makers on Vietnam—
Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian Affairs William Bundy is a good
example—would continue to maintain that Ball had been a devil’s advocate,
but this was simply untrue. Ball harbored very real and heartfelt disagreements
with the others. But dismissing or “domesticating” the dissenter in this way is
exactly what one would expect if groupthink were present, Janis’s analysis
suggests. Similarly, Lyndon Johnson himself would defuse the criticism of Press
Secretary Bill Moyers by announcing “here comes Mr. Stop the Bombing!”
whenever Moyers walked into the room, thus blunting anything Moyers might
say against the war before he even uttered a comment.
18
And when one of the
original architects of the war, Robert McNamara, began to have doubts about
the wisdom of the war and began to express these outside the group, Johnson
compared him to a son who had let slip to prospective buyers of a house that
there are cracks in the basement.
19
“He is just short of cracking up,” Johnson is
reputed to have told advisers in 1967 when McNamara was not present.
Criticisms of Janis’s Perspective
The groupthink approach has been criticized from a variety of perspectives.
Attempts to test the model more rigorously than Janis himself did have been
met with mixed results.
20
More generally, some have critiqued the theoretical
coherence of the model Janis developed, while others have used more recently
declassified materials to undermine the empirical arguments he made. As
Philip Tetlock and his colleagues note, four broad criticisms have been raised
against Janis’s work on the theoretical side: first of all, Janis relied on qualita-
tive case studies, a method which frequently tempts the researcher to empha-
size evidence which “fits” a theory and discard information which does not;
second, there is a “suspiciously perfect correlation” between the presence
of groupthink and flawed decision-making in Janis’s book, even though he
himself concedes that process is not everything and that it is possible (by sheer
luck) for a good decision to emerge from flawed procedures. Third, there is a
suspicious “all-or-nothing” quality to the way that Janis’s case fit so neatly into
the categories of groupthink or vigilant decision-making; and last, there are
various conceptual problems with the model itself, especially those having
to do with distinguishing the causes from the consequences of groupthink.
21
In their classic critique, for instance, Longley and Pruitt question (amongst
other things) the inclusion of “a belief in the inherent morality of the group”
and “stereotyped views of out-groups” in the list of the symptoms of group-
think, since unlike the other factors these appear to have little to do with
consensus formation or concurrence-seeking.
22
In short, one does not need
to hold a simplistic view of one’s enemy or an exalted view of one’s own
78 The Situation
moral position to engage in hasty or premature decision-making that excludes
minority views.
On the empirical side, David Barrett has notably challenged the idea that
Lyndon Johnson didn’t receive competing advice on Vietnam. Most of his
advisers did argue for escalation, but a significant minority did not, Barrett
notes. Six advisers in particular argued against escalation. There was George
Ball as we know already, but Senator William Fulbright, Vice President
Hubert Humphrey, Senator Mike Mansfield, Senator Richard Russell and
presidential adviser Clark Clifford all expressed their feelings against the war
directly to Johnson as well.
23
The picture of a president stubbornly ignoring
outside advice and relying exclusively upon a tiny group of like-minded
individuals therefore does not really fit what actually occurred, Barrett sug-
gests. Of course, we have long known that it was not just Ball who expressed
reservations about escalation; many in the CIA, Defense and State Depart-
ments also harbored strong doubts, though it tended to be those lower down
the hierarchy who felt this way. Even more significant, perhaps, is the evi-
dence we now have that Johnson himself agonized over the decision to
escalate quite extensively. Johnson secretly taped a large number of his phone
calls, and the declassification of many of these calls since the late 1990s has
shown a Johnson who was almost always pessimistic about the chances of
success, rather than exhibiting any “illusion of invulnerability.” We now know
that Johnson and his colleagues were, as Barrett puts it, “uncertain
warriors.”
24
With regard to the Bay of Pigs, Robert McNamara has stated that the
common emotion among Kennedy’s advisers when they initially took office
was not one of omnipotence or “the magic touch,” as Janis’s account suggests,
but a strongly defensive feeling. Domestically, JFK had won by the narrowest
margin in electoral history at the 1960 presidential election, but even more
importantly in foreign policy terms the dominant feeling was one of being on
the defense against an ever-expanding Communist threat.
25
Roderick Kramer
argues that Janis’s interpretation of Vietnam and the Bay of Pigs sits poorly
with what we now know about both case studies:
When making a case for the argument that Kennedy and his advisors
displayed symptoms of overconfidence and an “illusion of invulnerability”
when deciding to proceed with implementation of the CIA operation,
Janis did not have access, of course, to the classified records of top secret
briefings and meetings. This evidence, now available to scholars, indicates
that Kennedy’s assessments were undoubtedly influenced not only by
deliberately misleading intelligence assessments provided by the CIA,
but also by disingenuous, and politically motivated comments made by
Group Decision-Making 79
President Eisenhower to the new president during private, top-secret
briefings.
26
Rather than being influenced by group processes, Kramer suggests, Kennedy
may simply have had great difficulty believing that Dwight Eisenhower, “the
organizational genius behind the largest, most complex, and most successful
amphibious military invasion in U.S. history,” would have supported a much
smaller and less ambitious amphibiously based invasion that had little chance of
success.
27
In both the Vietnam and Bay of Pigs cases, moreover, the decisions
each president reached may have had more to do with individual-level ana-
logical reasoning processes (see Chapter 9 of this book) as opposed to group-
level ones. For instance, the confidence that Kennedy and his advisers had in
the CIA may have stemmed from the agency’s success in an apparently very
similar case, the overthrow of Giacomo Arbenz in Guatemala in 1954. JFK and
his advisers seem to have expected that Castro would flee the country when
presented with a U.S. plan for his overthrow, just as Arbenz had done seven
years earlier.
Newgroup Syndrome
A number of recent scholars have noted—probably with a fair amount of
justification—that there has been too much attention devoted in research and
textbooks to groupthink. No chapter on group decision-making would be
complete without devoting a good deal of space to groupthink, as this one has;
Janis’s theory is always the elephant in the room, a perspective we simply
cannot ignore whenever political groups are discussed. Equally, however,
empirical and theoretical criticisms of the groupthink approach such as the
ones noted above have prompted many analysts of foreign policy decision-
making to look “beyond groupthink,” re-examining the wider literature on
group behaviors within social psychology for clues as to how other theoretical
frameworks might be developed.
28
One such approach has become known as
the newgroup syndrome.
29
Eric Stern and Bengt Sundelius, the theory’s major
advocates, have proposed this approach “to capture a hypothesized pathological
conformity dynamic liable to occur in newly formed policy groups [. . .] in ad
hoc or newly institutionalized groups, that is, those in the forming stage.”
30
As
they further explain, in such groups:
A common group subculture and well-developed procedural norms tend
to be lacking. This vacuum creates uncertainty among the members who
are likely to be anxious, tentative, dependent, and, therefore, particularly
inclined to take direction from a leader or other assertive group members
80 The Situation
within the group. These conditions create incentives for both compliance
and internalization on the part of the individual member, which in turn
results in a tendency toward conformity in the group as a whole.
31
Drawing in particular on the work of Bruce Tuckman, Stern and Sundelius
hypothesize that groups go through a number of developmental stages during
the lifetime of their existence—from their initial formation to the point where
they formally “adjourn”—and that a differing kind of dynamic operates at each.
Stern and Sundelius are especially interested in the beginning of a group’s life,
however, where a new administration comes to power or a significant turnover
in membership (through resignations, hirings and firings) in effect creates a
new group dynamic. While dysfunctional decision-making is not inevitable at
this early stage—it all depends on the kind of norms that the group leader
encourages at the outset—there is a tendency towards caution and conformity
(and a corresponding lack of open, critical thinking) at this point.
Stern applies this approach to the Bay of Pigs case study, and we may
usefully contrast his own approach with that of Janis. Like Janis, he argues that
conformity was a particular problem in the decision-making, but he traces this
to the fact that Kennedy—having swept away Eisenhower’s decision-making
structures and a foreign policy apparatus which is now highly regarded by many
scholars
32
—operated in a way that was too informal and ad hoc. The major
players did not know one another well and were only beginning to find their
feet in their jobs. Moreover, the president himself had little management or
executive-level experience, having been a member of Congress and then a
senator. “Given Kennedy’s relatively laissez-faire management style, he did not
attempt to guide consciously and clarify the group decision culture in order to
reduce uncertainty and promote critical interaction,” Stern concludes. “He
appears to have been unaware of the effect of his person and the weight of his
office upon his colleagues. Similarly, the evidence suggests that he was insuffi-
ciently conscious of the emergent group norms (unwittingly reinforced by his
own conduct) of deference to the president and to ‘experts.’ ”
33
The Individual in a Group Setting
The group-level form of situationism suggests that groups are more than the
sum total of the individuals who compose them; once policy-makers form a
group, the resultant body can in a sense “overwhelm” its members and take on
a life of its own. As Stern puts it, Kennedy does not appear to have appreciated
this possibility at the outset. “He placed a premium on talent, believing that this
quality was the key to achieving policy and political success,” Stern argues. “In
other words, he believed that it was enough to assemble a number of talented
Group Decision-Making 81
people, throw them in a room together, and wait for good things to happen.”
34
This kind of perspective is akin to a belief in a kind of narrow dispositionism; in
other words, Kennedy’s initial view ignored the group dynamic that occurs
when we bring individuals together, and situationists like Janis would contend
that these dynamics are not always positive in their effects (as we saw in the Bay
of Pigs and Vietnam cases). By the time of the October 1962 Cuban missile
crisis, however, JFK clearly recognized the effects that group norms and other
factors can have on decision-making, taking various steps to ensure that his own
presence (for instance) did not preordain the decisions reached. Fortunately
for us, he seems to have been a quick learner.
Conclusion
We have seen how situationist arguments can take a number of different forms,
though all of the main approaches we have discussed—Skinner’s behaviorism,
Milgram’s obedience paradigm, Zimbardo “bad barrel” theory and the group-
think approach of Janis—share in common the belief that our dispositions are
less critical in shaping our behavior than the situation in which we find our-
selves. Most of us, though not perhaps everyone, can reliably be expected to
behave in predictable ways when placed in a certain situation. But there is, as
we have occasionally noted in the criticism of various situationist approaches,
another (rival) way of looking at the underpinnings of political behavior: dispo-
sitionism. Dispositionist approaches dispute the notion that human beings gen-
erally behave similarly when placed in the same kind of situation; as we saw in
Chapter 1, dispositionists believe in the immense variability of human beings—
their differing beliefs, attitudes, mindsets, and so on—and cite examples that
highlight the variation in political behavior which results from these differ-
ences. Our next task, then, is to discuss various perspectives that take a disposi-
tionist approach, and we begin that job in the next chapter with an examination
of the oldest approach to political psychology, psychobiography. As we shall
see, this is a body of work which inherently assumes that individuals and their
peculiarities “matter.”
82 The Situation
The Individual
Part II
Psychobiography
Dr. Justin Frank’s Bush On The Couch: Inside the Mind of the President caused a
minor storm when it came out in 2004:
If one of my patients frequently said one thing and did another, I would
want to know why. If I found that he often used words that hid their true
meaning and affected a persona that obscured the nature of his actions, I
would grow more concerned. If he presented an inflexible worldview
characterized by an oversimplified distinction between right and wrong,
good and evil, allies and enemies, I would question his ability to grasp
reality. And if his actions revealed an unacknowledged—even sadistic—
indifference to human suffering, wrapped in pious claims of compassion,
I would worry about the safety of the people whose lives he touched.
For the past three years, I have observed with increasing alarm the
inconsistencies and denials of such an individual. But he is not one of my
patients. He is our president.
1
Drawing on the uncompromising psychoanalytic theories of Melanie Klein,
Frank argues that the formation of Bush’s personality in early childhood
provides the critical key to understanding his later actions. His early develop-
ment, Frank suggests, was hampered by the treatment he received from
both parents: George H.W. Bush was an absentee father, often away in
Washington D.C., while Barbara Bush was a cold, unfeeling and authoritarian
mother. In response to this upbringing, Bush developed a Manichaean view
of the world characterized by black and white thinking. He also developed
delusions of megalomania and omnipotence. His actions as president, Frank
maintains, reflect “the drive of an under nurtured and emotionally hobbled
infant.” Using Bush’s history of alcoholism as one example, he lists Bush’s
failure to draw upon recognized treatment options like Alcoholics Anonymous
as evidence of “multiple, serious and untreated symptoms.” Removal from
Chapter 7
office is the only “treatment option,” both for Bush’s sake and for ours, Frank
contends.
In truth, Frank’s argument is merely one of the latest additions to what is
perhaps the oldest tradition of all within the field of political psychology.
Usually termed “psychobiography” or “psychohistory,” this approach assumes
that individuals are important in the sense that their psychological character-
istics are held to have a meaningful impact on real-world events and outcomes
(sometimes termed the “hero in history” model). All psychobiography has this
factor in common. Another point of similarity is that all work in this area either
explicitly or implicitly uses some psychological theory or other to make sense
of a person’s life history and choices.
It is worth pointing out at the outset that such approaches are nowhere
near as fashionable as they once were, probably reflecting the decline of
psychoanalytical approaches in general. It is easy to dismiss such argu-
ments as “psychobabble” or unscientific armchair analysis, as many critics do.
Others—usually psychiatrists or psychologists nowadays, rather than political
scientists—continue to do work within this tradition, and maintain that such
an approach is essential to understanding adult behavior, including the behavior
of major politicians. On the question of whether such work is ultimately
valuable, this chapter will make no presumption either way; that question is
left to the reader to work out for him- or herself. But we shall suggest that
whatever the advantages and disadvantages of psychobiography may be, these
approaches are at the very least worth considering and are often rather
intriguing.
The Formative Influence of Sigmund Freud
Many psychobiographies have been influenced, both in the past and today, by
psychoanalysis and the arguments of its creator, Sigmund Freud. Freud’s claim
that events in childhood exert a powerful impact on later development has had
an especially strong influence on this type of work. The reader will recall from
our earlier discussion that according to Freud, human beings are motivated by
only two things, aggression and the sexual impulse (together known as the
“pleasure principle”). He saw the mind as composed of what he called the id,
the ego, and the superego. Most critically in terms of his impact on the develop-
ment of psychobiography, Freud hypothesized that childhood experiences do
not simply fade in significance as time goes on, but often exert a fundamental
impact upon our adult behavior. He pointed out the importance of unconscious
processes, which as Butler and McManus note, include unconscious and
socially “unacceptable” wishes. These
86 The Individual
are inferred, for example, from dreams, slips of the tongue, and
mannerisms [. . .] in particular, unconscious conflicts are hypothesized to
be a prime cause of psychological distress, which psychoanalysts can help
to relieve by assisting in their expression, and by using psychodynamic
theories based on Freud’s work to interpret patients’ behaviors.
2
Freud believed that dreams, for instance, contain expressions of our hidden
desires and secrets, and that a skillful psychoanalyst could decode these dreams
to reveal the unconscious conflicts within. When conflicts occur between
different aspects of the personality, this creates anxiety in the ego; when this
anxiety becomes unmanageable, we resort to various unconscious defense mech-
anisms such as repression, rationalization, denial, displacement, and projection.
Freud’s legacy has been mixed.
3
As the psychologist Drew Westen notes,
Freud virtually invented the concept of the unconscious, the notion that we
may act from motives and reasons that are unknown even to ourselves. “Before
him, nobody realized that our conscious mind is the tip of the mental iceberg,”
Westen argues. Today, however, we take the idea of the unconscious pretty
much for granted. Also taken for granted is the notion that childhood devel-
opment may exert a fundamental impact on adult behavior (in Freud’s time
a radical proposition). Westen adds that Freud was also correct about denial.
“The research is crystal-clear that we look the other way not to see what
makes us uncomfortable,” Westen notes. Some of Freud’s ideas are so widely
accepted that they have become dissociated from Freud himself, Westen sug-
gests.
4
On the other hand, Freud’s reduction of our motives to simply sex and
aggression is nowadays viewed almost universally as far too simplistic, and his
methods have frequently been attacked as unscientific.
Freud wrote several psychobiographies himself. The best known is probably
his study of Leonardo da Vinci, in which he concluded—largely on the basis of
a dream reported by the artist and the anatomically detailed drawings of his
male subjects—that da Vinci was a homosexual.
5
Of more political relevance,
he was also supposedly the co-author (with William Bullitt) of a psychobio-
graphy of Woodrow Wilson, apparently written in the 1930s but published
only in 1967.
6
Nevertheless, his influence upon political psychology was mostly
indirect, and it was left to others who had been influenced by Freud’s body of
work to tease out its larger political applications and implications.
The Formative Influence of Harold Lasswell
Harold Lasswell’s path-breaking book Psychopathology and Politics was first pub-
lished in 1930.
7
Lasswell was heavily influenced by Charles Merriam, who
inspired Lasswell to explore the relationship between psychology and politics.
Psychobiography 87