This article both enlightened me and also disturbed me. It talks about how some teams come to decisions even before looking at the evidence in front of them. The analogy with the two types of juries were interesting. One type looks at the evidence and discusses it while the other type comes up with a verdict then tries to convince everybody that their decision is the right one. The MMT in the article would be considered the second type. The leader of it already made his decision even before the "team" discussed it. He shot down anyone who tried to throw in another opinion. He kept going back to the saying "If something is wrong, there is nothing we can do anyway." That really bothered me. The Team did not even try.
The author explained this by explaining how a person interacts with a crowd. If people remain indecisive in their opinion, they will tend to sway with the majority. People in the "team" should have tried harder to to speak up. If thee had, that whole disaster with the space shuttle Columbia could have been avoided.
This shot the experts of the challenger case into my mind. You think maybe that even know they had sufficient data in front of them that looked as though they should not have launched. I wonder if one of the scientists really was trying to launch this rocket so he voiced his opinion and gradually found followers and with the time constraints they had, the rest of the scientists just fell into line. I have no basis for this assumption but just along with what this article states and that they launched the rocket it makes me feel like someone had to have convinced everyone that the launch would be a success.
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