Sonia Sheryr
Dr. Bradley
CODES 123
9 March 2025
Reflection 3
Groupthink played a crucial role with the way decisions were made that ultimately led to the Challenger exploding. When the engineers mentioned their concern about the launch, Mr. Mason said, “We have to make a management decision.” He turned to Bob Lund and asked him to take off his engineering hat and put on his management hat. After that, management was the one to take the next steps and formulate points to base their decisions on.
Group polarization absolutely amplified risk taking and played a role in deciding if the decisions were effective or not. Especially since they were so dedicated to launching the challenger in the first place which places a biased mindset when it comes to safety concerns and delaying the launch. An example is when they go against the engineers word, and conclude the launch being safe and ready to go.
Social facilitation plays a vital role in high-pressure environments, and that pressure can cause a rush in decisions. It is absolutely crucial to think through decisions, big and small; not doing so can result in missing essential pieces of information and can be a disaster waiting to occur. Social loafing does factor in with the decision-making process. In this case, there is no one person to blame for the explosion, since it wasn’t one person who made all the leading decisions.
One lesson I learned from this was make sure you thoroughly think through decisions, and don’t feel pressured by leading factors because it can lead to incorrect and inaccurate decision making.