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Group Think

by AltHippo @ 8:01 pm. Filed under Uncategorized

I’ve been meaning to ask this for a while. But, first xylpdq. Count with me: not the first link, not the second, but the third. No, thank you.

Vastleft wants to re-examine the 2008 primary season. He throws out a number of things that calls to mind the old proverb about glass houses and stones. For instance, this:

Groupthink. Just about every aspect of Irving Janis’s model of fiasco thinking took hold. To cite but one manifestation: delegitimizing concerns of “out-group” Democrats (as “pie-fighters,” “Hillary obsessives,” “Obama haters,” “Rovian plants”).

Surely there are sites that qualify as Obama-hating sites. Yes? The confluence and pumapac to start with. I’m sure there are more. My purpose here is to look at the question of groupthink. I would say Janis’s thoughts on preventing groupthink are illuminating:

According to Irving Janis, decision making groups are not necessarily destined to groupthink. He devised seven ways of preventing groupthink (209-15):

1. Leaders should assign each member the role of “critical evaluator”. This allows each member to freely air objections and doubts.
2. Higher-ups should not express an opinion when assigning a task to a group.
3. The organization should set up several independent groups, working on the same problem.
4. All effective alternatives should be examined.
5. Each member should discuss the group’s ideas with trusted people outside of the group.
6. The group should invite outside experts into meetings. Group members should be allowed to discuss with and question the outside experts.
7. At least one group member should be assigned the role of Devil’s advocate. This should be a different person for each meeting.

I ask in all seriousness: do any of these ways of preventing groupthink occur at Correntewire?

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47 Responses to “Group Think”

vastleft Says:
June 18th, 2009 at 2:44 pm
Dear Hope Officer,

Answers to your/Janis’s questions, not that any of it matters, since we’re sinners and will always be sinners:

1. Leaders should assign each member the role of “critical evaluator”. This allows each member to freely air objections and doubts. — Every Corrente Senior Fellow has admin privileges and can post whatever s/he wants, whenever s/he wants. Sometimes there is objection by one or more Fellows, which may lead to an on-site dispute, or off-site communication. Sometimes the dispute leads to a voluntary decision to switch to Emeritus status or be taken off the mast-head entirely. As it happens, in side e-mail conversations, Lambert and I frequently urged fellow Fellows to, if they objected to our posting about the primary, stand up and speak their minds in posts and comments. Few did, and rarely, which I interpret as the weakness of the case for Obama as a transformative progressive. YMMV.

2. Higher-ups should not express an opinion when assigning a task to a group. — No one at Corrente assigns tasks to anyone else.

3. The organization should set up several independent groups, working on the same problem. — Corrente is a blog with a variety of posters, and a relatively open posting policy (anyone with a valid account can post). Again, no one is assigned “problems to work on.”

4. All effective alternatives should be examined. — We tried examining the possibility that Barack Obama was the new Messiah who should never be criticized and that Hillary Clinton was a Rovian Racist Bitch who should never be praised. Though many other blogs found both of these to be correct, we somehow came to the surely incorrect conclusion otherwise. Were there other important possibilities that should have been considered?

5. Each member should discuss the group’s ideas with trusted people outside of the group. — It’s a blog. Whatever anyone posts may be seen and criticized by anyone, and we have frequently posted links to our critics.

6. The group should invite outside experts into meetings. Group members should be allowed to discuss with and question the outside experts. — It’s a blog. Anyone with an account may post, and accounts are given pretty freely, and canceled only for trolling or other abusive or truthy behavior.

7. At least one group member should be assigned the role of Devil’s advocate. This should be a different person for each meeting. — We often play devil’s advocate, being devils in our own right.

Speaking of glass houses, perhaps you’d consider these questions while you continue to fret about the evils of Obama-heretics:

* How many A-list sites were Obama supporters driven off of, either by actual banning or by constant swarming and derisive comments by the posters and/or commenters? On how many A-list sites did that happen to Hillary supporters?

* How many A-list bloggers were afraid to post positively about Barack Obama or critically about Hillary Clinton? For how many A-list bloggers was the inverse true?

If you have trouble answering those questions, look to Eric Boehlert’s “Bloggers on the Bus” for examples of both. Good luck!
Mrs. Polly Says:
June 21st, 2009 at 2:46 am
“* How many A-list sites were Obama supporters driven off of, either by actual banning or by constant swarming and derisive comments by the posters and/or commenters? On how many A-list sites did that happen to Hillary supporters?”

Alt Hippo is more able to answer by several magnitudes than I, but the most famous case I know of being “driven off” was Goldwater, or whoever she is, who left (”flounced” is an alternative term I’m itching to use) that big Orange site and started the Effluents, or whatever that stagnant thing is. She was not banned, she left, because she didn’t like what the commenters said.

I’ve never understood why anyone cares that much about what insults faceless strangers type out on their keyboards. If the vast majority of comments are negative, it may be that the readers are deluded, in which case it’s an ideal platform for taking your argument to the unpersuaded.

Or else it may be time to consult yourself and see if your head has been in a tight and airless space and needs to be extricated.

“Anyone with an account may post, and accounts are given pretty freely, and canceled only for trolling or other abusive or truthy behavior.”

That one’s going to cause a little problem for you, intellectual-honesty-wise, Mr. VastLeft. “Trolling” and “Truthiness” are wonderfully vague, self-serving terms that actually mean “if a pro-Obama argument sounds too good, I must expunge it! Begone to your underbridge den!” Who decides truthiness?

At my jolly little blog, which you have sometimes visited I think, Rumproast, all comments stand, unless they’re truly foul (and by that I don’t mean politically foul), or attack a couple of PUMAs we agreed had good reason to be let alone. But you can come in and drop all the “truthiness” you want. It will be answered, thoroughly, and shown up for its shoddy, false reasoning, but it won’t be censored.

The common denominator I saw on pro-Hillary blogs was the insistance that they needed a “refuge”– and that’s why they censor dissent on nearly all of them.
AltHippo Says:
June 21st, 2009 at 1:15 pm
@Vastleft: you really need to listen to what Mrs. Polly is saying, as perhaps I can’t put it in a way that you can get. I’ve been troubled by what I’ve seen happen to Correntewire over the last year. You have a problem with “group think”. A problem that requires respect for commenters who dissent from the predictably anti-Obama rhetoric.

When you say things like this: “We tried examining the possibility that Barack Obama was the new Messiah who should never be criticized and that Hillary Clinton was a Rovian Racist Bitch who should never be praised” it’s difficult to respond, because you are so contemptuous towards the viewpoints of those who don’t hate Obama.

So, regarding your questions, pro-Obama bloggers were driven off of Corrente. BIO is where? Xan is where? When’s the last time Leah posted something? Why do you think that it is? Can you understand why those of us, say at Rumproast, see Correntewire as a fairly clear example of “group think”?
lambert strether Says:
June 21st, 2009 at 6:22 pm
Dear Hope Officer:

Sorry I’m so slow to respond to this post from June 15, but it only showed up in SiteMeter today.

It would be very hard for anybody who actually did their reading to regard bio as a pro-Obama blogger.

Peace out!

lambert

P.S. As to you “where is” question, I’m afraid that I must allow to you to continue your speculation, which, in the absence of actual knowledge, must remain uninformed. VastLeft has done an admirable job explaining moderation in more detail than I would ever do. But thank you so much for your concern, and good luck with your site!
gil mann Says:
June 21st, 2009 at 10:47 pm
But thank you so much for your concern, and good luck with your site!

I thought all y’all were out of your damn minds during the primary so I won’t comment on the substance, but I had to doff my cap to such magnificent internet dickery. That is guy-who-gets-his-comeuppance-in-a-teensploitation-comedy level stuff.

Disclosure: I’m a dick
AltHippo Says:
June 21st, 2009 at 11:35 pm
P.S. As to you “where is” question, I’m afraid that I must allow to you to continue your speculation, which, in the absence of actual knowledge, must remain uninformed.

Always wait for the “oh, by the way” part of a message, as that is where people start to answer your question.

In this case, the question of what happened to Correntewire front pagers who were shunned by the site remains unanswered. Because the answer is: we don’t want to engage with people who don’t agree with us. Correntewire is a site about people who think Obama cheated in the primary and shouldn’t be president. And if, by the way, we can somehow get Hillary Clinton elected in 2012, that would be okay, too.

Gil Mann: truth be told, I’m kind of a dick, too.
John Cain Says:
June 22nd, 2009 at 12:59 am
My problem with VastLeft’s list was its extreme myopia, in that he can’t see at all that he or anyone who agrees with him isn’t magically immune from the same foibles in points out on Obama supporting blogs. Take tribalism, for instance. The Clinton dead-ender* blogs have an animal mascot they rally around. Correntewire itself has an exhaustive list of acronyms and terms that can only be understood by the in-group there. How is this not tribalism?

I also love how VL feels free to conflate all his enemies while being horrified if anyone did the same to him. Thus, someone who was mean to him at DU = the Obama campaign = anyone he’s talking to today that’s disagreeing with him, but how dare you lump him in with Larry Johnson and all the PUMA blogs that trafficked in racist conspiracy theories? Hypocrisy at its finest.
John Cain Says:
June 22nd, 2009 at 1:00 am
* I voted for Clinton in the primaries and Obama in the general, like most Clinton primary voters. If you’ve got a better word that “dead-ender”, let me know.
marindenver Says:
June 22nd, 2009 at 1:16 am
This almost seems like piling on but the EmoCorrenteWhiners still bitch non-stop about the primaries, invite PUMAs to comment on their sites (including Mr. Feminist myiq.001xu) and fling poo at anyone who dares comment at the Whiner with a dissenting viewpoint (including vastheft (not a typo) telling me to “f” myself when I made a comment about his sources for one of his “histeria watch” pieces being wackjob 9/11 conspiracy theorists). I mean, who, for heaven’s sake, can take any of these people seriously or consider them serious commentators?
Mrs. Polly Says:
June 22nd, 2009 at 2:40 am
We’ve all grown used to Hillaryphiles flouncing out of blogs, but Mr. Strether seems to have perfected flouncing in.

His snide little cameo appearance would have been more impressive if:

A. he’d addressed any of the charges made against him and his peers: shrieking and stampeding for the exits in the face of opposing views, for instance, while banning dissent on their own blogs.

B. If the links he’d provided for the one minute point he had a chance of carrying hadn’t been 50% faulty. I’m willing to concede that bio, whoever that may be, was, for the two instances Strether used four links to provide, pro-Hillary. Now where is he? Still on the Titanic, and sinking. But he’s right, the iceburg wasn’t that large. Only 99.99% as large as advertised.

Exit Lambert Strether, blithely unaware that the frozen snot-balls he was planning to toss had visibly melted in his own pockets.
sean Says:
June 22nd, 2009 at 2:56 am
“Dear Hope Officer,

Answers to your/Janis’s questions,since we’re sinners and will always be sinners…”

vastleft — Do you actually expect to be taken seriously with this kind of poor-little-me faux victimhood? I don’t think you’re a sinner; I think you’re a dimwit, who has found dimmer wits to follow him. Unfortunately, unlike Darragh, you haven’t found a way to make them give you money.
Kerry Reid Says:
June 22nd, 2009 at 11:52 am
Since engaging with Obama supporters on blogs gave the CorrenteWhiners the vapors to such an extent that they felt “driven away” (pobrecitos!), I’m guessing they didn’t have the intestinal fortitude to engage in any real-time, face-to-face political activism. After all, their tender sensibilities probably wouldn’t have survived the experience of having someone scream obscenities and hang up during phone banking, or facing down hostile opponents in door-to-door canvassing.

Perhaps that’s why Hillary Clinton couldn’t win the primaries: her supporters were too wussy/lazy to get out there and do the hard work. They’d rather be whining in their echo chambers.
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