A reader recently wrote to suggest that if we really want to understand what drives the culture of the Claremont 400, we should look to the fields of social psychology and behavioral economics. Both disciplines look at group dynamics and how those dynamics affect the rationality of individuals.
The reader recommended the works of two people in particular. The first is social psychologist Irving Janis. Janis is famous for coining the term "groupthink". His most well-known work was his study of the Kennedy Administration's decision to invade the Bay of Pigs in 1961. Janis came to believe that groups that are too homogeneous in their ideology ignore critical bits of information that contradict their worldview. As a result, no matter how intelligent the group is individually, collectively it can make wrong decisions. In the case of the Bay of Pigs, thinking that a force of 1,200 could successfully invade and control Cuba.
Decision-making bodies marked by "groupthink" tend to seek unanimity and consensus at all cost and discourage or even punish challenges to their preconceptions. (Sound familiar?)
According to the group Psychologists for Social Responsibility, Janis identified several hallmarks of groupthinkers:
- Illusion of invulnerability –Creates excessive optimism that encourages taking extreme risks.
- Collective rationalization – Members discount warnings and do not reconsider their assumptions.
- Belief in inherent morality – Members believe in the rightness of their cause and therefore ignore the ethical or moral consequences of their decisions.
- Stereotyped views of out-groups – Negative views of “enemy” make effective responses to conflict seem unnecessary.
- Direct pressure on dissenters – Members are under pressure not to express arguments against any of the group’s views.
- Self-censorship – Doubts and deviations from the perceived group consensus are not expressed.
- Illusion of unanimity – The majority view and judgments are assumed to be unanimous.
- Self-appointed ‘mindguards’ – Members protect the group and the leader from information that is problematic or contradictory to the group’s cohesiveness, view, and/or decisions.
And, as our reader pointed out, the Claremont 400, especially during the Southard days, exhibited all of these traits. That is likely the reason they hate people like Jackie McHenry so much. McHenry was constantly waving the 400's inconsistency and hypocrisy in their faces. A more skilled politician might have tried to build a coalition around those contrary voices, but McHenry was too much of a non-politician (as her campaign material pointed out) to cobble together a governing coalition. That doesn't necessarily make her reasoning wrong, and those contrary voices are still out there in the community.
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The other person the reader suggested to us was James Surowiecki, who writes the Financial Page column for The New Yorker magazine.
The reader pointed us to 2004 Surowiecki's book The Wisdom of Crowds. Drawing on work by social psychologists, economists, and political scientists, Surowiecki argued that the larger and more ideologically diverse a group, the more they debate (even if they have heated, knockdown, dragout arguments), the better the group was at making complex decisions.
In the book's introduction, Surowiecki wrote:
Diversity and independence are important because the best collective decisions are the product of disagreement and contest, not consensus or compromise. An intelligent group, especially when confronted with cognition problems, does not ask its members to modify their positions in order to let the group reach a decision everyone can be happy with. Instead, it figures out how to use mechanisms--like market prices, or collective voting systems--to aggregate and produce collective judgments that represent not what any one person in the group thinks, but rather, in some sense, what they all think. Paradoxically, the best way for a group to be smart is for each person in it to act and think as independently as possible.
[Emphasis added]
As Surowiecki points out, no individual in a group holds 100% of the information needed to make a decision. Some hold 90%, some hold 1%, but even that one percent can be critical over time because errors by decision-making bodies compound. And everyone, even the uneducated, hold some critical bits of information.
When organizations exclude or filter the available information they base their decisions on, each future decision is affected, and the quality of the future decisions is diminished. Engineers would say that the level of noise in the system increases over time.
A group might start out at close to 100% meaningful information (signal, as the engineers say), and they might chose to ignore someone like the late Mike Noonan, a Claremont gadfly whom the Claremont 400 hated even more than Jackie McHenry, but even Noonan had some correct information buried in the noise of his ramblings. By refusing to take the time to sift through Noonan's and the like's noise to look for the signal, past city councils wound up ignoring important ideas and make weaker decisions.
Claremont's signal-to-noise ratio was close to zero by the end of the Southard administration, and the voting public responded.
Corporations are beginning to recognize the need for better decision-making processes, ones that are divorced from the usual yes-man hierarchy that characterizes many American companies. Some have experimented with decision markets, in which employees buy and sell futures contracts based on the likelihood of an event. Proponents of decision markets have argued that they can be more accurate than expert opinion in many cases, possibly because they a larger, more diverse group is participating rather than an elite few.
Even the Noonans of the world, it turns out, have something important to say. The question is: Are we listening?
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