Forces That Shape a Group’sDecisions

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Experts have identified three forces—cognitive, psychological, and social—that strongly affect how groups and their leaders discuss and arrive at decisions (Hirokawa, Gouran, & Martz, 1988). Going back to the devastating Challenger example from chapter 9, let’s take a deeper look at these forces.

Cognitive Forces. Cognitive forces consist of group members’ thoughts and beliefs. These affect how everyone in a particular group perceives, interprets, evaluates, stores, and retrieves information, which in turn influences the group’s decisions.

Cognitive forces influenced the NASA officials who made the fateful decision to launch the Challenger shuttle, a subject you read about in chapter 9. The officials discounted the credibility of key information available to them at the time, and they drew incorrect conclusions from the data. They also wrongly believed that the shuttle system was sound, which made them overly confident in their ability to have a successful launch.

Psychological Forces. Psychological forces refer to group members’ personal motives, emotions, attitudes, and values. In the Challenger disaster, lower-level NASA decision makers had initially recommended postponing the launch until the temperature warmed up later in the day. But when higher-ups pressured them to reverse their recommendation, they caved in—perhaps because they were worried about losing their jobs if they didn’t go along.

The decision makers also changed their attitudes about which criteria to use for postponing a shuttle launch. Previously, NASA rules dictated that a launch wouldn’t take place if anyone doubted its safety. But with the Challenger, the rule had changed: the launch would proceed unless someone presented conclusive evidence that it was unsafe. Engineers hesitated to express their inconclusive qualms, and so the launch proceeded.

Social Forces. Social forces are group standards for behavior that influence decision making. In the Challenger disaster, engineers were unable to persuade their own managers and higher-up NASA officials to postpone the launch. They tried to prove that it was unsafe to launch rather than take the opposite (and possibly more effective) tactic: to show that no data existed to prove that the launch was safe.