Abilene Paradox

In 1974, Jerry B. Harvey, professor of management science at the George Washington University in Washington, D.C , introduced an interesting quirk of group agreement. He called it the Abilene Paradox and explains it as a “failure to manage agreement”[1].

He described it as the tendency of people to go along with what they think the group wants to do — even when they themselves don’t want to do it. If more and more members of the group go along with the idea, it gets more and more difficult to become the spoilsport.

The Abilene Paradox describes a group dynamic where the collective agrees on a path of action that none of the individual members want to do.

To illustrate this phenomenon, Harvey recalls the following story: On a hot afternoon visiting in Coleman, Texas, the family is comfortably playing dominoes on a porch, until the father-in-law suggests that they take a 53 mile (85 kilometers) trip to Abilene for dinner. The wife says, "Sounds like a great idea." The husband, despite having reservations because the drive is long and hot, thinks that his preferences must be out-of-step with the group and says, "Sounds good to me. I just hope your mother wants to go." The mother-in-law then says, "Of course I want to go. I haven't been to Abilene in a long time."

As expected, the drive is hot, dusty, and long. When they arrive at the cafeteria, the food is as bad as the drive. They arrive back home four hours later, exhausted.

One of them dishonestly says, "It was a great trip, wasn't it?" The mother-in-law says that, actually, she would rather have stayed home, but went along since the other three were so enthusiastic. The husband says, "I wasn't delighted to be doing what we were doing. I only went to satisfy the rest of you." The wife says, "I just went along to keep you happy. I would have had to be crazy to want to go out in the heat like that." The father-in-law then says that he only suggested it because he thought the others might be bored.

The group sits back, perplexed that they together decided to take a trip that none of them wanted. They each would have preferred to sit comfortably but did not admit to it when they still had time to enjoy the afternoon.

The Abilene Paradox results from a kind of false cognitive dissonance. Cognitive dissonance is the psychological discomfort that arises when we do something out of sync with what we believe to be true. In this case, we want to be in alignment with others, but we also feel that what we think the group wants to do is a bad idea. This results in a difficult choice: deal with the discomfort of speaking up or the discomfort of being dishonest about your true feelings.

[1] Jerry B. Harvey: The Abilene Paradox: The Management of Agreement in Organizational Dynamics – 1988. See here.