Irving Janis - Career

Career

During the Second World War, Janis was drafted into the U.S. Army, where he carried out studies of military morale. In 1947, Janis became a faculty member of the Yale University Psychology Department, where he remained for nearly forty years. He collaborated with Carl Hovland on his studies of attitude change, including the sleeper effect.

During his career, Janis studied decisionmaking in areas such as dieting and smoking. This work described how people respond to threats, as well as what conditions give rise to irrational complacency, apathy, hopelessness, rigidity, and panic.

Janis also made important contributions to the study of group dynamics. He did extensive work in the area of “groupthink,” which describes the tendency of some groups to try to minimize conflict and reach consensus without sufficiently testing, analyzing, and evaluating their ideas. His work suggested that pressures for conformity restrict the thinking of the group, bias its analysis, promote simplistic and stereotyped thinking, and stifle individual creative and independent thought.

Janis wrote or co-wrote more than a dozen books, including Psychological Stress (1958), Victims of Groupthink (1972), Decision Making (1977), Groupthink (1982), and Crucial Decisions (1989).

In 1967, Janis was awarded the Socio-Psychological Prize by the American Association for the Advancement of Science (b). In 1981, he received the Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award of the American Psychological Association. In 1991, he won the Distinguished Scientist Award from the Society of Experimental Social Psychology.

He retired from Yale University in 1985, and in 1986 was appointed Adjunct Professor of Psychology Emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley.