GROUPTHINK MAY COMPROMISE LEADERSHIP RATIONALITY James A. Stegenga. Deterrence Bankrupt Ideology Policy Sciences, Vol. 16, No. 2 (Nov, 1983), pp. 127-1145. The problem maybe compounded when such decisions are made by small groups of people rather than by single individuals. What psychologist Irving Janis (1982) calls "groupthink" sets in, with all the members of the decisionmaking group so anxious to get along with each other, maintain their power positions, appease the group leader, and push the interests of their respective bureaucracies that they suspend the critical thinking required for sensible decisionmaking. Not knowing very well what goes on behind the closed doors of the Kremlin, we tend to exaggerate the unity and underestimate the diversity of the collective Soviet leadership, thus neglecting the role of those non-rational bureaucratic politics and "groupthink" factors we almost automatically look for when analyzing the somewhat more visible policymaking process of Western governments. In the very political processes of the Kremlin that we occasionally glimpse, we see at work some of those factors degrading the unitary rationality that nuclear deterrence ideology assumes.
