ABSTRACT
A great many of our political decisions are made within small groups. Sidney Verba’s first book, Small Groups and Political Behavior (1961), marks something close to the end of major efforts in several disciplines to take these small, informal groups seriously as loci of decision-making. This is evidently true of this discipline, but it is also true, with the major exception of families, in sociology. In psychology, the study of social settings has, at least in the American academy, gravitated toward the study of how an individual views some social context, rather than the study of social interactions. In economics, the Marshallian view was to make households a single person-like entity and to privilege individual choice. In our discipline, we are terrific at understanding individual choice, the role of organizations and large groups such as reference groups and others that shape our identity and beliefs and thus our choices, and of the influence of institutions in inducing political preferences and in constraining and channeling choice. But we rarely consider the immediate and direct interaction in which a great deal of political consideration, judgment, and choice is made. This lacuna is to our detriment, leaving us adrift in answering a large range of questions, such as the following. Is Antonin Scalia an articulate conservative ideologue on the Supreme Court or is he also able to persuade and thus build coalitions? Does he shape Clarence Thomas’ views, as some allege, or is Thomas an equally independent decision-maker? Campaigns use focus groups extensively. Does a group of six or so offer keen insight to the public’s mind, akin to application of Condorcet’s Jury Theorem, in which the group is better than any one of its members in discerning the truth, or is it more like Janis’ Group Think in which we observe the convergence of opinion not around what it “truly” is in each individual’s mind (if that is even meaningful) but what is collectively the most persuasive voice in that particular group at that particular moment? Would it have been better (from his perspective) for Colin Powell
by Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld? Do happily married couples make similar political choices because they share common experiences or because their interactions create common understandings of those experiences? While these are hardly the only valuable questions to ask, they are important and, as of now, too little studied.
