How We Know What Isn't So (20 page)

The extent to which such differences in construal give rise to the false consensus effect has been amply demonstrated by empirical research.
¹³
What this research implies is that people are generally aware that others have different tastes, values, and orientations, and this awareness influences their judgments about the extent to which other people believe as they do. People are less aware, however, of another source of divergent beliefs—the fact that the same issue or situation is construed quite differently by different people, even people with the same tastes, values, and orientations. As social psychologist Solomon Asch noted many years ago, differences of opinion between people are not always linked to differences in their “judgment of the object,” but often reflect differences in the very “object of judgment” itself.
¹⁴
To the extent that we are unaware of this hidden source of divergent opinion, we are likely to overestimate the extent to which others share our beliefs. With our beliefs thereby bolstered by unwarranted levels of perceived social support, we hold them with greater conviction and are less likely to abandon them in the face of logical or empirical challenges to their validity.

It might be expected that most of our misconceptions, particularly our misconceptions about what other people think, would be corrected by feedback from others. People might be expected to let us know when our beliefs are out of line, or at least when our assumptions about
them
are out of line. This is no doubt true to some degree: Many of our most bizarre and erroneous beliefs do not survive our interactions and discussions with others. Nevertheless, I will argue in the balance of this chapter that such corrective feedback is not as common as one might think. To a certain extent this is due to the fact—discussed above—that we associate primarily with those who share our own beliefs, values, and habits. Even more important, however, is that even when we do cross paths with people whose beliefs and attitudes conflict with our own, we are rarely challenged. People are generally reluctant to openly question another person’s beliefs.
*

My own experience in writing this book is instructive in this regard. Over the last several months, numerous people have asked me about what I am writing, including many who hold the kind of beliefs about psychic powers and holistic health practices that I call into question in Chapters 8 and 10. One might expect, then, that a brief description of the book would produce spirited argument over our various points of disagreement. I am sad to say that this has rarely happened. Instead, my descriptions of the book are met with the kind of acquiescence and affirmative nods that generally connote agreement and approval. And I believe that my own experience in this regard is quite typical! Consider how often we hold back our own reservations and disbelief when the roles are reversed and it is we who disagree with what someone is saying. When colleagues confide that they are mistreated, unappreciated, and underpaid, for example, we often remain silent or nod in apparent approval even if we consider the colleague’s complaints groundless. When someone tells us what they intend to name their newborn child, we generally give some bland indication of approval, although privately we may consider the name to be discordant or pretentious. The same is true when others ask us about the color they have just painted their house, or show us a piece of furniture or art they just bought. Even political and intellectual issues, presented in literature and film as sources of contentious debate at the dinner table, seem to produce less vocalized disagreement in real life than one might expect.

Evidence for this comes from several sources. First, people who live alone, elderly widows and widowers in particular, often worry that they will develop odd habits because there will be nobody around to point out their oddity or inappropriateness. They recognize that only our most intimate friends and relatives can be counted on to tell us when our beliefs are out of line or when our actions are inappropriate. More casual acquaintances generally try to sidestep the awkwardness of disagreement and thus leave us without essential corrective feedback.

A second source of evidence for people’s reluctance to openly disagree with others can be found in etiquette manuals. As sociologist Erving Goffman notes, etiquette manuals represent a codification of society’s norms and practices and thus can sometimes tell us a great deal about how people are expected to behave.
¹⁵
Most are very clear on this issue of whether we should air our disagreements with others. “Miss Manners,” for instance, tells her readers that “One cannot go around correcting others.”
¹⁶
Emily Post expresses the same sentiment when she says that “The tactful person keeps his prejudices to himself….” and that “Certain subjects, even though you are very sure of the ground upon which you are standing, had best be shunned; such, for example, as the criticism of a religious creed or disagreement with another’s political conviction.”
¹⁷
The guardians of proper behavior, in other words, seem to agree with the poet Heinrich Heine that “God has given us speech in order that we may say pleasant things to our friends.” The implication of their advice should be clear: To the extent that people routinely follow these prescriptions, we are unlikely to have our misguided beliefs and questionable habits reined in by explicit challenge from others.

Our reluctance to voice our disagreements has also been demonstrated in psychological research. Although there is not a large research literature on this issue, what evidence there is clearly supports the contention that people generally try to avoid potential conflict with others. In several experiments, individuals have been asked to discuss an issue or another person in front of an audience known to have a particular opinion about the subject in question. Sometimes the participants are asked to discuss their own opinion of the subject, and at other times they are merely required to summarize an assessment given to them by the experimenter. In either case, their comments are generally slanted to appear to be more in line with those of their audience than is actually the case.
¹⁸
We tend to discuss a person’s good points with his or her friends, but focus more on flaws when talking to his or her adversaries. We tend to soften or intensify our expressed position about, say, bilingual education or tax reform in accord with what we think are the beliefs or preferences of our audience.

The reasons we act this way are hardly mysterious. Doing so allows us to avoid the unpleasant emotions produced by discordant interactions. Disagreement often spoils our social encounters, and it is understandable that people might want to feign agreement to head off conflict and disharmony. In addition, people are also intuitively aware of one of the most basic laws of social psychology—that we tend to like people who are similar to ourselves. Thus, people recognize that to express disagreement is to risk being disliked. We sometimes try to shield ourselves from such antipathy by claiming that we are “just playing devil’s advocate” or that we are simply relaying the opinions of someone else. Such gambits are not always effective, however, because people tend to infer that a speaker’s statements reflect his or her true opinions to some degree even when they know that the substance of the speaker’s remarks were determined by someone else.
¹⁹
The tale of the messenger who was beheaded for reporting that the royal army had been defeated is relevant here: There are risks involved in being the “bearer of bad tidings” even when the bad tidings are not of one’s own making.

Our relative inexperience with open conflict is partly responsible, I believe, for a peculiar pattern of behavior that is exhibited after faculty meetings in the Department of Psychology at Cornell University (and elsewhere, I assume). Even in harmonious departments, a faculty meeting can sometimes be a stressful affair in which solutions to difficult problems are sought by people who often have fundamentally different interests and orientations. As a result, it represents one of those relatively infrequent occasions in which we participate in open, competitive lobbying and, occasionally, in acrimonious debate. Of course, all of the conflict that comes out in such a meeting exists beforehand, but it remains mostly unspoken until then, as everyone talks primarily with his or her known allies, and most of the dialogue with the “other side” is circumspect.

What occurs after such meetings is a period of “decompression” in which everyone mills around the halls and, in small groups, replays what was said in an effort both to determine what it all means and, more important, to smooth over any bitterness that may have been created. At such times, the faculty resembles nothing so much as a collection of people in need of an encounter group session or two. It is hard to resist the conclusion that this reaction might be diminished if we encountered such open discussions of differences more often.

Our inexperience with open disagreement and conflict is also reflected in the phenomenon of gossip. Gossip can be seen as a vehicle through which we release the pent-up dissent we are unable to express directly. What cannot be said to the source of our disagreement or disbelief is conveyed to someone else (who, by the way, is expected to agree with us—or at least appear to agree). Furthermore, gossip is also a means for getting us closer to the truth through a process of “triangulation” in which our own imperfect knowledge is combined with that held by others. Because we know that everyone tries to put an agreeable slant on things in our everyday interactions, we can never be sure whether we have heard the complete and honest truth from someone. “Did she really like my lecture?” “Do they honestly like him, or are they just saying that because they know I do?” By consulting other people’s knowledge, we can see things from several angles, and can try to make adjustments for any biases in our own knowledge base. Inconsistencies in what people say to us and what they say to other people, for example, enables us to get a better idea of what their true feelings are likely to be. Previous accounts of gossip have discussed how it serves as a way for people to achieve a stable and shared definition of reality;
²⁰
what these accounts have failed to emphasize, however, is that one of the reasons gossip is particularly well-suited to this task is that we do not always receive veridical feedback from others. Gossip helps fill the void.

Thus far, this discussion has focused on the reluctance to express disagreement in everyday social interaction. This is undoubtedly where the reluctance occurs most frequently. This does not imply, however, that the phenomenon exists only in such everyday circumstances where the consequences of not speaking up can sometimes be rather negligible. Even members of Presidential advisory groups have been known to suppress their dissenting views when airing them would have promoted a more thorough and vigorous deliberation and a more effective policy. Sometimes doubts are withheld because of members’ fear that their sentiments will not be well received and that their personal status and future political effectiveness will diminish as a result. Vice President Hubert Humphrey, for example, learned to swallow his doubts about the Johnson administration’s Vietnam policy and “get back on the team” after his statement of his initial reservations had him banished from the inner circle for a number of months.
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Even when an advisor is not concerned with his or her own status and power, doubts are sometimes suppressed in the interest of group harmony. As psychologist Irving Janis’s work on “Groupthink” suggests, members of highly cohesive advisory groups who are under considerable pressure to devise effective courses of action can become overly concerned with maintaining apparent consensus within the group and will sometimes censor their personal reservations to accomplish it. Disastrous policies sometimes result. Janis cites the passage from Arthur Schlesinger’s account of the Bay of Pigs fiasco in which he castigates himself “for having kept so silent during those crucial discussions in the Cabinet Room…. I can only explain my failure to do more than raise a few timid questions by reporting that one’s impulse to blow the whistle on this nonsense was simply undone by the circumstances of the discussion.”
²²

Inside accounts of Presidential advisory groups make it clear that the failure to express dissent can have direct, immediate, and severe consequences. More relevant to the purposes of this book, however, is the damage that stems from its less direct, less immediate, but more pervasive effects. Because so much disagreement remains hidden, our beliefs are not properly shaped by healthy scrutiny and debate. The absence of such argument also leads us to exaggerate the extent to which other people believe the way that we do. Bolstered by such a false sense of social support, our beliefs strike us as more warranted than is actually the case, and they become rather resistant to subsequent logical and empirical challenge.

*
The idea that we overestimate the extent to which others share our beliefs implies that this mechanism concerns beliefs that we already hold. This mechanism is thus most directly relevant to understanding the
maintenance
, rather than the
formation
, of erroneous beliefs. Because of this, and because this mechanism is so general that it serves to bolster almost
any
belief, it will receive less explicit discussion than the mechanisms discussed in earlier chapters when it comes to dealing with the specific beliefs addressed in chapters 8-10. Nevertheless, perceived consensus has such an important and pervasive impact on people’s views that any analysis of the mechanisms underlying questionable and erroneous beliefs would be incomplete without a discussion of the sources of error in people’s judgments of what other people think.

*
This tendency applies only to people’s explanations of their
own
behavior. As discussed in the previous chapter, people tend to think of other people’s behavior as the product of underlying personal traits and dispositions. For more information on this asymmetry in causal attribution, the reader should consult: E. E. Jones, & R. E. Nisbett (1971) The actor and the observer: divergent perceptions of the causes of behavior. In E. E. Jones, D. Kanouse,H. H. Kelley, et al. (Eds.),
Attribution: Perceiving the causes of behavior,
pp. 79-94. Morristown, NJ: General Learning Press, or D. Watson, (1982) The actor and the observer: How are their perceptions of causality divergent?
Psychological Bulletin
,
92
, 682-700.