#25 - Concept Reference, Must Be True

[MannyH]

I was unable to locate an explanation for this question. I chose answer choice C for this question but the credited response is choice E. I see that only 39% of people got this question correct so I assume that it is more so on the difficult side.

[Malila Robinson]

Hi MannyH,
Answer E comes from the first paragraph where it states: "When cohesiveness is low or lacking entirely, compliance out of fear of recrimination is likely to be strongest."
Answer C appears to be backwards. In describing groupthink the passage states that: "...a highly cohesive group of decision makers, ...will think the proposal is a good one (30) without attempting to carry out a critical scrutiny that could reveal grounds for strong objections." So it is not that inadequate info is causing the group to be overly cohesive, it's that the overly cohesive nature of the group may cause them to act on inadequate info.

Hope that helps!
-Malila

[chian9010]

Hi,

I got this question right by selecting E but I put B in my contender. Could anyone tell me why B is incorrect?

[Adam Tyson]

Sure thing, chian9010! The only mention of military decision making in the passage is in the bit about an analysis of major fiascoes. That means that the study looked at some big screwups and found certain patterns involving groupthink. But does this mean that the military often has such situations of high conformity? Not at all! Maybe there were 20 military fiascoes in the study, but there were another 10,000 examples of military decision-making groups that had low conformity. We just don't have any info from the passage to support a claim about what is often expected of these groups. We know only that there were at least some cases of groupthink among them.