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Abilene paradox

Abilene paradox noun: the situation where a group of people collectively decide on a course of action that goes against the preferences of many or all of the individuals in the group, because the individuals choose to side with what they believe is the majority preference.

Noun

Abilene paradox (plural Abilene paradoxes)

  1. The situation where a group of people collectively decide on a course of action that goes against the preferences of many or all of the individuals in the group, because the individuals choose to side with what they believe is the majority preference.

Forms of Abilene paradox

pluralAbilene paradoxes

Origin of Abilene paradox

Introduced by Jerry B. Harvey in his 1974 article "The Abilene Paradox: The Management of Agreement", which described the example of a group deciding to travel to Abilene, Texas, for dinner.

Questions about Abilene paradox

What does Abilene paradox mean?
Abilene paradox means the situation where a group of people collectively decide on a course of action that goes against the preferences of many or all of the individuals in the group, because the individuals choose to side with what they believe is the majority preference.
What part of speech is Abilene paradox?
Abilene paradox is a noun.
What is the plural of Abilene paradox?
The plural of Abilene paradox is Abilene paradoxes.

Words near Abilene paradox in the dictionary

  1. abikoviromycin
  2. Abila
  3. abilao
  4. abilaos
  5. Abilene
  6. Abilene paradox
  7. Abilene paradoxes
  8. Abilenes
  9. Abilenian
  10. abiliment
  11. abiliments

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: Abilene paradox (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Cite this entry: “Abilene paradox.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/abilene_paradox. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.