CHQ Dialogues Reading #9 "Why We Should Have the Courage to Disagree"

Why We Should Have the Courage to Disagree FACILITATOR 3” ID

FACILITATOR 3” ID

We need people who see the world di erently

By Tim Harford Tim Harford writes the Undercover Economist column, and was previously an economics leader writer for the FT. He rst joined the newspaper as Peter Martin Fellow in 2003.Tim is the author of seven books, including the million-selling The Undercover Economist and most recently Fifty Things That Made the Modern Economy. He is also a regular presenter for BBC radio.He was made an OBE in the 2019 new year honors list “for services to improving economic understanding”.

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A few days after Christmas in 1978, United Airlines Flight 173 ran into trouble on its descent into Portland, Oregon.

The landing gear should have descended smoothly and an indicator light blinked on to indicate all was secure.

Instead, there was a loud bang and no light. While the crew tried to gure out whether the landing gear was in position or not, the plane circled and circled. The engineer mentioned that fuel was running low, but didn’t manage to muster enough forcefulness to convey the urgency to the captain, who was focused on the landing gear. Finally, when the rst o cer said “we’re going to lose an engine, buddy”, the captain asked, “why?” The plane crashed shortly afterwards. Ten people died. The lesson: sometimes we can’t bring ourselves to speak up, even when lives are at stake. It might seem strange, in this politically divided age, to call for people to speak out if they see things di erently.

But our current political discourse doesn’t quite qualify.

(Abuse is not an argument, as any Monty Python fan knows.) Useful dissent means serious engagement with people who see the world di erently — or, perhaps, the courage to puncture the consensus of one’s own tribe. It is far more common to see people seeking out like-minded groups, while politicians are happy to deliver hell re sermons to their own choirs. That is a shame. Within a cohesive group, the mere demonstration that disagreement is possible can have liberating e ects. Charlan Nemeth, a psychologist at the University of California, Berkeley, studies dissent. (Her recent book is titled, No!: The Power of Disagreement in a World that Wants to Get Along.) When she arrived at the university she found her o ce a little too austere, and decided to put down a rug. “These o ces are all the same for a reason,” remonstrated a colleague. She kept the rug anyway — and before long, her colleagues started putting rugs in their o ces, too. Apparently, few people had liked the austere o ces but nobody was willing to admit that. It took Prof. Nemeth’s low-level troublemaking to shatter the illusion of consensus.

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Prof. Nemeth has studied disagreement during brainstorming sessions. One rule of brainstorming is not to criticize the ideas of others. When she and colleagues ran their sessions, they found that groups produced more ideas if the “do not criticize” rule was reversed, encouraging participants to “debate and even criticize each other’s ideas”. Dissent can free us to place rugs in our o ces, or express our individuality in more important ways. It can

also stimulate our ideas and creativity. And — as the case of Flight 173 suggests — if we hesitate forcefully to disrupt a group conversation, that can deny others a vital piece of information.

Matthew Syed, in his book Rebel Ideas, draws the same conclusion from a disastrous attempt on Everest in 1996.

Mr Syed argues that junior members of the expedition had useful pieces of information about the weather and their equipment but tended to stay silent, deferring to the team leaders.

A similar dynamic is at play in lower-stakes environments.

One study, conducted by Garold Stasser and William Titus, asked undergraduates to discuss hypothetical candidates for a student society president. The researchers gave each participant a di erent fact sheet; some facts were given to everyone in the discussion, but others were disclosed to only one person. People rarely spoke up about their private information, and the conversation revolved — redundantly — around what the whole group knew already rather than trying to nd out what wasn’t widely known. There was an opportunity for everyone to learn from everybody else, but it proved more comfortable to focus on knowledge that they all had in common.

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The truth is that disagreement is hard. We nd it unpleasant to be disagreed with, and it can be painful to be a dissenter. Prof. Nemeth notes that when she hired actors to play the role of dissenters in experiments studying group dynamics, the actors found it distressing to be on the

receiving end of hostility. Some even asked for “combat pay”. Even in gentler settings, we underestimate the bene t of friction. One study of problem solving (conducted by Katherine Phillips, Katie Liljenquist and Margaret Neale) simply contrasted small groups of friends with those of three friends plus a stranger. The groups with an outsider did much better at solving the problems, even though the strangers had no special expertise: their mere presence raised everyone’s game. Nevertheless, the groups of friends enjoyed themselves more and had more con dence in their answers — con dence that was, of course, badly misplaced.

We rarely appreciate it when someone is speaking out rather than tting in. But whether it is as trivial as a rug, or as vital as a fuel gauge in a circling aircraft, we need people who see things that we don’t. We need them to speak up.

And we also need to listen when they do.

"Why should we have the courage to disagree" is the 9th reading in this series designed to stimulate your thinking as a facilitator about how people participate in civil discourse.

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This reading appeared in the Financial Times on February 1, 2020.