In October 2021, the UK Parliament’s Science and Technology and the Health and Social Care Committees issued a scathing report on the initial poor handling of the coronavirus pandemic by scientists and government ministers in the early months of 2020. The report stated that the failure of ministers to challenge poor scientific advice led to “one of the most important public health failures that the UK has ever experienced.”
The mismanagement of the health crisis occurred in the wake of a survey conducted by John Hopkins University in October 2019 to determine which countries were best prepared for a pandemic where the UK and the USA emerged as the best prepared territories. Thus, the findings of the joint committees, after months of interviews with expert witnesses, make not only for interesting reading but also provide an insight to human nature which was ultimately responsible for the inadequate responses to the pandemic.
The report concluded that Britain’s pandemic planning was too heavily based on influenza which is not driven by asymptomatic transmission and had failed to incorporate the lessons learnt from outbreaks of SARS, MERS and Ebola. The report noted, “Instead of mirroring policy in Europe and North America, where the flu fallacy was just as dominant, we might have turned to South East Asia, site of two coronavirus epidemics in the past 20 years, to see what they were doing: early lockdown, border control, track and trace.”
The inquiry also found that the ministers and the scientists adopted a “fatalistic” approach of trying to manage Covid-19, rather than stopping it, which “amounted in practice” to accepting ‘herd immunity’ through infection. However, the report did praise Britain’s vaccine programme, labelling it “one of the most stunning achievements in history”.
So how do, “presumably the most experienced and smartest people we could get,” according to the report, initially adopt a laissez-faire policy of tackling a coronavirus pandemic with the guidelines for an influenza pandemic? As the former Chief Medical Officer for England, Professor Dame Sally Davies aptly summed it up, “We were in groupthink. Our infectious disease experts really did not believe that SARS, or another SARS, would get from Asia to us.” And, the politicians, no experts themselves, failed to question the disease experts. The ultimate result of this mismanagement disaster was a higher death toll than should have occurred.
Groupthink is a word initially coined by William H. Whyte Jr. in an article for Fortune magazine in 1952, but more often attributed to the late Yale University psychology professor Irving Janis, who penned Victims of Groupthink in 1972 (subsequently revised and republished in 1982 under the title Groupthink: Psychological Studies of Policy Decisions and Fiascoes). During a career which spanned over four decades, Janis conducted extensive research in the areas of decision making, stress and attitude changes.
In defining groupthink, he attributed his coinage to an analogy with “doublespeak” from the newspeak vocabulary of George Orwell’s 1984. “The main principle of groupthink, which I offer in the spirit of Parkinson’s Law, is this: ‘The more amiability and esprit de corps there is among the members of a policy-making ingroup, the greater the danger that independent critical thinking will be replaced by groupthink, which is likely to result in irrational and dehumanizing actions directed against outgroups,’” Janis stated.
Janis concluded that as the decision makers opt for their preferred interpretation of events, they chose to cloak themselves and their line of thinking with morality. The members of the group, intoxicated by their power, envision themselves as both right and virtuous. He outlined eight symptoms which might be indicative if group members were slipping into groupthink mentality. The first two, an illusion of invulnerability and a belief of an inherent morality of the group, stem from an over confidence in the group’s prowess. Collective rationalization and stereotyping of opposing views reflect the tunnel vision adopted by the group with their problem solving. The final four signs – self-censorship, illusions of unanimity, direct pressure on dissenters and self-appointed mindguards – exemplify strong conformity pressure within the group.
In the book Janis presents the case for groupthink by citing disastrous foreign policy decisions including the US 1961 Bay of Pigs Invasion fiasco, Nazi Germany’s decision to invade Russia in 1941 and the Watergate Scandal.
In due course, researchers will no doubt uncover similar instances in Guyana’s post-independence history, where they might find it apt to question some of the decisions that were made when the long-term effects are closely dissected. The powers that be, on both sides of the fence, will be found wanting here, and now one can only wonder if groupthink was a significant contributing factor.
Examples that spring to mind from the past include the scrapping of the oldest railway service in South America and the stubbornness not to resuscitate it (while most of the infrastructure was still in place) when the oil crisis struck shortly after.. The ultimate disasters and squandering of vital financial resources in pursuing the Upper Mazaruni Development project and the investment in the white elephant sugar factory at Skeldon are not far behind in magnitude. Of more recent vintage would be the signed oil exploration agreements and the pursuit of a new Demerara Harbour Bridge sans an environmental study.
A common recurring, underlying feature of all these fiascoes, aside from the strong likelihood of groupthink and the eschewing of expert input, was the complete lack of a national consensus on any or all of these projects. As long as we are devoid of unity and the us-against-them mentality continues to prevail among our political elite, a case of groupthink is ripe for the minds of those blessed with the handling of the sovereign wealth fund, laying the pathway for the rest of the populace to be vulnerable to the possible ravages of the dreaded Dutch disease.
