You find persuasion in the strangest places. Consider this book review by Holly Morris of “No Way Down” written by Graham Bowley about the worst loss of life in a mountain climb at K2 during August 2008.
Holly Morris appears to suggest that Groupthink was a persuasive problem in this event and that because the climbers succumbed to this, they made fatal decisions. Based only on the review information plus other publicly available information about this disaster, I am dubious about the analysis of Groupthink. Some people think that when you observe a number of people talking together and there then follows a bad consequence, you’ve got Groupthink and this is not true.
Groupthink requires a small group of 8-15 people with a long history of contact and decision-making who experience high levels of cohesion in the group. Simply stated, the social and emotional functions of such groups become more prominent than task functions. When this arises, Groupthink acts as a WATTage switch that throws everyone into a Biased High WATT processing mode that leads people to make the data fit a conclusion rather than follow the data to a conclusion as operates in Objective High WATT processing. The Bias points them toward maintaining high cohesion.
As described in this book, it is hard to argue that the 19 people who attempted K2 in August 2008 were a cohesive group under the required definition of Groupthink. If only because of language differences between nationalities (Koreans, Dutch, Americans, Serbian, for example), it is hard to call these people, cohesive. They certainly worked together and coordinated during the climb, but that does not make them a cohesive group under the Groupthink concept. It is unlikely that these people decided to act as they did TO MAINTAIN GROUP COHESION which is the driving factor in Groupthink.
Given all of the factors operating in this disaster, Holly Morris’s claim of Groupthink is more likely due not to the reality of the disaster, but to the reality of reviewing books. Morris is observing the persuasion psychology of an outside collection of actors with the outcome of the event already known. She can see all the “mistakes” the climbers made not because she’s smarter than the climbers or not under the sway of persuasion forces, but because she knows what happens and can reason backwards. “People died in the future, so they must have made mistakes in the past, now let’s find the mistakes!”
It strikes me as entirely reasonable that if these climbers had been alone in their smaller national groups (no other national climbing teams were on the mountain), it’s likely they would have made many of the same decisions. The risk of death is already part of the equation and simply by being on the mountain, any climber has already accepted that as a possibility. Some of the fatalities clearly had nothing to do with group effects. One fell when not secured to a line. Others were killed in avalanches. Certainly none of these people would have been on the mountain at that moment if they had known what would happen, as Holly Morris does. But, they didn’t.
I’ve noted the misuse of Groupthink before. It appears that poorly read people have glommed onto a term that has an explicit technical meaning that they then stretch, pull, and wrap around whatever meaning they prefer as if they’re using a Gladwell coinage like “tipping point” or “blink” rather than something from the peer review literature.
Doing persuasion like a NYT scientist, when you see several people who are talking to each other and something bad then happens, you’ve got Groupthink. That, however, fails the most basic test. You need well established groups with a clear prior history of contact, then add in that high level of cohesion. The combination of the number of targets and strong relational commitment to the group is what creates that Biased High WATT processing which produces bad decisions.
A better explanation for the behavior of the climbers is found in a persuasion concept that Morris describes, but does not name. Morris closes her review with what appears to be a sad answer to her concerns about Groupthink. Morris looks at the horrible loss of life, eleven people, and thinks that no one should want to climb K2 again. She even doubts whether survivors would try it again. But, she ruefully observes:
When Bowley asks one survivor, Alberto Zerain, what it would take to go back to K2, “he pushed back his chair and clenched his fist demonstratively. ‘I would go back now!’ he said, in a surprisingly loud voice, gazing through the window as if the mountain were already calling him.”
Here, I think we can see a likely example of dissonance in operation. When you suffer for what you love, you often strengthen your love rather than change your beliefs or behaviors in the face of that punishment. Here’s a man who survived the worst climbing accident in memory with eleven deaths in one climb. And, he wants to try it again!
Outside observers looking at all this information, tend to use the most obvious persuasion principle here from Reinforcement Theory. If you get a good consequence, keep going. If you get a bad consequence, quit. Thus, any one who nearly dies doing something and sees other people die doing it, must follow the correct rules of persuasion and walk away, right?
If you are an observer, probably, yes. But, if you are an actor doing what you love, then the Principles of Reinforcement Theory do not apply the same way. Instead, as you climb the mountain peak, you may also climb the dissonance trail.
