Groupthink and Academic Culture

Dan Klein gives a lecture on academic groupthink, tying in our joint paper and my "Heterogeneity" paper. Dan asks how groupthink can dominate entire academic disciplines.

Departmentally based decision making, collegiality, depends on majority vote.  Democratic processes are eminently susceptible to conformity pressure, as de Tocqueville noticed in the 1830s.

Scholars like Irving Janis (also Milgram and Asch) have suggested that groups tend to conform.  Love of people like ourselves, homophily, leads to the eradication of alternative viewpoints.  Highly intelligent people are easily capable of groupthink, as Janis's book Groupthink points out with respect to the Kennedy cabinet.  Klein points out that academic beliefs are more closely related to self-image than the decisions that Janis describes; the nature of academics' beliefs is closer to Jonathan Haidt's "sacred beliefs."

Klein uses the example of the  ideological field of history. At the departmental level, homophily leads to groupthink.  At the national level, the field's hierarchical hiring allows the elite universities to create a monotone ideological perspective.  Learned societies scour non-conforming academics by keeping them from publication opportunities.  "The profession answers these questions for all."

Universities are the reverse of what they appear. They do not encourage thought. They encourage mindless conformity.

Klein asks: "What if waiters worked as professors do, so each waiter job is controlled by a central waiter department?"  Of course, waiters are not as inept or incompetent as professors because there is no centralized waiters' learned society.