In groupthink, organizations value consensus more than free thought. The emphasis on consensus leads to group polarization, in which a group’s positions become more extreme than any individual would come up with. Alarmist climate science is a textbook example of groupthink in action.
Guest post by Paul MacRae
A while ago, I received an email from a friend who asked:
How can many, many respected, competitive, independent science folks be so wrong about [global warming] (if your [skeptical] premise is correct). I don’t think it could be a conspiracy, or incompetence. … Has there ever been another case when so many ‘leading’ scientific minds got it so wrong?
The answer to the second part of my friend’s question—“Has there ever been another case where so many ‘leading’ scientific minds got it so wrong?”—is easy. Yes, there are many such cases, both within and outside climate science. In fact, the graveyard of science is littered with the bones of theories that were once thought “certain” (e.g., that the continents can’t “drift,” that Newton’s laws were immutable, and hundreds if not thousands of others).
Science progresses by the overturning of theories once thought “certain.”
And so, Carl Sagan has written:
“Even a succession of professional scientists—including famous astronomers who had made other discoveries that are confirmed and now justly celebrated—can make serious, even profound errors in pattern recognition.”[1]
There is no reason to believe that climate scientists (alarmist or skeptic) are exempt from this possibility.
That leaves the first question, which is how so many “respected, competitive, independent science folks [could] be so wrong” about the causes and dangers of global warming, assuming they are wrong. And here, I confess that after five years of research into climate fears, this question still baffles me.
Climate certainty is baffling
It is not baffling that so many scientists believe humanity might be to blame for global warming. If carbon dioxide causes warming, additional CO2 should produce additional warming. But it’s baffling that alarmist climate scientists are so certain that additional carbon dioxide will produce a climate disaster, even though there is little empirical evidence to support this view, and much evidence against it, including a decade of non-warming. This dogmatism makes it clear, at least to those outside the alarmist climate paradigm, that something is very wrong with the state of “consensus” climate science.
There are many possible reasons for this scientific blindness, including sheer financial and career self-interest: scientists who don’t accept the alarmist paradigm will lose research grants and career doors will be closed to them. But one psychological diagnosis fits alarmist climate science like a glove: groupthink. With groupthink, we get the best explanation of “how can many, many respected, competitive, independent science folks be so wrong.”
Groupthink was extensively studied by Yale psychologist Irving L. Janis and described in his 1982 book Groupthink: Psychological Studies of Policy Decisions and Fiascoes.
Janis was curious about how teams of highly intelligent and motivated people—the “best and the brightest” as David Halberstam called them in his 1972 book of the same name—could have come up with political policy disasters like the Vietnam War, Watergate, Pearl Harbor and the Bay of Pigs. Similarly, in 2008 and 2009, we saw the best and brightest in the world’s financial sphere crash thanks to some incredibly stupid decisions, such as allowing sub-prime mortgages to people on the verge of bankruptcy.
In other words, Janis studied why and how groups of highly intelligent professional bureaucrats and, yes, even scientists, screw up, sometimes disastrously and almost always unnecessarily. The reason, Janis believed, was “groupthink.” He quotes Nietzsche’s observation that “madness is the exception in individuals but the rule in groups,” and notes that groupthink occurs when “subtle constraints … prevent a [group] member from fully exercising his critical powers and from openly expressing doubts when most others in the group appear to have reached a consensus.”[2]
Janis found that even if the group leader expresses an openness to new ideas, group members value consensus more than critical thinking; groups are thus led astray by excessive “concurrence-seeking behavior.”[3] Therefore, Janis wrote, groupthink is “a model 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.”[4]
The groupthink syndrome
The result is what Janis calls “the groupthink syndrome.” This consists of three main categories of symptoms:
1. Overestimate of the group’s power and morality, including “an unquestioned belief in the group’s inherent morality, inclining the members to ignore the ethical or moral consequences of their actions.” [emphasis added]
2. Closed-mindedness, including a refusal to consider alternative explanations and stereotyped negative views of those who aren’t part of the group’s consensus. The group takes on a “win-lose fighting stance” toward alternative views.[5]
3. Pressure toward uniformity, including “a shared illusion of unanimity concerning judgments conforming to the majority view”; “direct pressure on any member who expresses strong arguments against any of the group’s stereotypes”; and “the emergence of self-appointed mind-guards … who protect the group from adverse information that might shatter their shared complacency about the effectiveness and morality of their decisions.”[6]
It’s obvious that alarmist climate science—as explicitly and extensively revealed in the Climatic Research Unit’s “Climategate” emails—shares all of these defects of groupthink, including a huge emphasis on maintaining consensus, a sense that because they are saving the world, alarmist climate scientists are beyond the normal moral constraints of scientific honesty (“overestimation of the group’s power and morality”), and vilification of those (“deniers”) who don’t share the consensus.
For example, regarding Symptom 1, overestimation of the group’s power and morality: leading consensus climate spokespeople like Al Gore, James Hansen, and Stephen Schneider have stated outright that they feel it’s acceptable and even moral to exaggerate global-warming claims to gain public support, even if they have to violate the broader scientific principle of adherence to truth at all costs (http://www.paulmacrae.com/?p=51 has examples.) Consensus climate science also overestimates the power of humanity to override climate change, whether human-caused or natural, just as government planners overestimated the U.S.’s ability to win the Vietnam War.
Regarding Symptom 2, closed-mindedness, there are many cases of the alarmist climate paradigm ignoring or suppressing evidence that challenges the AGW hypothesis. The Climategate emails, for example, discuss refusing publication to known skeptics and even firing an editor favorable to skeptics.
Regarding Symptom 3, pressure toward uniformity: within alarmist climate science there is a “shared illusion of unanimity” (i.e., a belief in total consensus) about the majority view when this total or near-total consensus has no basis in reality. For example, the Oregon Petition against the anthropogenic warming theory has 31,000 signatories, over 9,000 of them with PhDs.
Climate scientists who dare to deviate from the consensus are censured as “deniers”—a choice of terminology that can only be described as odious. And the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change explicitly aims for “consensus” in its reports—it does not publish minority reports, and yet it is impossible that its alleged more than “2,000 scientists” could completely agree on a subject as complicated as climate.
Group polarization
Janis notes one other form of dysfunctional group dynamic that arises out of groupthink and that, in turn, helps create even more groupthink:
The tendency for the collective judgments arising out of group discussions to become polarized, sometimes shifting toward extreme conservatism and sometimes toward riskier forms of action than the individual members would otherwise be prepared to take.[7]
This dynamic is commonly referred to as “group polarization.”
As a process, “when like-minded people find themselves speaking only with one another, they get into a cycle of ideological reinforcement where they end up endorsing positions far more extreme than the ones they started with.”[8] [emphasis added]
And because these positions are so extreme, they are held with extreme ferocity against all criticisms.
Examples of alarmist climate groupthink
Groupthink is common in academic disciplines. For example, philosopher Walter Kaufmann, a world-renowned editor of Nietzsche’s works, identifies groupthink in his discipline as follows:
There is a deep reluctance to stick out one’s neck: there is safety in numbers, in belonging to a group, in employing a common method, and in not developing a position of one’s own that would bring one into open conflict with more people than would be likely to be pleased.[9]
Similarly, in the 2009 Climategate emails, CRU director Phil Jones shows this “deep reluctance to stick out one’s neck” in writing (July 5, 2005):
“The scientific community would come down on me in no uncertain terms if I said the world had cooled from 1998.”
Keith Briffa laments (Sept. 22, 1999):
“I know there is pressure to present a nice tidy story as regards ‘apparent unprecedented warming in a thousand years or more in the temperature proxy data’ but in reality the situation is not quite so simple. … I believe that the recent warmth was probably matched about 1,000 years ago.”
Elsewhere, Briffa notes (April 29, 2007):
“I tried hard to balance the needs of the science and the IPCC, which were not always the same. I worried that you might think I gave the impression of not supporting you well enough while trying to report on the issues and uncertainties.”
All of the above (there are many more examples in the Climategate emails) reveal scientific groupthink, which puts the needs and desires of a peer group—the desire for “consensus”—ahead of the scientific facts. We would, undoubtedly, find other examples of alarmist groupthink if we could examine the emails of other promoters of climate alarmism, like James Hansen’s Goddard Institute.
This groupthink isn’t at all surprising. After all, alarmist climate scientists attend several conferences a year with like-minded people (the views of outright “deniers” are not welcome, as the CRU emails clearly reveal). In the absence of real debate or dissent they easily persuade themselves that human beings are the main reason the planet is warming and it’s going to be a catastrophe. Why? Because everyone else seems to think so and, in groupthink, consensus is highly valued. The same principles operates strongly, of course, in religion.
The ‘hockey stick’ and groupthink
Climate alarmists will, of course, angrily dispute that climate science groupthink is as strong as claimed here. However, groupthink is clearly identified in the 2006 Wegman report into the Michael Mann hockey stick controversy.
As most WUWT readers will know, the Wegman report was commissioned by the U.S. House Science Committee after Mann refused to release all the data leading to the hockey stick conclusions, conclusions that eliminated the Medieval Warm Period and Little Ice Age in order to show today’s warming as unprecedented. In fact, as mathematician Steve McIntyre discovered after years of FOI requests, the calculations in Mann’s paper had not been checked by the paper’s peer reviewers and were, in fact, wrong.
The National Academy of Sciences committee, led by Dr. Edward Wegman, an expert on statistics, identified one of the reasons why Mann’s paper was so sloppily peer-reviewed as follows:
There is a tightly knit group of individuals who passionately believe in their thesis. However, our perception is that this group has a self-reinforcing feedback mechanism and, moreover, the work has been sufficiently politicized that they can hardly reassess their public positions without losing credibility.[10] [emphasis added]
Wegman noted that the Mann paper became prominent because it “fit some policy agendas.”[11]
The Wegman Report also observed:
As statisticians, we were struck by the isolation of communities such as the paleoclimate community that rely heavily on statistical methods, yet do not seem to be interacting with the mainstream statistical community. The public policy implications of this debate are financially staggering and yet apparently no independent statistical expertise was sought or used.[12] [emphasis added]
In other words, alarmist climate scientists are part of an exclusive group that talks mainly with itself and avoids groups that don’t share the anthropogenic global warming hypothesis and alarmist political agenda. Overall, Wegman is describing with great precision a science community whose conclusions have been distorted and polarized by groupthink.
Recognizing groupthink
After the Climategate emails, some consensus climate scientists began to recognize the dangers of groupthink within their discipline. So, Georgia Tech climatologist Judith Curry wrote in 2009:
In my opinion, there are two broader issues raised by these emails that are impeding the public credibility of climate research: lack of transparency in climate data, and “tribalism” in some segments of the climate research community that is impeding peer review and the assessment process.[13]
Similarly, IPCC contributor Mike Hulme wrote:
It is possible that climate science has become too partisan, too centralized. The tribalism that some of the leaked emails display is something more usually associated with social organization within primitive cultures; it is not attractive when we find it at work inside science.[14] [emphasis added]
In short, it is clear that groupthink—a later, more scientific word for “tribalism”—is strongly at work within alarmist climate science, however much the affected scientists refuse to recognize it. As a result of tribalism (groupthink), alarmist climate science makes assertions that are often extreme (polarized), including the explicit or implicit endorsement of claims that global warming will lead to “oblivion,” “thermageddon,” mass extinctions, and the like. Indeed, one of the ironies of climate science is that extremist AGW believers like Gore, Hansen and Schneider have succeeded in persuading the media and public that those who don’t make grandiose claims, the skeptics, are the extremists.
Group polarization offers a rational explanation for extreme alarmist claims, given that the empirical scientific evidence is simply not strong enough to merit such confidence. It is likely that even intelligent, highly educated scientists have been caught in what has been called the “madness of crowds.” Indeed, writing in the Times Higher Education magazine, British philosopher Martin Cohen makes this connection explicit:
Is belief in global-warming science another example of the “madness of crowds”? That strange but powerful social phenomenon, first described by Charles Mackay in 1841, turns a widely shared prejudice into an irresistible “authority”. Could it [belief in human-caused, catastrophic global warming] indeed represent the final triumph of irrationality?[16]
There is strong psychological evidence that alarmist fears of climate change are far more the result of groupthink and the group polarization process than scientific evidence and, yes, this alarmist groupthink has indeed led to the triumph of irrationality over reason.
Paul MacRae is the author of False Alarm: Global Warming—Facts Versus Fears. His blog is at paulmacrae.com. More on this subject: http://www.paulmacrae.com/?p=51
Notes
1. Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark. New York: Ballantine Books, 1996, p. 49.
2. Irvin L. Janis, Groupthink: Psychological Studies of Policy Decisions and Fiascoes. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1982, p. 3.
3. Janis, p. vii.
4. Janis, p. 9.
5. Janis, p. 247.
6. Janis, pp. 174-175.
7. Janis, p. 5.
8. Andrew Potter, “The newspaper is dying—hooray for democracy.” Maclean’s, April 7, 2008, p. 17.
9. Walter Kaufmann, Critique of Religion and Philosophy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press, 1990 (1958), p. 51.
10. Edward Wegman, et al., “Ad Hoc Committee Report on the ‘Hockey Stick’ Global Climate Reconstruction.” U.S. House Committee on Energy and Commerce, 2006, p. 65.
11. Wegman, et al., p. 29.
12. Wegman, et al., p. 51.
13. Judith Curry, “On the credibility of climate research.” Climate Audit blog, Nov. 22, 2009.
14. Andrew Revkin, “A climate scientist who engages skeptics.” Dot.Earth, Nov. 27, 2009.
15. Steve Fuller, Kuhn vs. Popper: The Struggle for the Soul of Science. Cambridge: Icon Books, 2006 (2003), p. 105.
16. Martin Cohen, “Beyond debate?” Times Higher Education, Dec. 10, 2009.
May I quietly suggest that another prime example of ‘groupthink’ in science is Darwinian evolution. All of Janus’ hallmarks are present and more & more scientists are realizing this, especially cellular biologists and mathematicians, as evidence piles up. I suspect this suggestion will encounter some feedback and will be happy to supply a reference list to any truly interested.
One reason why the AGW groupthink has been so widely accepted in the political sphere is that it coincided with, (was fed by?), the rise of environmentalism. The Left used environmental fears to persuade the younger generations that everything the West did was for greedy & selfish reasons, & therefore must be opposed by moral individuals.
“subtle constraints … prevent a [group] member from fully exercising his critical powers and from openly expressing doubts when most others in the group appear to have reached a consensus.”
Too bad he is also speaking of blog communities, though I have migrated to the skeptic ones (yes, WUWT for one) for the minimum of this very effect. Now if we can just tone down the few top-posters who seem to insist on that type of “groupthink” (and bar-the-doors if you disagree) instead of being inquisitive as to why you hold an opposing viewpoint. Opposing views are always what moves science along its track into the future and it always seems to come from the few, or even just one voice.
johanna says:
April 30, 2012 at 7:22 pm
…..Your statements about evolution are inaccurate, 100% of biologists do not believe in the theory of evolution, which in any event is far from monolithic. There are literal ‘creationist’ biologists and a significant group of ‘intelligent design’ biologists, not to mention many divergences among those who broadly support the theory of evolution but disagree substantially about what it means in practice.
As for your figures about the US population’s views of evolution, I have no idea if they are correct, but they are in any event irrelevant to the subject under discussion.
++++++++++++++++++
I would add that whether one believes in “The Big Bang Theory” or believes that “God said it and, BANG!, it happened”, we are still surrounded by this physical world which is governed by physical laws that Man is endeavoring to understand.
Also…
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Eric Adler says:
April 30, 2012 at 6:27 pm
In my opinion, a better example of group think than climate science is the community which frequents this blog. There are so many scientific misconceptions propagated with almost no one dissenting. People are willing to accept any theory no matter how wrong which contradicts AGW,: the temperature record is a fraud, …
()()()()()()()()()(()(()()()()()
I think you just like to argue. “The temperature record”. The one Michael Mann found in a few tree rings? I’ve never heard anything from anyone that has convinced me I should accept a wooden nickel.
Bob Rogers says:
April 30, 2012 at 7:40 pm
May I quietly suggest that another prime example of ‘groupthink’ in science is Darwinian evolution. All of Janus’ hallmarks are present and more & more scientists are realizing this, especially cellular biologists and mathematicians, as evidence piles up.
**********
What does the evidence pile up to? And please don’t say Intelligent Design, which is a religious based philosophy and not grounded in science. What is the more compelling theory? And what facts support it?
A similar example of the power of group think is deference to an authority figure when the culture does not encourage junior members of the team expressing doubts.
In the process of aircraft accident investigations years ago they found that often the crew had all the information that they needed to avoid the accident, but due to the internal dynamics of the crew, useful and sometimes critical information was simply discarded because it conflicted with the opinion of the senior pilot. There are cases of air crashes due to the aircraft running out of fuel and the flight engineer I believe it was kept trying to tell the pilot and copilot that they were short of fuel but his information was simply discarded as not fitting the pee-conceived expectations of the senior flight officers.
To some extent humans are hard wired to herd like behavior and deference to a strong leader unless their local culture actively encourages the minority opinion being expressed. Even then if that request for conflicting information is only a pro-forma request and there are subtle forms of peer pressure to not rock the boat it still leads to group think.
I recall a story I read about a relatively junior pilot who was flying with a very senior officer. The senior officer advised him as they got in the aircraft “there is no rank in this airplane! If you see something that does not look right you tell me!”
By doing that he gave the junior officer permission to bring conflicting information into the cockpit and encouraged him to actually do his job of monitoring what was going on in the air craft and form his own judgements regarding if things were normal or not.
The current culture in higher education (heck even grade school) where so much emphasis on “team building” and “consensus” is an absolute prescription that virtually guarantees group think will dominate all but the strongest personalities in the group. Our educational system with their warm and fuzzy everyone gets a trophy and no value judgement grading and lets everyone work in a happy cooperative group is laying a foundation for 30 -50 years of this sort of nonsense as these students go into a world where they have no clue how to say —
“wait I think you are making a mistake!”
You want those people on your team and participating in the decision process. They keep everyone honest if they can express their concerns constructively and the others in the group understand how to evaluate conflicting information objectively without forcing it to fit through a filter of expectations.
Larry
From my experience in the private sector, groupthink is in part a self-preservation strategy based on a no-fault premise: if everyone buys in, nobody can be faulted for being wrong. Individuals may have doubts, but there is no upside in expressing them. The whistle-blower doesn’t just identify the primary ones in error, but all the enablers, sycophants and gravy-train travellers. That is why he is vilified and has to have special, legal protection.
If nobody moves, nobody gets hurt. The implicit assumption in this concept is that danger lies in straying from the status quo. In the stockmarket – unfortunate personal experience here – the analyst who lets his clients slide all the way down is not pilloried if all clients have slid similarly; in fact, if his clients’ losses are only slightly less odious than that of the group, he receives thanks for his non-efforts. The analyst who says his clients must sell when the firm wants to hold firm, betrays the firm by showing internal disagreements. The stock-market clients want no disagreement. He is gone, gone, gone.
Groupthink, I am saying, has different components reflecting different parts of the social group Groupthink is about the power that lies in certainty, the requirement that no options but the ones in play are possible, despite their possible unpleasantness. First, those with power, or who think they have power, are threatened by appearing not to have certainty: Gore, Hansen, Suzuki, Gillard are some of these. And they, themselves,do have certainty, at least enough to move forward, for their egos say they are smarter and wiser than the common. Even if there is doubt, it must be in the details – which don’t matter. Keep the narrative clean, perhaps, but that is because the narrative IS clean, in its essence. And they believe at least this.
Second, those allied with power are threatened by loss of opportunity by their association with power. Mann, Jones, Schmidt: their egos AND their professional lives and social activities will collapse if they allow uncertainty into the discussion. Their certainly flows both ways, supporting the power-holders above them, and defeating the resistance from below.
Third, the lowest group, – the Madding Crowds of voters – are represented by the Romm, McKibben,Gleick, Richard Black group: they WANT certainty. They benefit vicariously by being acolytes: the Enlightened who will become warriors if needed (think Gleick). These are the ones who deep inside want figures who figure things out for them, who they perceive as wise elders (the IPCC, Suzuki as an individual). These authorities hold the place that ideal parents, doctors, priests or, ultimately God once held.
Dispute about CAGW (or other large scale issues, including racially-based conspiracies or witchcraft) puts this lowest, potentially most dangerous group, in an untenable position. They want but also may NEED the world to be “nailed down”. They would be personally devastated to find out they were not just wrong but wronged (Michael Shermer, writer and editor of Skeptical Enquirer, is a maniacal debunker and denier of all non-mainstream science, as well he should be: he is an admitted former Believer, since disappointed.)
Groupthink is a phenomenon that does not have the same cause or reason to be maintained for all parts of the group. In business, as I have seen, those close to the top will act forcefully in opposition to simple logic because they cannot mentally handle behaving day-to-day in ways that they disagree with: they drink the Kool-aid because life is untenable otherwise. Once they retire or move away from the powers that create the mandate, they will come clean, without hesitation or embarrassment. What else could I do? they say. It was a done deal and I had to get on-board or leave the ship. This is well documented as how the intellectuals of Czechoslovakia survived during the Stalinist period (though ultimately leading to alcoholism, depression and suicide).
Life is generally good for the top echelons of groupthink. They set the rules and rule those who punish the rule-breakers. The real problem with maintaining groupthink lies at the bottom of the group, with the ones whose lives are based on following instructions. The foot soldiers understand they must look above for advice, support and security. If they lose faith in those who control all that is important, they are in a dark, dark place. A place no one wants to be.
So how to you defeat bad groupthink? Chip, chip, chip. That is one way. Pieces fall apart silently and somewhat secretly, so those at the top go silent or look the other way. Is Obama doing this now, leaving climate change out of his speeches? Speaking up for tolerance in the subject is another: like firing an EPA manager who goes too far? Let’s see if Jackson stays in her post. Chris Hulme, in the UK, is now gone: was it really a stupid avoidance of a speeding ticket that did him in?
The other, most common, way a bad groupthink idea collapses is when bad things consequent to the groupthink happen to too many “innocents”, supporters and disbelievers alike.
Examples: in the Viet Nam war fight of the ’60s and early ’70s, as well as the witchcraft run of the late 1600s to early 1700s, the eventual fallout reached everyone. The draft by lottery captured only about 2% of the male population, but threatened 100% of the entire population – all the men, all the wives, daughters, sons, mothers and fathers of the United States. Everyone had a personal stake in the “rightness” of the war. Earlier, during the witch mania in Europe, some villages were denuded of their wealthy but not politically protected members. All families had someone taken from them, those whom they knew to not be witches. Year after year this went on, until all survivors expected to be targeted. Nobody was left safe, not even informers. That was when the end came, when the witchhunters were now the hunted and the victims of the purifying fires.
As for CAGW: when the windfarms are on your doorstep, you see them broken and idle while your electricity charges have doubled and your property values halved, when gas costs you $10/gallon and you are prohibited from flying unless you have paid an indulgence or have an legal exemption, when your business failed because Green taxes are too high, you are not “green” enough, or your customers can’t afford you, and yet there is no discernible improvement in your lives (the witches are all dead, but we still have hailstorms and plague?), you are in the same position as those in ’68 of watching an idiot on TV draw a bingo ball to determine who dies tomorrow or hearing the hoof beats of another witch-hunting party arrive in the market square. The problem is no longer OUT THERE, involving OTHER PEOPLE, but has become here, and you. And since you know that you are a victim but not a problem, you will disbelieve. And disobey.
The second way is the traditional end of groupthink gone bad. Will it have to go this far? Perhaps not. The sound of chipping is pretty loud. Chipping away is what WUWT, Climate Depot, Talkbloke’s Talkshop is all about. Informed dissent with an audience. Me, I’m hopeful, still. Not CERTAIN, but hopeful.
Bob Rogers:
In a feeble attempt to break out of the “Engineer mold” I tried to get into Pharmacy school in the mid ’90’s. One of the “missing prerequisites” was a microbiology course. (1996)… In that course I found out that the reason there were individual survivors in a petri dish with a single bacterium species, exposed to an antibiotic, was because of the fact that the particular survivors had altered their biochemistry to make themselves “antibiotic resistant”. Even more STUNNING than this discovery was that the survivors somehow ALTERED their DNA to carry this change forward.
LAST, they also develop DNA communcation threads, called “Prions” which can COMMUNICATE the needed change to other members of their species in the solution/culture.
Completely “Lamarkian”.
So when one of my church’s high schoolers was carrying a biology textbook (dated, about 1999 vintage) around a couple years ago…I asked to look it over while at a church supper. SURE ENOUGH, completely up with the times…NOT!!!! It had the classic “random mutation/evidence of
how “natural selection” works…reason for the survival of the few and their ability to be anti-biotic resistant.
HAHAHAHA! Yes, “eeeeeevolutionary groupthink” at its finest!
Max
The usual term for “The groupthink syndrome” is the Asch Effect, named after Solomon Asch, 1907 – 1996.
There’s a list somewhere of about 25-odd modern theories that either turned out to be flat out wrong, or very questionable, including the value of prohibiting the use of DDT and the ozone layer. It seems to be the kind of thing that fits the groupthink argument; does anyone know of a link to it?
Also, Sagan’s comment seems rather ironic, given his stance on AGW before he passed away.
Some thoughts:
The tendency to conform to a group, particularly with regards to a moral context/cause, and particularly amongst the young,is so strong in humans I suspect, because it had evolutionary benefits in our distant past. In other words, we are pre-disposed to be susceptible to group-related causes, following an inborn moral imperative, which allowed our ancestors, within groups, to survive over those groups that didn’t have this strong predisposition.
If you need any obvious evidence of this, have a look at the hold of religion on humans. Religion is simply the inborn moral imperitive (i.e. God/higher Cause) combined with group/social identity. It is a very powerful fusion of the two.
However, for this kind of ‘groupthink predisposition’ to be effective in an evolutionary sense, it has to be not only very strong in making members conform to a social agenda, but it goes so far as to set up both social and psychological structures to strongly oppose other agendas/groups/ideas etc. In other words, I think the deep seated intolerance of ‘other’ groups is deeply buried in our subconscious; a leftover of our evolutionary tribal past.
But the one thing this human groupthink/tribalist tendency is not very good at, is science. It was never set up by evolution to be necessarily ‘true’, or consistent with external observations, but only to be effective socially, which is not the same thing. If anything, the psychological processes involved tend to actually depart from external observations in order to achieve what can’t be easily detected by the senses; the ‘moral instinct’; fighting on in the face of adversity, so to speak. Such a departure from the external senses gave some survival advantage, within certain moral social contexts (e.g.war).
It is most obviously expressed in religion, which combines an inborn moral imperative/social cause within a group/identity context. But one major mistake of science in general has been to traditionally assume that ‘religion’ and ‘science’ are two completely different things; psychologically they actually overlap, and the same problems and side effects that occur with one, occur also in the other. These side effects can be severe, it was indeed a very costly thing, this evolutionary groupthink tendancy that evolved; on the one had we had moral beings fighting for a cause and an identity, on the other had we have fanaticism and moral justification for just about anything, as the moral cause ignores the external environment.
J.R.R.Tolkien was onto something when he wrote satirically about an all powerful thing that came into being, which was able to control minds to a point where one could control the world. This mind control mechanism, however is so dangerous, and so able to be co-opted for various selfish interests, that it is actually better to get rid of it once and for all. The social consequences are too severe. So the world has gradually discovered that the old religions, (which combine group-think with the moral imperative), were not only never related to reality in the first place, but contain some nasty side effects, which are best destroyed. But in so doing, just as with Tolkiens One ring, “many fair things also fade away”, such as the mystical and the secure, and the sublime”.
AGW as an idea is being used irresponsibly, by the elite, for groupthink and moral purposes, the same sort of social process that has plagued all of human history.
Max Hugoson says:
…reason for the survival of the few and their ability to be anti-biotic resistant.
*******
And that in a nutshell is evolutionary theory. Is it not?
The individuals captured by groupthink get to the point where they can’t help it:
“I know that most men, including those at ease with problems of the greatest complexity, can seldom accept even the simplest and most obvious truth if it be such as would oblige them to admit the falsity of conclusions which they have delighted in explaining to colleagues, which they have proudly taught to others, and which they have woven, thread by thread, into the fabric of their lives”.
~Leo Tolstoy
Reg Nelson says:
April 30, 2012 at 8:26 pm
Perhaps we can compare the argument of evolution vs. intelligent design to the black swan fallacy, only with a larger space to examine. Maybe there is a way to find a designer; maybe not. From a scientific viewpoint, it’s deucedly difficult. At least with the Higgs boson, we have some generally-agreed on methods of conducting the experiment. Pure mathematics won’t resolve the issue, especially if you take the Hugh Everett formulation of non-collapse of quantum mechanics as a possibility.
By comparison, the scale of finding the drivers of climate change is much smaller. In fact, I think we already have enough raw data to put broad limits on what theories remain plausible. My quick guess is measuring lunar albedo to sufficient accuracy over a 20-60 year period – and getting Earth’s albedo in the process, along with satellite and ocean observations, should wrap it up, in terms of CO2 vs. clouds and aerosols. We still may not have the medium-term cycles – say the 850-1100 year cycle – explained – that may take more than one more cycle to answer.
In the meantime, I’m more worried about the implications of groupthink to human progress. As has been noted, the pressure to accept AGW as dogma is worldwide, and in many/most classrooms around the planet, more than Christianity, Islam, and other religions. So the fight for science could take centuries to resolve.
Well, an example that Christopher Monckton often cites of faulty consensus is Lysenkoism:
http://www.skepdic.com/lysenko.html
Although, I’ve never been able to find out if Soviet scientists were convinced, en masse, of Lysenko’s ideas, or just terrified to disagree with them. AGW, on the the hand, seems to have a spectrum – of true believers, self-promoting profiteers (who may not believe), and timid sheep.
My impression is that once Lysenko had managed to curry favor with Stalin, he was pretty much free to develop any weird idea which indirectly supported the leader’s latest political aims. In other words, Lysenkoism was science totally devoted to saying what the State wanted to have said. But the appeal of Lysenko’s theories to the Marxist mentality escape me. Mendelian natural selection had been embraced by Darwinists, and Capitalists had modified it to fit their notions of society. But what is there about Lysenko’s “vernalization” theory, or the willfullness of inheritable traits, that strikes a cord with Stalin and his cohort?
Whatever the appeal was, however universal the groupthink became, the charisma and power of Stalin evoked such an aura of invulnerability around Lysenko, that he carried on, year after year with his anti-genetics meme. Real geneticists were dubbed bourgeoise quacks, and learned to either keep silent, or were sent off to the Gulags. Many were, and many disappeared.
The militant intimidation enforced by CAGW cadres have clear parallels.
Michael Mann, for example: the very model of the modern, major… er, modeler.
@davidmhoffer:
April 30, 2012 at 4:24 pm
As always I enjoy your analysis and largely agree. However, perhaps the group-thinkers at the UN or Solyndra were not all as cynical as you portray. Admittedly some were and are, but I suspect many in AGW-related positions see themselves as being on the side of good. The way I understand human nature, their train of thought might go as follows: “Perhaps their jobs are not doing as much to alleviate the ‘problem’ as might be depicted to the public, but, since they are contributing their little bit to the solution, their consciences need not be troubled that their positions and programs exist.” Since their thoughts most likely focus on their own security and relative competence, and not on the scientific justification – flawed or otherwise – for the work they do, cynicism would probably not be a major facet of their conscious evaluation of their positions and agendas.
What is lacking is critical thinking and intellectual integrity, but modern society, in any case, no longer rewards these qualities. Hah! Now that was a cynical thought!
Darn it, I Think I’ve double-posted thanks to this awful new WordPress environment. My apologies. I can’t tell if a comment has disappeared utterly because I’m apparently not logged in, so I’ve learned to copy the comment before clicking. Then, when I’ve completed the log-in if this becomes necessary, the entire comment has disappeared, so I re-enter.
“If I were a member of the hardcore Left I might think that groupthink would be a good way to herd the useful idiots. Good thing the Left hasn’t thought of that yet.”
Cass R. Sunstein’s book “Going to Extremes: How Like Minds Unite and Divide” covers much of the same ground about consensus leading to extreme positions. It includes suggestions for preventing that problem. In my review at Amazon I noted that the advice could easily be converted into tips to do do as you fear.
Groupthink is part of this, but not the whole story. Groupthink is basically a situation of too much internal feedback within the decision making processes of a group leading it to go off in wild random directions. But the directions of this madness are not completely wild. The theory of climate catastrophe is not random. It represents in my opinion what people “want to believe”. Why, you may ask, would people like to believe that the world was heading for catastrophe? That is an interesting question.
I think many people are searching for meaning and purpose in life, and for a community to belong to. What bigger meaning or purpose could there be than in committing yourself to fight to save the world against destruction. What better than the fellowship of fellow crusaders fighting the good fight against the forces of evil.
nc says:April 30, 2012 at 7:37 pm
“…. Vietnam….If the US had not stepped in, just what do you think that area of the world would have looked like….”
Very much as it does now, only sooner.
Max Hugoson says:April 30, 2012 at 8:39 pm
“… the survivors somehow ALTERED their DNA to carry this change forward….”
Primarily epigenetics I believe? – fascinating stuff – quite a few studies being carried out only in recent years – more of a twist on evolution than a rewrite.
The people explaining the chance of a huge 6 degrees celsius warming may be alarming but there is a chance of it happening. The people explain that there could be only a 1 degree warming may be alarming but there is a chance of it happening. The point is skeptics want to put everyone’s livelihoods at risk, while climate alarmists want to spend a little money to make sure it doesn’t happen. This is the real truth of the matter, we care about the possibility of great harm to humans and deniers want to take a chance.
markx,
As a Viet Nam vet I’ve done a lot of reading about it. “Lessons Learned” and all.
North Viet Nam had been planning its insurgency in the South for at least five years prior to JFK’s election. They had an established infrastructure in the South.
The shooting war was started by President John F. Kennedy, but it was on a limited scale. Then President Lyndon Johnson took over, and blew it completely. Lyndon Johnson overruled the unanimous war plans of his Joint Chiefs of Staff, deciding that a ground war was the way to go.
The JCS had recommended a two-pronged attack: mining Haiphong harbor, thus denying the NVA of the largest portion of its war materiel, and carpet bombing Hanoi with a fleet of B-52 bombers, until the North cried “Uncle!” Once Hanoi was leveled, other cities would be next. [A single B-52 carried a load of 88 500 lb bombs, and 24 750 lb bombs.]
The North had no SAM missiles then, and no anti-aircraft weapons that could reach the B-52s’ altitude. Despite popular perception, dictators cannot withstand tthe masses when the proletariat is losing everything under the current leadership. The North would have been forced to sue for peace.
But as history shows, Johnson blew it big time, eventually committing more than 500,000 American boys to a war based on his inept strategy. Johnson retired to his ranch, grew his hair down to his shoulders, and turned the problem over to President Nixon, who settled the matter. I still think that the war could have been won if the U.S. leadership [already infected by groupthink] had stood up to the weak Chinese bluster, and gone back to the original proposal.
TET was a last gasp by the Viet Cong, but our fifth column media portrayed it as an American defeat, which it certainly was not: no territory was taken by the VC, and their infrastructure was exposed and largely destroyed. If the Press had acted rsponsibly and patriotically like they did in WWII, the result would have been the same as WWII.
Smokey says:
April 30, 2012 at 11:15 pm
markx,
As a Viet Nam vet I’ve done a lot of reading about it. “Lessons Learned” and all.
Well said Smokey. It is a good to know that there are studied people like you out there that can pass on a wholesome perspective on Viet Nam. Having worked with more than a handful of Viet Nam “Boat People” I know that their slaughterer was averted by the intervention of The United States after the surrender of the French.
The American media is totally infiltrated by, and committed to, the Left. The American media has portrayed the heroism of the American soldier & American military leadership as dubious, silly, righteous, arcane & out of step with “modern” thinking. Their efforts to “groupthink” us into a totalitarian system is leading us to larger governments, more taxes, less freedom & censored speech, i.e., politically correct speech. Politically correct speech, CAGW, diversity, redistribution of wealth, anti-bullying campaigns, Little League games without scores, rethinking American battles, like Tet… are all direct assaults on American freedom… American Exceptionalism… Capitalist superiority…
The Marxist’s, Communists, the American Left, hate two things: the natural order of things brought on without government intervention & a wholesome winner-take-all competition in everything from grades, sports to making money & personal success.
This article is right on to point out groupthink.
There is an experiment where a paper note is passed around a room where each person rewrites it in their own words before giving it to the next person. After a couple dozen iterations, it bears little resemblance to the original.
Those doing “mainstream” temperature and solar reconstructions too often feel they can make matters a little more like they “should” appear anyway if they fudge them a little. Those are fed into models along with, even worse by far, arbitrary aerosol tricks and more to get a figure for high future warming (GIGO: Garbage In, Garbage Out). That figure is read by those making predictions of the effects of future temperature rise, who fudge them in turn towards overstating the harm as opposed to benefit from a given temperature rise. Those predictions of dire effects give extra motivation for those doing temperature and solar reconstructions of the past to fudge them more in CAGW-convenient directions in the next iteration, and feel they can get away with it. And so the cycle repeats.
It particularly got worse after Mann’s hockey stick in the late 1990s, as the implicit message many got is you get vastly rewarded and honored if you fudge for the cause, without the slightest actual risk of academic penalty let alone any legal risks (especially since convenient skewing can always be blamed on accidental error if it ever is discovered and indeed it is frequently almost impossible to say for sure what is deliberate versus accidental on a given single paper even though the overall pattern becomes blatant if one knows what to look at). An irony is that even Greenpeace’s claim of a $0.03 billion once for skepticism is minuscule next to how Greenpeace itself has a budget on the order of $0.3+ billion/year, $3+ billion/decade, which is just the tip of the iceberg next to governmental funding and all else aimed in part at promoting the CAGW movement.
What gets published as “mainstream” in the 2000s is more extreme and less honest on average than what most would have dared to publish in the early 1990s, and totally unlike the lack of much systematic bias prior to then. Once the field got corrupted and outsiders realized that, fewer even wanted to try to enter it as a career unless personally the kind of ideologue who doesn’t mind dishonesty, not minding that they’d have to toe the party line to get funded.
The way to get past the above is to do something even many scientists never do: look at original data relatively directly in all fields, even outside one’s own field, not letting such get passed through filters putting propaganda spins on it of interpretation first. For example, I’m not most interested in what mainstream AGW-supporting websites want the public to see; I want to see the raw data before it is processed and “adjusted” (although even the raw data can be fudged sometimes); I want to see what the public is *not* supposed to see. At that point, one can see, for instance, the solar/GCR climate influence like this: http://www.freeimagehosting.net/newuploads/319xq.jpg (as discussed more in comments near the end of http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/04/11/does-co2-correlate-with-temperature-history-a-look-at-multiple-timescales-in-the-context-of-the-shakun-et-al-paper/ ) … and how the alternative is lol BS for explaining the past few centuries, with increasingly absurd claims becoming “mainstream” like the new frontier is towards blaming the MWP to Little Ice Age transition on humans even though the numbers like population and emissions are minuscule and absurd for such even by prior CO2 theory itself (for example: hyperbiased Wikipedia LIA article which has “peer reviewed” paper links).
That’s not even getting into certain ideologies indirectly supporting the CAGW movement. For instance, the CAGW movement is associated with the energy religion, the belief that human energy consumption must stagnate/decline in the future (as if the present number of several TW human energy usage was a rule of physics in an universe where 200000 TW intersect Earth alone), which is in turn reinforced by such as those who claim vast harm from long-term nuclear waste disposal when actually the limited quantity of manmade radioisotopes has little radioactivity in the long term compared to >> 100 trillion tons of uranium, thorium, decay chain products, potassium-40, etc. natural radioisotopes within Earth’s 3 * 10^19 ton crust.
But a vast collection of falsehoods combine into a group’s thought patterns, to the degree they think as opposed to emote at all, when the group actively works on trying to expel those having politically incorrect independent thought. I have seen ideological tribalism and then increasing ideological polarization over time on several forums and on Wikipedia in the core deletionist and admin group for the “climate change taskforce,” amounting to microcosms in miniature of the CAGW-promoting networks in the outside world. After they get rid of dissenters, what they have left is trying to one-up each other in repeated iterations. And, for whatever reasons, the type who tend to argue and dominate most (like the highest postcount individuals on a forum in many cases who make 100+x the posts of the average poster) tend to be largely ego driven, about enforcing their views and winning arguments at all costs, while constituting the most dishonest groups of people I’ve ever seen.
There is an effort towards what would become eventually international agreements to indirectly help promote low energy and low material consumption (the way of disguising its simpler term: poverty) on and redistribution away from the non-believers, like those who drive SUVs. I once wondered why communism has been repeatedly tried: Even if you believe an entrepreneur averages $X harm per $Y of economic activity, at most that would mean a particular percentage tax rate for externalities under such logic but never somehow always only 100.00% effective tax rate minimum counterbalancing (pure communism). But then I realized that part wasn’t really based on either logic or noble emotions but rather on jealousy, anger that others don’t respect (worship) an ideology, etc. So is the CAGW movement in part, mixed with the ignorant and naive who are well-meaning but have fallen for appeals to superficial authority. Russian communism, though, at least favored advancement of human material progress (in theoretical goals, however much with issues in implementation) and for eventual expansion of mankind into space. The CAGW movement does not.
The mob mentality effect, in which individuals blithely commit atrocities they would be horrified to contemplate if isolated from the examples and approval of all of the many around them. It’s probably a genetically programmed survival trait from the days of tribal warfare.