No!

The Power of Disagreement in a World that Wants to Get Along

Charlan Nemeth

• Publisher: Atlantic Books
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9781786490261
• eBook ISBN:
  9781786490254
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Social Sciences

We like to get along, at home or in the workplace. We don't want to hurt people or offend. Therefore, it is no surprise that numerous famous psychological experiments have proven that we don't tend to go against authority or the majority view. Famous management gurus share the view that harmony, cohesiveness and agreement are the building blocks for effective decision-making and creativity. But they are wrong. In No!, Charlan Nemeth, the world's leading expert on dissent, uses her 35 years of research to show why we need rebels - and how fostering more disagreement can dramatically improve decisions and the production of good ideas. Using examples from Twelve Angry Men to brainstorming, she explains how people with minority opinions need the space to express themselves uncompromisingly, even if it causes discomfort. Explaining why the devil's advocate technique doesn't work and why authentic disagreement is necessary to open our perspectives, this book has the power to revolutionise business, creative organisations, and society.

PART I

MAJORITIES VERSUS TROUBLEMAKERS

GETTING PEOPLE TO AGREE WITH YOU IS AN ART—THE ART OF PERSUASION. It turns out that the majority has an enormous advantage. They almost don’t need to try to persuade us. The simple fact that they are the majority is enough for people to agree with them or to follow them. In fact, their power is so immediate and compelling that we follow them even when our own senses tell us they are wrong. The majority has the ability to bend reality.

Minority views, on the other hand, have an uphill battle to persuade us. We don’t agree readily. In fact, we find many reasons to resist agreement. Dissenters—“the few”—don’t persuade immediately. It has to be done over time, through a choreography of persuasive style. When we do agree with a minority view, it is usually based on a real change in attitude. It means that we now follow or agree with that view because we have been convinced.

1 NUMBERS RULE

THE CLASSIC TV SHOW CANDID CAMERA MIGHT NOT HAVE been the most scientific demonstration of the power of the majority, but it was one of the funniest. You may remember this program: Allen Funt did “experiments” on the street and secretly videotaped the reactions of everyday people. One segment from 1962, which I loved, was called “Face the Rear.” He had three people (who were paid accomplices) enter an elevator with one innocent rider. Once the doors closed, the three accomplices all turned to the rear of the elevator. When the elevator doors opened, it was revealed that the fourth rider had followed that majority and was facing the rear. After the doors closed again, the three accomplices then faced the side. When the doors reopened, all four were facing the side, although the innocent rider was looking very confused. As this segment continued, the three accomplices removed their hats. The innocent rider did too. When they put their hats back on, he followed suit.

I still show this segment to students, and they still roar when they see it, simply because it gets so quickly to something essential about human behavior. The man in the elevator had no idea why the other three passengers were turning around, but he assumed (as most all of us would) that they knew something he didn’t. Perhaps the doors opened at the rear. And so he followed their lead. And even when the door’s opening revealed that the majority was wrong—they weren’t facing the door, after all—he still followed what the majority was doing.

Majorities have enormous power to get us to agree with them or to follow them. That power is direct and pervasive. We see it everywhere, including in decisions that affect people’s lives, such as those made in cockpits or on surgical teams or during jury deliberations. We’ve already seen that the majority’s decision that landing gear was the critical issue caused everyone on the crew of United Airlines Flight 173 to follow and thus to neglect other critical issues. With juries, the outcome of a jury deliberation can be predicted with 90 percent certainty based solely on the majority position on the first ballot. The jury may take hours or days to reach a verdict, but 90 percent of the time its final position is the majority position on the first vote.

That they win doesn’t mean that majorities are necessarily correct. Rather, it means that majorities exert immense pressure on our thoughts and feelings, as well as our judgments and decisions. In fact, as we will see in this chapter, majorities are so powerful that they can trick us into believing things that aren’t true. Ordinary people, when faced with a majority opinion that is clearly incorrect, will nonetheless side with that obvious falsehood over one-third of the time. When the judgment involves ambiguity—as, for example, questions of politics or business often do—the majority’s power is even greater. My colleagues and I have found that people can follow the majority as much as 70 percent of the time, even when that majority is wrong.

The power and pull of the majority is all around us, even if we don’t notice it, and even if we are unaware of its potential influence over us. Majorities get us to agree. They get us to follow them, often without reflection. This is especially true when they are unchallenged. We may believe that we generally think for ourselves and are persuaded only by strong arguments. But we will see that, when faced with the opinions of others, we often agree without good arguments or any arguments at all. We can even lose sight of what we believe and what we know on our own. The simple fact that they are in the majority, that they are “the many,” has this particular power to persuade.

Following the majority can make sense if we think that the majority is right. They may be right, and they often are, but they are not necessarily right. The problem is that we assume that they are right just because they are the majority. To some extent, best-sellers such as The Wisdom of Crowds inadvertently reinforce the assumption that truth lies in numbers.

That book properly points out the value of judgments by “the many” and their superiority in many cases over the judgments of “experts.” What may be lost on the reader, however, is that the majority opinion is superior only under certain circumstances. For example, accuracy is more likely found in numbers if the judgment is a matter of common knowledge. Judging the number of balls in a jar relies on common knowledge. Knowing who discovered the transuranium elements is not so common; an expert in chemistry is more likely to know the name of Glenn Seaborg than a dozen laypeople. Independence of judgment is another critical element. The average judgment of a large number of people can be accurate provided their judgments are independent. If they have influenced one another, ten people might have the accuracy of one. Herding behavior and stock bubbles, for example, demonstrate that many people doing the same thing is not necessarily an indication of their accuracy or good judgment. They may be following one another rather than making independent judgments.

The problem is not that the majority is wrong. Statistically speaking, they may be right, depending on the task and the circumstances. And it is not that the judgment of “the many” is without value. The problem is that we assume that they are right simply because they are “the many” rather than “the few.” The problem is that we make this assumption and then agree or follow—often unreflectively. Thus, while books such as The Wisdom of Crowds correctly point to the accuracy of numbers of people over individual people—even over experts under certain circumstances—their readers may not fully appreciate the limits to that conclusion and the circumstances under which it occurs. More importantly, such books may reinforce the assumption that the majority is right.

The majority can often be wrong. What if everyone in your group expressed a judgment that you knew was not true? You might think that you would not care what they said or did and that you would answer correctly, especially if you could see the truth with your own eyes. Research stretching back more than half a century demonstrates quite clearly, however, that the truth is no sure protection against the majority.

The classic study of this phenomenon was conducted in 1951 by the influential psychologist Solomon Asch. In Asch’s initial study, individuals were shown two slides side by side. One slide showed a line that served as a standard for the experiment. The other slide had three lines for comparison, one of which was equal in length to the standard line. People were shown a series of these slides. Their task was simply to pick the line that was equal to the standard. This wasn’t a difficult task, nor was it ambiguous. One comparison line was exactly equal to the standard, while the other two were noticeably longer or shorter. Alone, people had no difficulty in judging the right answer. It was obvious.

In one of the experimental conditions, the researcher brought in groups of seven to nine individuals, only one of whom was an innocent participant. The others were paid accomplices of the experiment. They formed a unanimous and incorrect majority. The question at stake was whether the naive participant would follow them and give the same wrong answer.

Imagine you are the naive participant. You see the slides. It is clear that line B is the correct answer. You hear the judgment of one person saying that it’s line A. You brush him off; maybe he just has poor vision. Then a second person says, “A.” Now you start to perk up. A third says, “A.” This continues. They all say that A is the correct answer. Now it’s your turn. What would you do? Asch’s results showed that around 37 percent of judgments agreed with the majority’s incorrect judgment.

This study, while first conducted half a century ago, has been replicated many times and in many countries. Whether in Fiji or the Netherlands, in Japan or Canada, many people follow the erroneous majority even when their senses tell them the majority’s judgment is in error. This occurs with many different kinds of people and in many different cultures. This occurs whether we are experts or novices.

The amount of conformity, of following a majority’s erroneous judgment, is affected by a number of variables. In general, the amount of following is higher when the task is more difficult or more ambiguous; it is also higher among individuals who have low self-esteem or who are attracted to the group. Even the size of the majority has a bearing on the degree to which we follow them. Most research shows that conformity increases as the majority size increases from one to around three or four; thereafter, size corresponds little to the amount of conformity.

Solomon Asch, like many psychologists who followed in his footsteps, was not simply interested in manipulating situations to increase or decrease the magnitude of this effect. He wanted to know why people follow the majority even when the majority is in error. Interviews with Asch’s subjects have revealed—and the subjects of many similar experiments since Asch’s study have corroborated—two main reasons why people follow the majority. One is an assumption that truth lies in numbers—that, as the old song goes, “Fifty million Frenchmen can’t be wrong.” We call this the Fifty-Million-Frenchmen Principle. The other reason is a desire to belong—or conversely, a fear of being different and of inviting ridicule or punishment. Many people can relate to the Japanese proverb that the nail that sticks up gets hammered down. And so it does, leading to the Keep-Your-Head-Down Principle.

In the early study by Asch, the majority contradicted reality and the information that participants saw with their own eyes. After the study, the naive participants were interviewed. Some insisted that the majorities had been correct. They actually believed—or reported they believed—that they had seen the lines the same way as the majority. Others had followed the majority even though they knew the majority was wrong. These participants—who were relatively few in number—said that they didn’t want to be different. Most participants didn’t see it this clearly. They didn’t know for sure. They said that they made a judgment call.

Most of the individuals in Asch’s study assumed that the majority must be right and that the problem was with themselves. Each of them, after all, was a minority of one. We generally think that truth lies in numbers. After all, how could so many people get such a simple task wrong? Because of this assumption, participants no longer trusted the information from their own eyes and believed that they must have missed something or miscalculated. The average amount of conformity to error may have been 37 percent, but a much larger proportion of the participants in Asch’s study—75 percent—made such an assumption at least once during the study. That is, on at least one of the trials, three-quarters of the participants followed the majority error even when it contradicted the information they could see with their own eyes.

Perhaps the more striking finding came from the other 25 percent—those who never followed the erroneous majority, not even once. Even though they answered accurately every time, they, too, were not untouched. Even they reported that the majority was probably correct. They, too, didn’t really trust the information from their own eyes. They just felt that it was their obligation to call it as they saw it. After all, they were participating in a study of visual perception, according to the cover story.

Some one hundred studies have investigated this phenomenon since Asch, and time and again they have demonstrated the power of the majority. This is especially true when the entire majority is in agreement or when they are all doing the same thing. Like most of us, they wanted to belong. More importantly, they feared rejection, ridicule, or worse. Indeed, that fear may be an even more potent reason for following a majority than any assessment of its accuracy. When we are motivated to believe that the majority is right, it is much easier to arrive at that conclusion.

The history of the financial industry also reveals the power of the majority to shape judgment and behavior. From the original investing bubble, the South Sea Bubble of the early eighteenth century, to the NASDAQ and housing bubbles of the last twenty years, investors have been known to herd—to put their money where others have already put theirs. Empirical work by economists confirms that investors often follow the decisions of others instead of doing their own due diligence. For example, in the late 1990s, there was a large bubble in the US stock market. Between 1995 and 2000, the NASDAQ rose fivefold. Prices rose precipitously during that period, only to fall by just as much—in less than a year. Obviously, when the bubble is expanding, people are making money. When the bubble pops, most of those people lose money.

As the economist Robert Shiller argues, bubbles are not necessarily evidence that all those investors were incapable of being rational about investment choices, even as they were making bad investment choices. They were being rational about something else. John Maynard Keynes would describe what they were doing as a “reputational calculation.” In this view, one reason why investors follow the crowd and ignore their own judgment is that the average reputational risk for contrarian behavior is greater than the average financial risk. If you deviate from the crowd, you lose in reputation whether you succeed or fail. It is a lose/lose situation. If you are right—and are thus a successful contrarian, it only confirms that you are rash. If you are wrong, and are thus an unsuccessful contrarian, you will be vilified.

This fear of being in the minority manifests itself in workplaces as well. For example, Kathleen Ryan and Daniel Oestreich have found that around 70 percent of employees don’t speak up when they see problems. Their research suggests two reasons. One is that employees think that speaking up won’t matter and the company will simply ignore what they say. The other reason is fear of the majority—fear of those who remained silent and did not report the problem. This is clearly the fear of repercussions, such as ridicule and rejection by colleagues or a larger audience. Silence then becomes part of the power of the majority.

We see similar kinds of following in consumer...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Fear Consensus, Love Dissent
• Part I: Majorities Versus Troublemakers
• Part II: Closed Minds Versus Open Minds
• Part III: Groupthink Versus Groups of Thinkers
• Notes
• Index