A Movie About Making Decisions Under Uncertainty

The new movie Golda focuses on the tense days before and during the Yom Kippur War.  As the trailer shows, the tension was driven in part because of the number, magnitude, and timing of the decisions that had to be made.  The fact that many of the key decisions were group decisions only amplified the challenges.

A 2004 article from the Foreign Policy Research Institute made this comment about decisions made just prior to the start of the war:

 Prof. Baruch Fischhoff at Carnegie Mellon has used this complex setting as an example of “groupthink.”  When the Israeli military leaders looked at the information they were given – troop positions, movement of equipment, Soviet consultant changes, etc. – there were multiple possible interpretations.  One possibility was that an attack was not imminent.

The military decision makers knew each other well; they had fought together in past wars and skirmishes, and they respected each other’s opinions – in fact, many were good friends.  When person A proffered an opinion about the evidence, person B’s respect for A gave the opinion credence.  B’s support encouraged A to believe that the opinion had merit because A respected the opinions of B.  Person C respected both A and B, voiced that respect, further encouraging A and B to subscribe to that view since they both respected C’s opinions.  This is the launch of groupthink.  The setting is one of ambiguous information and genuine mutual respect.  The military leadership decided that an attack was not imminent and extreme emergency measures were not needed.

Naval leadership was not at that meeting – they were out at sea.  Their leadership – with the same information, same war experience, same time constraints – concluded that an attack was imminent.  Their groupthink went in a different direction.

Evaluating information is influenced by our perception of the information:  is our perception accurate?  Accurate perception is most difficult in circumstances exactly like those in which intelligence analysis is conducted: “making real-time judgments about evolving situations on the basis of incomplete, ambiguous, and often conflicting information that is processed incrementally under pressures for [making] early judgment,” as the Foreign Policy paper says.

In the article “Connecting the Dots” in The New Yorker (2003), the clarity after the attack versus the clarity of signals before the attack was summarized this way:

Take a quick look at the diagrams below:

What did you read?  Did you notice the double “A” or “THE”?  Most people don’t in their first glance at the figures.  This illustrates the fundamental challenge to accurate perception:  we have a bias toward perceiving what we expect to perceive.

Groupthink influenced the U.S. perception and evaluation of information regarding the presence of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) before the Iraqi war.  The same Policy report quoted a U.S. Senate committee’s conclusions about U.S. intelligence:

Events that seem unlikely to occur in the future can appear to be almost inevitable looking back after they have occurred.  This hindsight bias is always present; after we know something has occurred, we see it as very likely no matter how unlikely we may have viewed it before it occurred.  In the same New Yorker article, this tendency is described:

This hindsight bias is dangerous because it not only fools us into thinking we understand the past perfectly, but that confidence carries over to therefore thinking we understand the future, too.   

Ironically, a movie about bad decisions by others has the effect of making us more confident about our own decision making.  Looking back, we see they missed the obvious; we wouldn’t have.  They were vulnerable to groupthink; we wouldn’t be.  There is a well-known comment from one of the earliest decision analysts, Amos Tversky:  A person “who sees the past as surprise-free is bound to have a future full of surprises.”

Groupthink is powerful because it is insidious; we are “inside” the effect, as it were.  It isn’t external pressure or coercion so much as it is a sense of group confidence based on mutual respect. When this happens, dissent is far less likely – not because it is suppressed, but because it never really shows up. 

There is an old saying that no jail is so secure as one from which no one wants to escape.  Therein lies the seductive power of group think.