Groupthink Not a Problem in Simulated Mars Mission

Groupthink Not a Problem in Simulated Mars Mission | Wired Science | Wired.com: "Getting along with your fellow astronauts can be dangerous. Too much consensus — what some psychologists call “groupthink” — can keep crews from being creative in a crisis. But a new study found that six “cosmonauts” on a simulated Mars mission emerged from 105 days in a replica spacecraft with their quirks intact.

The study was the first to directly tackle the possible downside of harmony, rather than antagonism, in a space mission.

“Earlier, we had been focusing on how tension increases over time,” said social psychologist Gro Sandal of the University of Bergen in Norway, lead author of a paper to be published in Acta Astronautica. “This paper has more or less the opposite focus: whether people start to think more and more similar while they are isolated.”

Groupthink is still a controversial concept: Not all social psychologists think it exists. But those who believe in it think it tends to happen when people isolated in an extreme situation — a war zone, for instance, or a ship in the Arctic — start thinking in lockstep and avoiding outward disagreement. Groupthinkers also often feel like they’re united against a common enemy — on a space mission, this could be Mission Control."