Why media stars missed the UP story

They may well be, but I’m not talking about the failure of the bulk of the mainstream media to call the numbers exactly right. That is somewhat forgivable.

I’m talking of a more extreme failure to convey a sense of the popular mood even after months of extensive ground reportage. On the contrary, many mainstream media stars were peddling a near-unanimous narrative of a ‘backlash’ against demonetisation and of an SP-Congress victory that, with hindsight, comes across as having been hopelessly out of touch with reality. It reflects a deeper failing that, in the interest of retaining their credibility, the media ought to reflect on.

The most charitable explanation one can proffer is that these media stars, who often travelled in UP together and posted group selfies of themselves on Twitter, fell victims of a psychological phenomenon known as ‘groupthink’.

Sort of. Yale University psychologist Irving Janis, who coined the term ‘groupthink’, intended it to encapsulate the phenomenon that occurs within a group of people in which the desire for group harmony or conformity results in an irrational or dysfunctional decision-making outcome. Janis noted that the more amiability there is among the members of the group, the greater the danger that independent critical thinking will be replaced by groupthink. In extreme cases, members suppress dissenting viewpoints and even resort to self-censorship.

Not at all. In the 1950s, Solomon Asch, the pioneer of social psychology, conducted ‘conformity’ experiments, which concluded that ‘peer pressure’ and the felt need to ‘conform’ to a group can induce one to change one’s opinion, even on points of indisputable facts.

Thus, for instance, if I am a member of a ‘buddy’ media circle that holds that demonetisation is a vote-losing disaster, I may, for the sake of group solidarity, allow myself to be persuaded by that ‘unanimous’ argument even if it means suppressing my own first-hand reporting experience to the contrary.

Yes, and it sort of explains how the US media was blinded by Trump’s election. It has implications in other areas in the real world.

In decision-making within organisations, for instance. If boards of companies are susceptible to groupthink, it works to the organisations’ detriment.

Asch’s experiments established that even a single contrarian voice within a group opens up the space for the articulation of independent thoughts, which optimises the group’s decision-making capacity. And experiments by psychologist Samuel Sommers at Tufts University established that in a mock jury, white jurors placed within diverse racial groups made fewer mistakes and deliberated longer – as opposed to all-white juries.

It’s not just about promoting identity diversity, although that too helps. As social scientist Scott Page demonstrates in his book The Difference , it is cognitive diversity — or the diversity in the way members of a group think — that yields superior outcomes.

The consensus among them today is that the BJP is a sureshot winner in 2019. That too is ‘groupthink’ at work.

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