Decision Making: A Psychological Analysis of Conflict, Choice, and Commitment

by Irving L. Janis, Leon Mann

Psychological Analysis of Conflict, Choice, and Commitment

Genres: Psychology

512 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1979

About the author

Irving L. Janis was a research psychologist at Yale University and a professor emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley most famous for his theory of "groupthink" which described the systematic errors made by groups when taking collective decisions. He retired in 1986.

He also collaborated with Carl Hovland on his studies of attitude change, including the sleeper effect.

Reviews

[Robert Bogue]

It was a different time, 1977. Back then, publishing was harder and the focused energy that went into creating a book was larger. When Irving Janis and Leon Mann wrote Decision Making: A Psychological Analysis of Conflict, Choice, and Commitment, they were writing something that was designed to comprehensively cover everything known about decision making at the time. As it turns out, there hasn't been that much added to the knowledge how we make decisions – and there's been a great deal that we lost from their work in the sound-bite world we live in today.

Read more

[Doni · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was a very odd book. We're not sure this experiment is authentically sexual enough. So we'll take prostitutes and have some of them play hard to get and some of them be enthusiastic and then we'll see how the men respond. Really? Is this ethical? For as out-of-box thinking as this may make the authors appear, I was disappointed there wasn't much more beyond the traditional cost-benefit analysis. It was Ben Franklin on steroids.

[Rainier Moreno-Lacalle · Rating 4 out of 5]

Timeless