There’s a slippery slope in the climb toward social acceptance. Why do people do what they do to be part of something, not just in college environments but in foreign policy war rooms, in workplaces, in locker rooms, and beyond?
Hazing explores the sometimes deadly rituals of belonging that are fueled by a tradition of secrecy, power, and groupthink, and the lengths people will go to in order to completely fit in, to not rock the boat, even if going against logic or normalcy. Why do people defy their own inner moral codes just so they can belong? What can the “hive mind” accomplish and is it worth the risks of something going terribly awry? (The phrase “hive mind” is first credited to sci-fi writer James H. Schmitz in his short story, Second Night of Summer, wherein a hive mind correlates to the way a colony of bees behaves, as if directed by a single intelligence.)
What is Groupthink?
Groupthink is a psychological phenomenon in which people strive for consensus within a group. First made prominent by social psychologist Irving Janis, his 1972 study specifically focused on the psychological mechanics that led to foreign policy decisions such as the Pearl Harbor bombing, the Vietnam War, and the Bay of Pigs invasion. (The term “groupthink” was inspired by Orwell’s 1984 which used the idea of “doublethink” for highly suggestive ideas or expressions, first used in an article by William Whyte in Fortune magazine 20 years before Janis.)
Groupthink stands for an excessive form of concurrence-seeking among members of high prestige, tightly knit policy-making groups. Excessive to the extent that group members come to value the group and being part of it higher than anything else, causing them to strive for quick and painless unanimity on the issues the group has to confront. To preserve the clubby atmosphere, group members suppress personal doubts, silence dissenters, and follow the group leader’s suggestions. [Irving L. Janis’ Victims of Groupthink, Paul ‘t Hart]
Essentially, they believe in their group’s morality above all, and have a distorted view of reality, simplifying any opponents as inherently evil, while forsaking ethics. Naturally this mentality, Janis demonstrated, led to some serious foreign policy fiascos, famously the Bay of Pigs invasion that went horribly awry for Kennedy’s White House.
For Kennedy, the consequences were so catastrophic that observers couldn’t help but wonder how such a monumentally bad decision could have been made—especially since Kennedy spent days discussing it with a team of famously brilliant advisors, including Robert McNamara, Robert Kennedy, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., Allen Dulles, and about 40 others. …
“There were 50 or so of us, presumably the most experienced and smartest people we could get,” Kennedy would later recall. “But five minutes after it began to fall in, we all looked at each other and asked, ‘How could we have been so stupid?’” [–Jay Dixit, Neuroleadership]
The Bay of Pigs fiasco was in fact one of the inspirations for Janis’ groupthink study a few years later.
In the Bay of Pigs Invasion, Janis discovered, the problem was that although Kennedy’s advisors had good reason to think the mission would fail, they never voiced these concerns. Although they harbored private doubts, they “never pressed, partly out of a fear of being labeled ‘soft’ or undaring in the eyes of their colleagues.” In the words of Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., one of the advisors present at the meetings, Kennedy’s “senior officials… were unanimous for going ahead… Had one senior advisor opposed the adventure, I believe that Kennedy would have canceled it. No one spoke against it. [-Neuroleadership]
Groupthink Can Lead to Bad Business
On a smaller scale, though, the concept of groupthink can still take hold to dangerous effect. Groupthink became such a common concept in the business world [see Enron collapse for example], megalomaniac CEOs are more than tempted to drum up more of it, and we see that groupthink is still used and abused despite the awareness that, ultimately, it’s not especially good for a company’s health or growth.
[“The lawyers are supposed to say no, the accountants are supposed to say no, the bankers are supposed to say no…”-From Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room]
A Psychology Today article addressing how groupthink can lead to bad decisions listed four ways a business leader can avoid falling into groupthink:
- Include group members who have diverse points of view. This prevents like-minded thinking and is one of the virtues of group member diversity and inclusion. You may also bring in expert outsiders who offer differing viewpoints and alternative strategies.
- Ask members to play “devil’s advocates.” Appoint some individuals in the decision-making group to conduct a critical evaluation of any potential decision—asking the tough questions (“What if we…?”).
- Remove time constraints. If possible, don’t put a time limit on the decision-making process. Allow members time to discuss all possible alternatives and courses of action.
- Minimize your leader’s influence on the decision.
The idea of an overly conformist “Yes Man” in business or politics is now an indelible part of our pop culture and inspired the ironic name of a satirical political activist group.
Why do people agree to be hazed? #HazingFilmPBS pic.twitter.com/FG2pTdY2TL
— Independent Lens (@IndependentLens) September 28, 2022
Cults Are Groupthink to the Extreme
Speaking of the dangerous side of a collective hive mind which led to a deadly decision, the notorious Heaven’s Gate cult that ended in tragic ritual suicide touched on a number of elements Janis wrote about in his original groupthink book: cohesiveness and isolation; biased leadership (in this case Marshall Applewhite, the mystic and cult leader); and decisional stress. From Group Dynamics:
Groupthink becomes more likely when the group is stressed, particularly by time pressures. The Heaven’s Gate group experienced such stress, as the arrival of the comet Hale-Bopp and the Christian holy days forced them to come to a decision regarding their assumed transportation. When groups are stressed they minimize their discomfort by quickly choosing a plan of action, with little argument or dissension.
The Heaven’s Gate cult also was a good example of conformity pressures. In groupthink situations, pressures to conform become overwhelming. “Each individual member of the group experiences a personal reluctance to disagree. Through self-censorship, pressuring dissenters, and mindguarding, the group develops an atmosphere of unanimity. Every person may privately disagree with what is occurring in the group, yet publicly everyone expresses total agreement with the group’s policies. The fact that the Heaven’s Gate members dressed similarly and looked so identical that the first officers on the scene assumed that all of the members were men speaks to the magnitude of the pressures to seek uniformity.”
Experiments in Groupthink
The Stanford Prison Experiment inspired several fictionalized films based on the somewhat shocking, even lurid nature of a famous experiment in the summer of 1971, led by psychology professor Dr. Philip Zimbardo.
Zimbardo converted the basement of the Stanford University psychology building into a mock prison. He advertised asking for volunteers to participate in a study of the psychological effects of prison life.
The 75 applicants who answered the ad were given diagnostic interviews and personality tests to eliminate candidates with psychological problems, medical disabilities, or a history of crime or drug abuse. For the participants, the study chose 24 men who were judged to be the most physically and mentally stable, the most mature, and the least involved in antisocial behaviors. The participants did not know each other prior to the study and were paid $15 per day to take part in the experiment. The experiment has been used since the ’70s as an example of how everyday people, when given too much power, can act as a like-minded hive to become sadistic tyrants.
There’s been some skepticism about the experiment’s true lessons, too. A Scientific American article by psychologist Scott Barry Kaufman argued:
There’s no way the small group of participants in the Stanford Prison Experiment represented the full range of human personality variation. For one, these were young males. Already, there is going to be higher levels of testosterone, on average, than most other populations. But there’s also the issue that these participants actively sought out participation in a study having to do with prison. Research published in 2007 found that people who responded to an ad to be part of a study on “prison life” scored higher on tests of aggressiveness, authoritarianism, Machiavellianism, narcissism, and social dominance, and lower on measures of empathy and altruism.
But even among the small sample of young male participants in the Stanford Prison Experiment, there was great variability in how people responded to power. Some guards were particularly cruel, whereas others could barely take the cruelty and offered to go on errands, while still others were actively kind to the prisoners, fulfilling their requests.
This Mind Field episode offers another fascinating alternative take on the Stanford Prison Experiment, similarly dissecting how key takeaways from it may have been skewed and distorted, including some anecdotal evidence that the “guards” may have been asked to play it more overtly rough:
To go even deeper into groupthink experiments, the 1951 Asch Conformity Experiment was another groundbreaking, if flawed, experiment in group conformity.
Groupthink and Hazing in Sports
“Digging deeper, groupthink often develops as a result of a number of factors coming together at one time, including previous team culture/expectations, strong and persuasive personalities from team leaders, and cooperating team members who feel they are expected to participate and thereby do so,” wrote Christopher Stankovich. “Perhaps the greatest danger of groupthink is the diffusion of responsibility that occurs, a phenomenon where current group members experience a perceived anonymity that allows them to think and feel as though they alone are not responsible for potential problems.”
As with fraternities and sororities, group hazing in sports is still prevalent in colleges even as many programs have attempted to crack down on it—whether due to intense public pressure and bad publicity, or a change in leadership. Professional sports teams have had less (at least public) instances of hazing, other than more “benign” rituals like making rookies wear costumes on a road trip—and even that has evolved for many teams and every player situation, new or veteran, which use wearing costumes as a bonding exercise.
In a case in California, some members of a varsity girls soccer team forced four freshman girls to drink alcohol until the girls vomited or collapsed. In New Jersey, freshmen soccer players were physically abused and thrown in the mud as part of an annual hazing event. [NFHS study]
A Guardian article from 2021 surmised that hazing could make a “comeback” once the pandemic was over*: (*As of this writing the COVID pandemic isn’t “over” in the way everyone hopes and dreams of, but college sports with actual in-person crowds have returned.)
Athletes were also more likely than non-athletes to be supportive of hazing—defined in a major 2008 study as “any activity expected of someone joining or participating in a group that humiliates, degrades, abuses, or endangers them regardless of a person’s willingness to participate.” Though older research has found that male teams were more likely to take part in hazing than female teams, Kerschner said that recent studies indicate a more even split.
The Canadian Hockey League, a junior-level sports organization across Canada, recently faced a lawsuit alleging widespread, horrific abuse and assault in hazing rituals.
There are endless stories of abusive ritual hazing in college sports, many of which never saw those responsible get a full reckoning—or if they did, it came decades later. The Ohio State University (OSU) wrestling scandal famously needed an independent investigation in 2019 to find that team doctor Richard Strauss had sexually abused at least 177 students over nearly 20 years, from 1979 to 1997. OSU agreed to pay $40.9 million to settle the lawsuits of 162 men who alleged sexual abuse during Strauss’s tenure.
A key takeaway for our purposes is that as part of that investigation, several former wrestlers in that program accused both the former head coach Russ Hellickson and U.S. Representative Jim Jordan, who was an assistant coach between 1987 and 1994, of knowing about Strauss’s alleged abuse yet failing to take action to stop it. (Jordan has denied knowledge.) In a similar case, those in charge of Penn State’s hugely successful football program covered up years of child abuse by assistant coach Jerry Sandusky. Why did the OSU and Penn State coaches and administrators deny this, despite all evidence and accusation to the contrary?
While Big Football certainly played a role, what happened at Penn State is best explained by a psychological phenomenon known as groupthink, whereby sound decision making is impaired by the bigger concern of group unity and preservation. Insider groups—private clubs and fraternities, religious groups and sometimes corporations—are particularly prone to groupthink, and it’s hard to imagine a more inside group than university president Graham Spanier, senior vice president Gary Schultz, athletic director Tim Curley and revered football coach Joe Paterno. [TIME]
How to Avoid Groupthink and Hazing in Sports
On a more hopeful note, this piece from the Sport Information Resource Centre in Canada recommends how sports teams can avoid dangerous groupthink. This includes:
- Championing a devil’s advocate position (or as Janis called it, a critical evaluator): Create an environment in which athletes feel comfortable and confident enough to critique ideas without a fear of backlash;
- Encourage diversity on your teams: Diversity not only facilitates group performance but also reduces team conformity, encouraging different perspectives and opinions;
- Establish multiple groups to work on decisions separately: Different groups working in parallel will come up with a diverse set of ideas to contribute to the discussion that can then be had as a group;
- Coach with youth athletes;
- Bring in an expert for outside perspective;
- Remain impartial.
The key takeaway from this is for teams to go against the limits of traditional ways of thinking in sports that leads to groupthink.
Hazing is now illegal to at least some degree, in 44 American states. But in some form or another, it still continues everywhere, and in those remaining states there is little to no legal recourse. Meanwhile, the groupthink that leads to these dangerously unchecked rituals can be dissipated when individuals are more conscious of it in the first place, and willing to go against the “hive mind,” to stand up—and speak up—when something is simply wrong.
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