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Recently, I've caught myself musing that "groupthink" has an undeserved reputation. The term has come to mean "suppression, within a group, of voices dissenting with an incorrect or suspect decision".

That isn't a specialty of groups. A supposedly "integrated" personality is quite capable of being, so to speak, of two minds about a given decision, yet suppressing its misgivings and pressing on.

I'm fond of the term "escalation", which in this paper is defined as "increasing commitment to a failing course of action". If we can find terms which are perfectly appropriate for the same dysfunction in both groups and individuals, why does "groupthink" enjoy such popularity ?

I think the main reason is that we don't want to believe that a single mind is capable of (what we ought to call) "groupthink". We want to believe that, as individuals, we have rational or moral reasons for suppressing internal dissent; for instance, we speak of listening to our head instead of our heart, or the reverse.

Rather than recognize the dissent for what it is - an internal debate deserving, as it does in groups, a resolution from due process rather than by fiat - we prefer to invoke absolute judgements on abstractions: "emotions are not rational", or "logic is soulless". We're evading the truth: we are large, we contain multitudes.

Conversely, a group which has achieved a high degree of integration - which we may want to call a "team" - is not necessarily a bad thing.