āI don't need their good opinions I have plenty of opinions Everybody has opinions but it doesn't make them true." -Mean Girls: The Musical
Complete the following sentences.
There are no right or wrong answers.
Itās all a matter of your opinion (of someone elseās opinion):
David thinks religion is a waste of time becauseā¦
Rabbi Jeffās congregation struggles to attract new members becauseā¦
Shira and David only go to synagogue on the High Holidays becauseā¦
Bob is against abortion becauseā¦
Rachel thinks anti-Semitism is on the rise becauseā¦
In each case, the hypothetical person engages in behavior or expresses some opinion; their choice is not up for debate. Your role is to explain why they do what they do or feel what they feel.Ā Look at your responses:Ā
Why did you choose each response?
Could you alter each of your explanations so that you only provide favorable reasons for the person making the decision?1
Iām asking you to do a basic act of perspective-taking; anyone is welcome to hold any opinion, but our ability to engage with one another depends on whether or not we take the time to understand anotherās worldview. But most of us, including me, close our minds when we need to open them.
And if itās hard to do this when one person judges another, imagine how hard it is when an entire group must do it across a whole range of opinions.
All communities face this challenge, and I suspect itās not getting any easier. So letās roll up our sleeves and learn.
Consensus Bias
Ever been on a road trip and gotten a speeding ticket?
Such a buzzkill.Ā
With that in mind, consider this hypothetical:
While driving through a rural area near your home you are stopped by a county police officer who informs you that you have been clocked (with radar) at 38 miles per hour in a 25-mph zone. You believe this information to be accurate. After the policeman leaves, you inspect your citation and find that the details on the summons regarding weather, visibility, time, and location of violation are highly inaccurate. The citation informs you that you may either pay a $20 fine by mail without appearing in court or you must appear in municipal court within the next two weeks to contest the charge.2
What percentage of your peers would you expect to pay the $20 fine, and what percentage would you expect to contest the charge in court? The answers must add up to 100%.3
This scenario is one in a series of experiments by Lee Ross, David Greene, and Pamela House (RGH) to demonstrate what they term the āfalse consensus effectā (FCE), sometimes known as āconsensus bias.ā While there are several cognitive biases weāve discussed about how groups can seem to reach agreement when there is much-hidden dissent (Abilene paradox, confirmation bias, illusory truth effect, etc.), FCE demonstrates that individuals āsee their own behavioral choices and judgments as relatively common and appropriate to existing circumstances while viewing alternative responses as uncommon, deviant, or inappropriate.ā4
In other words, itās not just that we seek out information that confirms the rightness of our choices; we are also more likely to ascribe negative qualities and motivations to those who make different choices than we do, what RGH calls a ādistortion in the attribution process.ā5 Ā Once a distorted field of vision takes over, all of a sudden, people can presume all kinds of things about other people, turning even small disagreements into major conflicts.
Consensus bias is one reason Iāve never loved pleas for āJewish unity.ā
First, any claim of Jewish unity presumes a kind of consensus bias, believing that certain ideas where every Jew should obviously agree with one another.
But more importantly, the FCE reminds us that if there is someone who does not embrace a core principle of how someone else defines āJewish unity,ā forgetting that we have āidiosyncratic interpretations of situations factors and forcesā6 can lead us to ascribe sinister intent to others.
Many of us love to talk about how much Judaism admires discussion and debate (for good reason.) Still, our organizations would probably function better if we took a cue from Jewish tradition and try and understand the opinions of others before we make judgments about their choices.
Complicit
All of us are guilty of the consensus bias from time to time. People skilled in leadership practice typically know how to manage agreement and disagreement and only presume consensus after much exploration. However, while ignoring a lack of consensus is not inherently unethical or illegal, the FCE can serve as a gateway to leaders allowing more serious unethical behavior to be tolerated. For that reason, I hope youāll consider reading Max Bazermanās Complicit.
Sadly, the Jewish organizational world is no stranger to unethical behavior: However, we have little knowledge about how well most organizations measure up in terms of tolerating unethical behaviors in terms of personnel, accounting, governance, etc. While I lack the necessary data to evaluate it, Bazermanās last book shows how one spots the early signs.
Transitioning from the nonprofit world to the world of corporate fraud, Bazerman uses the case of Theranos as an opportunity to examine how our tendency to prefer simple, singular explanations for complex problems can encourage unethical behavior and allow past bad behavior to repeat itself:
Theranos was a health technology company founded by Elizabeth Holmes that raised massive amounts of money with a promise to revolutionize healthcare, only to be later uncovered as a fraud, resulting in the imprisonment of Holmes and company president Sunny Balwani.
Bazerman does not deny Holmes and Balwani's guilt (how could you?), but his interest is in all the people complicit in Theranosā crimes who will likely never be punished other than perhaps losing money.
When Theranos was all the rage, venture capital firms were all too eager to give this company money at a massive valuation, major figures from the world of business and politics served on Theranosā board, and major media outlets were happy to put Holmes on the cover before the winds shifted.
However, John Carreyrou and others poked holes in Theranosā story long before the fraud was revealed, and even then, many supporters refused to believe it. And since Theranos billed itself as a healthcare company, we have no idea whose health was harmed by their fraudulent technology.Ā
In examining Theranos, Bazerman makes the case that while Holmes and Balwani deserve their punishments, many people cannot mentally absorb that there are other actors complicit in the illegal activity and should be held to account, what Bazerman calls the the āfallacy of a single cause.ā7 Just because our minds assimilate a single primary cause for most complex problems more easily does not mean that the simplest explanation is the best.
Returning to the FCE, Bazermanās analysis should pause leaders when a group analyzes a complex problem and gravitates toward a single overarching cause. Once that single cause takes over the narrative, it becomes a kind of anchor to all future thinking, and leaders should welcome questioning a leaderās assumptions rather than blindly trusting their judgment. Ultimately, little is gained by leaders by encouraging ādevotion at the expense of deliberation.ā8
Fraud in Academia
Bazerman on the Freakonomics podcast.
Terrific for the researchers and scientists who subscribe.
110%
According to Google Trends, searches for āhow to overcome lonelinessā spiked 110% in the past 30 days.
What I Read This Week
Art of Doing Niksen (Nothing): I love it when a language has a word with no English equivalent. Here is a Danish word we should all get to know.
Declining Trust At Work: Since COVID-19, work colleagues trust each other less, with no signs of abatement. Read more
American Jewish Philanthropy in 2022: Excellent report from the Ruderman Family Foundation and the Lilly Family School of Philanthropy on trends in giving among American Jews. Here is the report.
Why Content Moderation is a Red Herring: I donāt always love what Jonathan Haidt writes, but I love his piece about technology and social media.
The Text File that Runs the Internet: Robots.txt is a component of the modern internet that secretly runs much of our lives. Read more.
In other words, if you say, āDavid thinks religion is a waste of time because he is stupid,ā you are responding to Davidās opinion with an opinion of your own. I suspect that if you disagree with the choice of any of these individuals, your explanation for why they do what they do will be unfavorable to them. The challenge is to provide an answer for each prompt that reflects positively on them (which may be difficult depending on the prompt.)
For rhetorical effect, this entire passage was taken word-for-word from the article that first outlines what becomes known as the false consensus effect. See:
Lee Ross, David Greene, and Pamela House, āThe āfalse consensus effectā: An egocentric bias in social perception and attribution processes,ā in Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, Volume 13, Issue 3 (May 1977), 282.
Ibid.
Ibid., 280.
Ibid., 299.
Ibid., 299.
Ibid., 79.