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Larry Donnelly is a native of Boston, He teaches law in NUIG. He has published law journal articles in Ireland and internationally, as well as being a regular media commentator. I talked him about an article he wrote for TheJournal.ie.
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Two minds are better than one.
That’s a fairly obviously true saying in most cases; whether in a work environment or elsewhere, most people will be familiar with a situation where people in a group contribute suggestions that together get a solution to a problem that was better than any one member of the group could have come up with.
But it’s not always true. Sometimes a group of people make a worse decision than any individual in the group would have. There’s scientific research on this, it was done, like a surprising amount of interesting research, but the CIA. They did the research in the aftermath of the failed invasion of the Bay of Pigs in Cuba, where the Americans supported anti-Castro Cuban exiles in launching a military attack on their home country.
The attack was a disaster, over 100 of the attackers were killed and almost all of the rest of the force of 1,500 men were captured. In retrospect it seemed obvious to everyone that such a tiny force, even with American-supplied weapons and backup, could never stand a chance against a relatively-well defended country, and the hope that this ragtag bunch of former plantation owners, landlords, businessmen and trust fund kids could inspire the population to overthrow their government and install them in charge instead seemed insane.
Yet this plan, insane in retrospect, was signed off by many well-qualified committees and experienced military people in the CIA. How could so many smart people have made such a big mistake?
In fact, that was the problem. Fair play to them, the CIA brought in psychologists to analyse why the mistake had been made and avoid similar ones in future. And the resulting research was clear. One problem was the number of people involved.
The fact that there was so many of them, so many different committees, planning split across the Eisenhower and Kennedy presidency, and no individual thought that they personally were responsible. Each individual saw that lots of other smart people were agreeing to the plan, so if they had doubts, they kept them to themselves; with the effect that everyone in the room thought that they were the only person with a niggling doubt, none of these other smarty guys have this doubt, I must be wrong so I’ll stay shtum. And even if the whole thing does wrong, it won’t be me held responsible, it’ll be all those other smart guys.
I’ve heard this research expanded on by some business leaders who talk about this effect being amplified where there is a lack of diversity in the room where a decision is being made. That kind of fits here. All those CIA decision-makers most likely had the same type of background, they were guys that came from middle-class white families, were educated in military academies, and had similar career paths from the army into the CIA.
So where one of them has a blind-spot in decision making, there’s a very high risk that most or all of the others in the room have the same blind spot. In this case, when Cuban former landlords, who had been booted out by Castro, told them that for sure their former tenants would welcome them back and give them back their plantations, these CIA guys were all the type of people who wanted to hear and believe that.
And because they wanted to believe that, they did believe it. That’s when two minds are dumber than one, and a whole roomful of minds is even dumber still.
So you’d think that current trend towards diversity could have benefits that people haven’t even thought about; more diverse perspectives can lead to better decision-making. But the problem I see here is that what’s important to better decision making is more diverse perspectives. That isn’t always what happens.
There’s a particular type of comeback that is sneaking from the nastier corners of social media into politics. The Sinn Féin senator Lynn Boylan gave a prime example of it in the Seanad recently.
This is what is called ad hominem, which is a fancy Latin way of saying playing the man, not the ball. It’s when someone doesn’t have the smarts to defeat their opponent in a debate, so they try to insult them instead, and say that their argument can’t be right because look at the eejit who’s saying it.
As exemplified by Senator Boylan, the most recent fashion for this type weak-mindedness tries to hide behind supposedly being the valiant defender of some put-upon minority or other; but it’s very noticeable that the people who use it are often themselves middle-class white people, not from the group that they claim to be defending.
Since I used the groupthink example from the 1960s, here’s another example. If you have a political point to make, this is the way to persuade people.
If your argument relies on insulting your opponent, or saying that it’s invalid because of who that person is, then you need to look at it again, because that’s a weak argument.
