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Robert McKeever, a student in Gonzaga University’s Master of Arts in Communication and Leadership Studies program, has written a thesis about the Internet social networking site Facebook that has been accepted for presentation Aug. 27 when the largest annual gathering of political scientists in the world convenes at Harvard University.
Robert McKeever, a student in Gonzaga's Master of Arts in Communication and Leadership Studies Program, has written his thesis about the Internet social networking program Facebook. McKeever will present the paper at a prestigious conference at Harvard University Aug. 27.
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McKeever, who lives in Chapel Hill, N.C., will present his thesis, titled “Facebooked: Groupthink in the Era of Computer Mediated Social Networking” on Aug. 27 at the annual American Political Science Association Conference. He will present the paper as part of a panel at the 6th Annual APSA Preconference on Political Communication at Harvard’s Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics, and Public Policy. The panel is sponsored by the APSA Political Communication Division and Harvard’s Shorenstein Center. Attendees to the APSA meeting, which runs through Aug. 31, will consider McKeever’s thesis among the latest and best research on political science and politics.
Gonzaga communication arts Professor John Caputo directed the thesis by McKeever, who is applying for admission to several top-flight Ph.D. program nationwide.
McKeever’s paper explores the symptoms of the phenomenon known as Groupthink as they manifest themselves in the modern age of computerized social networking. What began as a social-psychological condition used to explain the policy blunders of governments and organizations, Groupthink has evolved into the computerized landscape, and in so doing has provided researchers a new medium for investigating the process. The study investigates specific political events tied to this condition, providing a historical examination of the profound manner that Groupthink has shaped society and how it will mold the future of computer mediated interaction.
Groupthink is a type of thought and behavior in which group members aim to minimize conflict and reach consensus without critically testing, analyzing, and evaluating ideas. In groupthink, group members abstain from promoting viewpoints outside of or contrary to the group’s consensus. Groupthink often leads to hasty or irrational decisions as group members set aside their doubts for fear of upsetting a group’s balance.
The paper also evaluates research methodologies being used to diagnose the symptoms of Groupthink in organizational settings. This analysis is an instrumental part of the work because Groupthink research is notably difficult to conduct in clinical conditions utilizing the scientific method.
However, because social networking sites do not follow the same rules governing the organizational structures previously being tested, they provide a unique means for compiling empirical data pertinent to Groupthink study. The task however, is discovering where the exact defects are in Groupthink and the errors that stem from them. The principal question of this research is to identify if the ever-growing trend toward Internet-based social networking, like Facebook, can provide researchers with successful strategies for clinically evaluating the process of Groupthink.
The co-chairs of the pre-conference are Thomas Patterson (Shorenstein Center, Harvard University), Richard Davis (Brigham Young University), and Diana Owen (Georgetown University). For more information, please contact McKeever at (919) 272-3054 or via e-mail.
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