Larry Donnelly is a native of Boston, He teaches law in NUIG. He has published law journal articles in Ireland and internationally, as well as being a regular media commentator. I talked him about an article he write for TheJournal.ie.

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Two minds are better than one.

That’s a fairly obviously true saying in most cases; whether in a work environment or elsewhere, most people will be familiar with a situation where people in a group contribute suggestions that together get a solution to a problem that was better than any one member of the group could have come up with.

But it’s not always true. Sometimes a group of people make a worse decision than any individual in the group would have. There’s scientific research on this, it was done, like a surprising amount of interesting research, but the CIA. They did the research in the aftermath of the failed invasion of the Bay of Pigs in Cuba, where the Americans supported anti-Castro Cuban exiles in launching a military attack on their home country.

The attack was a disaster, over 100 of the attackers were killed and almost all of the rest of the force of 1,500 men were captured. In retrospect it seemed obvious to everyone that such a tiny force, even with American-supplied weapons and backup, could never stand a chance against a relatively-well defended country, and the hope that this ragtag bunch of former plantation owners, landlords, businessmen and trust fund kids could inspire the population to overthrow their government and install them in charge instead seemed insane.

Yet this plan, insane in retrospect, was signed off by many well-qualified committees and experienced military people in the CIA. How could so many smart people have made such a big mistake?

In fact, that was the problem. Fair play to them, the CIA brought in psychologists to analyse why the mistake had been made and avoid similar ones in future. And the resulting research was clear. One problem was the number of people involved.