The Cognitive Biases of Hierarchy
Posted by Kevin Carson on Aug 20, 2010 in Commentary • 13 commentsIn a recent column (“Why Networks Defeat Hierarchies,” C4SS, Aug. 12), I examined the tendency of hierarchies to suppress negative feedback on their own performance. Paranoia over leaks and the obsessive desire to protect the leadership’s monopoly on information leads to knowledge being denied those in the organization who need it to make effective policy. Data from below is systematically filtered to create a false image of the world at the top of the pyramid. And the discretion that subordinates need to cope with the unexpected, against a background of information overload, is hampered by management’s need to have a finger in every pie.
Another, related problem is the cognitive biases that authority itself implants in the mind of the individual manager.
In an essay at (of all places) The Wall Street Journal (“The Power Trip,” August 14), Jonah Lehrer describes the findings of psychologists’ experiments on how power affects one’s view of the world. According to Lehrer, the experiments found that people in a position of power display behavior patterns commonly associated with damage to the portions of the cerebral cortex that govern empathy and the ability to imagine the world from others’ perspective. Power, in other words, kills the ability even to understand that there are other perspectives than those of the hierarchy.
One part, in particular, was interesting: after being assigned to superior and subordinate positions in a role-playing game, participants were exposed to fake cell phone ads. Some of the ads emphasized product quality and price, while others “featured weak or nonsensical arguments.” Interestingly, subjects who’d been role-modeling positions of authority “were far less sensitive to the quality of the argument.” Lehrer writes:
“This suggests that even fleeting feelings of power can dramatically change the way people respond to information. Instead of analyzing the strength of the argument, those with authority focus on whether or not the argument confirms what they already believe. If it doesn’t, then the facts are conveniently ignored.”
So if you wonder why the MBAs at corporate seem to be literally unaware of any alternative to the Nardelli/Fiorina/”Chainsaw Al” model of downsizing everybody and giving themselves a bonus, the answer is: they probably are. Their own power has made them stupid.
I think part of the explanation for the outcome of the cell phone experiment might be that people in power are encultured to shut off the capacity to critically evaluate communication based on internal logic or sense, and instead to evaluate it based on how authoritative the source is. After all, if they’re not at the very top of the pyramid, they’re expected to “buy in” to whatever comes from above and uncritically pass it along down the conveyor belt.
And applying critical thought processes to policies or other communications from management is, for ordinary workers, clear evidence that one doesn’t have his mind right. To evaluate communications from above in terms of their content, rather than simply tucking one’s head and saying “I obey,” suggests (however faintly) that the evaluator views the source of the communication as in some sense their equal or peer, and sees the communication as an attempt at persuasion by an equal rather than someone under whose authority they have been set.
In conversations with authoritarians about the stupidity of the pointy-haired bosses, I frequently encounter statements that “they’ve been put in authority for a reason, and it’s been decided that blah blah woof woof.” Note the passive voice. The people in authority, and their policies, are just part of “the way things are,” embedded in the nature of the universe. If you state it instead in the active voice (“So-and-so says to do this”), there’s the danger that someone will see the issuer of the order as a mere mortal with individual goals and desires and subjective judgment. Then, rather than accepting “the rules” as something that’s “been decided” like tablets handed down from Mt. Sinai, they might start actually examining the motivations and judgment of their superiors, and evaluating — from the standpoint of an equal — whether they’re good or bad.
Once you start viewing as equals the people who set the speed limits for a particular stretch of highway or write the instructions on a box of mac and cheese, or who send you all those idiotic memos every day, and you evaluate their communications based on whether they make sense rather than the authority of their source, your mind is no longer right. Once you view the makers of rules as your equals, and their rules as arguments or suggestions to be evaluated and followed based on your own judgment of their merits (If it’s not “a good idea,” I don’t CARE if it’s “the law”), you’ve established that you’re a dog with too much ancestral wolf DNA to be safe around humans.
BTW, I found an article by Alfie Kohn making some similar points. Extended quote:
http://www.alfiekohn.org/teaching/challenging.htm
When I was a teacher, I always made a point of stopping any student who used the plural pronoun when talking about a book: “They say on page 87 that. . . .” What bothered me was not the grammatical error (assuming only one person wrote the book), but the disappearance of the author into the indefinite “they.” Authors are fallible and have distinctive points of view, I reminded my classes. When we lose sight of the person behind the words, we forget that those words can be challenged.
Exactly the same thing happens when students encounter a series of finished products, whether they are books, scientific laws, or ethical precepts. Thus, one solution is to allow them to watch something being written, or proved, or decided, in order to make the activity in question more accessible and less intimidating. Good writing or thinking isn’t up there and out of reach, done only by others and handed down to us. Rather, it’s something students realize they might be able to do themselves, even if they can’t do it all that well yet.
Equally important, the solutions, conclusions, compositions, and decisions that are set out as examples are not immune from the students’ critical inspection. And by demystifying the activity, we demystify the people engaged in the activity.
Taking an evolutionary psychology perspective*, it is reasonable for people with power to approach problems differently from people without power. The person without power has to deal with the general world directly, as is, and try to create wealth. The person with power only has to deal with his subordinates, and extract wealth from them. As such, his main interest is to keep his subordinates in line, so anything that he says has to be filtered with that goal in mind. If the easiest way to say the right thing is to think the right thing, then the powerful person's thinking would be structured such that he only thinks those things that would benefit him if his subordinates thought likewise.
Along these lines, you may be interested in some recent game-theory developments trying to explain why human societies are more egalitarian than other ape societies (e.g. chimps, gorillas). As I understand it, the basic idea behind the "egalitarian revolution" hypothesis is that as humans became more intelligent, the ability to form coalitions became more important than one-on-one fighting ability, and this leads to an equilibrium condition where the "dominant" coalition includes everyone. I haven't had a chance to read the original paper (it's publicly available), but it could provide some insights into the conditions that might contribute to a modern egalitarian revolution.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/10/0810… http://svenssonresearchlaboratory.blogspot.com/20…
*This is just speculation, not sound science.
"This is just speculation, not sound science"–like evolutionary game theory, sociobiology, etc.
It's still fun to read about; thanks for providing the links. The notion that the emergence of intelligence makes fighting a less valuable success strategy seems pretty intuitive; the idea that, because it isn't, cooperation is the obvious alternative is worth more thought. Presuming people are well informed, that seems right. But one thing intelligent people can do is to mystify others into believing that, even absent superior physical force, they should still be obeyed non-consensually because God or Nature or the State has conferred superior rank on them.
A keen eye, Mr. Carson. Thanks for sharing such a sharp perception of one of our most overbearing social myths. -f
Yup, my students constantly refer to the author as "they" — drives me crazy.
OT – Is there a place to submit links to outstandingly daft defenses of the state?:
http://bit.ly/b3U6Qp
It just seemed…remarkable.
Josh – I'm not sure why you found this so egregious. It sounds like the guy is a minarchist of sorts and that is still a better realization than the status quo.
I think sometimes getting people to see the practicality and benefit of lessoning regulations, if not abolishing them, is a first step – which is where this article seems to be (to me).
Now, if you mean the mention of bloggers having to get a license – well that’s another case; one I hope Mr. Carson addresses at some point because, we had to see this one coming, right?
A few years ago after the Mohammed cartoon fiasco I watched Alan Dersowitch, on Colbert, suggest that we consider licensing cartoonists. As a person who cartoons, I saw this as an affront to one of the most spontaneous and individually free forms of communication that we have developed – so of course he would want it licensed; after all – look what a ruckus those cartoons can cause.
It only makes sense that they would target blogging this way – even though the intent may be “innocent” – it is the equivalent of getting Capone on taxes; if you can’t shut the bloggers' voice down in court then tax their voice away.
Josh: I second what Joe said. Compared to the mainstream liberal shock and outrage in Yglesias' column, it looks like a pretty thoughtful reassessment of the real effects of state involvement in the economy. True, he doesn't go all the way and become and anarchist — but then how many do? Compared to the reflexive defense of all state regulation as ipso facto "progressive," in what passes for mainstream discourse, this is an almost pure distillation of sweet reason.
Ok, "oustandingly daft" is overheated. The perils of late-night commenting. Your points are fair. And of course lowering barriers to entry is a good thing.
I guess what rankled a bit is how he kinda tiptoes up to admitting the state is an instrument of class-power, but then…itdoessomegoodthingstoo. This kind of attempted equanimity seems to me to close the door on considering the possibility of anarchism rather than be a first step toward it.
The rhetorical structure is roughly: "it is commonly thought that the right is anti-state and the left is pro-state, but lo! there is a third way! A minimal state liberalism!" Thus are the options yet again circumscribed while appearing to expand.
But I suppose I should try to be a more glass half full kinda guy.
I wonder how this could relate to "theoretical authority." It would be pretty interesting if theoretical authorities had similar cognitive biases once obtaining such a position in academia, especially relating to the ability to recognize good/bad argumentation.
Hume: from what I've seen (in Biology) a number of researchers do become obsessed with "their legacy" or their pet theory. They argue for it incessantly, and seem unwilling to acknowledge difficult evidence. Sometimes researchers will concede a debate that they have put a lot of effort into, but often it seems that once a person has put a lot of time into developing a theory, he is quite unwilling to abandon it.
For an interesting read, check out Motoo Kimura's obituary:
(www.genetics.org/cgi/reprint/140/1/1.pdf)
"Promoting and defending the theory became an obsession
with him, and he lost no opportunity to argue
for its importance. Discussion was not a matter of give
and take, but of polemics. He was inventive in continuously
finding new evidence, as new facts emerged."
In the end, it doesn't matter too much, because old scientists die and the ultimate "jury" is composed of other researchers who are not personally invested in the theory. In some sense, these obsessive advocates play a similar role to lawyers in the American legal system — arguing for their case and letting a jury decide.
Even worse would be the phenomenon described *combined
with* the Dunning-Kruger effect:
quote:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning-Kruger_effec…
The Dunning-Kruger effect is an example of cognitive bias in
which "…people reach erroneous conclusions and make
unfortunate choices but their incompetence robs them of the
metacognitive ability to realize it"[1]. They therefore suffer
an illusory superiority, rating their own ability as above
average. This leads to a perverse result where people with
less competence will rate their ability more highly than
people with relatively more competence.
[...snip...]
Across four studies, the authors found that participants
scoring in the bottom quartile on tests of humor, grammar, and
logic GROSSLY OVERESTIMATED THEIR TEST
PERFORMANCE AND ABILITY. Although test scores put them in the
12th percentile, they estimated themselves to be in the 62nd.
Meanwhile, PEOPLE WITH TRUE KNOWLEDGE TENDED
TO UNDERESTIMATE THEIR COMPETENCE.
A follow-up study suggests that grossly incompetent students
improve both their skill level and their ability to estimate
their class rank only after extensive tutoring in the skills
they had previously lacked.
end quote.
I hereby suggest that the world's problems are caused by a
confluence of: 1) the phenomenon described by Kevin (cognitive
bias of power), combined with 2) the Dunning-Kruger effect,
combined, often, with 3) psychopathy/sociopathy (total lack of
conscience). There's some overlap of the three, particularly
#1 and #3. In any case I think it can readily be seen that the world
is run by people suffering from varying degrees of the three in
combination, and that as long as that is the case then the world
world will be driven to ruin — which accords with empirical
observation.
Interesting, Alan. I recall some semi-tongue-in-cheek org theory writer arguing that the Peter Principle was overly optimistic, because the people who made promotion decisions were themselves too incompetent to accurately evaluate the performance of their subordinates. So in the real world, people are promoted a couple rungs *above* their level of incompetence before anybody notices.