Irving Janis coined the term in 1972, studying American foreign policy disasters including the Bay of Pigs. His argument was that cohesive groups suppress dissent in order to preserve agreement, and the suppression is usually invisible to everyone in the room.
An American psychologist named the failure mode in which a team stops exchanging information while believing it still is.
Martin Seligman spent his early career on learned helplessness: after repeated uncontrollable adversity, people stop trying even when they could succeed. It became a leading model for depression.
Then he inverted it. If helplessness can be learned, so can optimism. He identified explanatory style as the mechanism — pessimists attribute bad events to causes that are internal, stable and global, and those attributions can be disputed and changed.
Elected president of the American Psychological Association in 1998 by the widest margin in its history, he used the position to launch positive psychology as a field. An American psychologist turned optimism into a research discipline and then into a training programme.
Angela Duckworth’s research argues that sustained effort over long periods predicts achievement better than talent does, and her book on it was a substantial American bestseller.
The finding is congenial, and that is part of why it travelled. It says the thing did not work yet, rather than that it will not work.
The American negotiation vocabulary has a name for the effect of the first number, and it is taught as something to deploy rather than merely to notice. Who anchors first is a live question in American negotiation training, with an argument on each side.
An American sales and negotiation term, taught explicitly, with techniques attached: matching pace, finding common ground, remembering personal details. It is treated as a skill that can be learned and improved, not as something that either happens or does not.
Gesichtswahrung. Face-saving. German conflict resolution attends to it explicitly, and the word is used openly in describing how a settlement was constructed. A resolution that humiliates one party is understood to be unstable, and constructing the exit is part of the work.
Chris Voss, formerly the FBI’s lead international kidnapping negotiator, teaches a method built on mirroring, labelling the other party’s emotions aloud, and calibrated questions. His book became a major American bestseller and his firm trains corporate negotiators. The technique is not to set emotion aside. It is to name it accurately and work with it.
Emotionale Erpressung. Emotional blackmail. A German term applied to a negotiator who invokes the relationship, the history, or personal difficulty in order to move a position. The word names it as coercion rather than as persuasion.
Said in American workplaces before or after criticism of work, and the frequency is the evidence. Nobody issues the instruction unless the default is the opposite. The sentence concedes what it is asking people to overcome.
Go with your gut. Trust your instincts. What does your gut tell you? My gut says no.
American business speech treats the practitioner’s intuition as a legitimate input, nameable in a meeting and stated without apology.
The organ is the point. The claim is not that the person reasoned quickly. It is that something below reasoning produced an answer worth acting on.