Wiser: Getting Beyond Groupthink to Make Groups Smarter

"This book is helpful because it’s about how groups work together and so many of our decisions are made in groups. They have their own peculiar dynamics, which, if you don’t know about them, can cause problems. I just found it a great, straightforward book that pulled together all the evidence about why groups sometimes make good decisions, and sometimes go wrong. For example, one potential problem is information cascades. If one person speaks first and asserts something, then it’s easier to agree. So everyone just ends up agreeing with this one thing. It can be really random, who happened to speak first, or what they said, and it may not be the best idea, but it builds momentum. It becomes very hard to challenge it, because all the incentives are to agree. They point out that often it’s leaders or people higher in the status hierarchy who speak first, so you don’t get a genuine discussion. This can have some really interesting consequences. For example, you might think that groups are a moderating influence and will come to more of a compromise than individuals. That’s not the case. Groups actually end up creating more extreme positions because of this snowball effect of everyone agreeing. They’ll go, ‘While we’re at it, why don’t we do this as well?’ This leads to other problems. For example, compared to individuals, groups are much more aggressive when it comes to other groups. Conflict between groups is generally nastier than conflict between individuals, partly because they become more extreme, and you’re bonding together in your opposition. Another problem is that groups often spend a lot of time talking about information everybody knows. The most critical thing may only be known by one or two people, but it’s never discussed, because the incentives aren’t there. Then they talk about things you can do to improve those group discussions, some of which are quite hard. They include monitoring who speaks first in the discussion, so leaders do not speak first, and incentivizing new information. Another option is giving people the chance to write down their thoughts before they are in a social situation, when they don’t have the pressure of listening to other people. They can think about what they actually believe, rather than being influenced by other people. Everyone can discuss their actual position later and combine all those individual thoughts in a group setting. They also argue that groups can be wiser than individuals if you set them up correctly. So the way you create the meeting, the incentives, the way the agenda is set, how you do feedback, all really matter. We’re all having meetings all the time and we’re not doing them very well. Wiser gives us some evidence-based ways of making them better. There are other books on this topic, but this one is very no-nonsense and gives you the data. There’s been a ton of new research in the last 10-15 years that really changes our view of hypocrisy. There are a couple of books about hypocrisy, but they do it in a different way, and there’s been nothing recently. It was also a concept that I couldn’t get out of my head. I was reading an article in February 2020, and it just really took hold of me, because when I thought about it, I realized the concept is everywhere. It really drives some of our fury and our behavior. We’re using it in really varied ways, and in ways we don’t fully understand. Hypocrisy is not something that exists in the world: it’s a judgment we make about the inconsistency of others that we don’t like. We are motivated to see hypocrisy all the time. It speaks to a deep sense of fairness in us. It triggers a sense that people are gaining something they don’t deserve. That sense of fairness has deep, evolutionary roots, but our criticisms of hypocrisy always end up bending back into hypocrisy themselves. This is the hypocrisy trap. Whenever you’re calling hypocrisy out, your motives are mixed. You want to look good yourself by being the accuser. You claim that you’re doing it because someone else has violated some principles, but you often put standards on other people that you can’t live up to yourself. So it creates more hypocrisy, if the accusations get out of control. The other danger is that we just use the concept all the time, so that it becomes meaningless, and people stop caring about it. They can say, ‘So what if I’m a hypocrite? I don’t care. I’m just going to do this anyway.’ And some of that moderating influence of hypocrisy that we depend upon gets trashed because we’ve overused it. I think that’s where we’re in danger of heading. It’s in various places. I talk about companies. I talk about personal relationships. It can be problematic in all of them. There are three things I suggest we should do. One is that we can try and be more consistent and act more in line with our intentions or our ambitions. That’s where some of the behavioral science comes in. We also need to understand why people are accusing us of hypocrisy, what gets us in trouble, and ways of making it less likely that we get called out. That’s justified because some of the accusations are spurious and out of control. The final thing is to try and change our views of hypocrisy and what level of consistency we think is even appropriate, because behavioral science would say that inconsistency is baked into social behavior. Indeed, in some cultures, hypocrisy is not such a big deal, because the idea that you’re behaving differently in different situations—you’re inconsistent because of the demands on you—is more accepted. I’m not saying we have to go that far, but I think we need to understand that there are some hypocrisies that we think are valuable and get us to a better place, and there are some that are toxic. Rather than just saying hypocrisy is bad, we need to distinguish between the different kinds. I think part of the problem for politics is that as a politician, you’re in an adversarial system where you’re forced to take a position on issues and, often, you have to take it quickly. These are often really complicated, complex issues, and so you may then have to revise that. But any revision is jumped upon by opponents, because it’s an easy accusation to make. It is the easiest thing you can say about your opponent in politics, that they’re a hypocrite. Also, the reason people don’t like it is that they feel that politicians’ whole job is to state principles that they believe in. That therefore opens you up massively to violating those principles. The truth is that in politics, you need both principles and pragmatism. We want people to get things done, as well as give a really clear statement of what they believe in. So we put inconsistent demands on politicians, and a lot of the anger we feel is just our own hypocrisy reflected back at us, because we’re making those inconsistent demands and we’re pretending we don’t. We flip between the two. ‘Just get something done. Be pragmatic about it. Why can no one get anything done?’ ‘Why don’t you stand up for what you believe in?’ We want both those things at once."