Biases or collective intelligence?

I live in Italy, and one of the stylized facts (or stereotypes, which is probably a potentially reasonable synonym) about Italians is that we love pizza, we play the mandolin, and that we love football. Well, I guess that the mandolin truly is an unjustified stereotype, but football is actually pretty popular. It’s a constant source of conversation and often sparks passionate debates. It is probably the same for other countries as well, but it is the inception for this small reflection.

My interest in football is mild at best. I am fan of Inter Milano, but often I don’t know the players of the team or what is the result of the last game. This year, Inter had a very good run in the Champion’s League, and in particular it won against Barcelona in the semi-finals. These last two matches between Inter and Barcelona were particularly rich of goals, very spectacular; the return match was won at the extra time by Inter in the home stadium. Near the end of the regular time, Inter was one goal down, after being ahead in the first half, but a defender scored and tied the game in extremis. So, the game was particularly emotional, and it has certainly generated strong feelings, not just in the fans of the two teams.

Italians know something about winning very tight matches at the extra time: in the 1970 world cup in Mexico, the national team beat Germany 4-3 in the semi-finals, before loosing the final against Pelé’s Brazil. It was another long match, very emotional, that seemed endless to those living that moment.

If you talk about this match of Italian national football team to an Italian - if you find someone old enough to know something about it (I was born later, but this match was used as a theme for movies, and it is quite legendary, at least in Italy) - the general description will be that of an heroic feat.

The opinions about Inter’s victory against Barcelona, instead, will mostly fall in one among three categories: Inter fans will immediately draw a similarity between the two matches, while fans of other teams will vigorously reject this opinion (and they will cast shadows on quality of the referee of the semi-final against Barcelona), and of course there are those that do not know or even care about the topic of the discussion. Football can be quite divisive, polarizing. Probably just as politics, and maybe more. Sport, after all, has an rhetorical power and a smooth ability to put us in contact with deep sense of belonging. Something that we are probably designed by evolution to look for.

These recent events reminded me of a book I read that discusses about some of the causes of this phenomenon. The book is The Knowledge Illusion, by Steven Sloman and Philip Fernbach.

The book is about the fundamentally communal, collective nature of intelligence and knowledge. It is about the fact that, due to this feature, humans were able to bring about extremely complex technologies, whose realization spectacularly exceeds the abilities and knowledge of a single individual, by leveraging what a community was collectively able to produce collaboratively. These times put a lot of emphasis on competition, probably too much. We tend to neglect that even when we invoke competition as a mechanism to stimulate ourselves to do our best, it is often with the aim of a shared, common good, granting an individual prize as well to the winners.

Most of us don’t really know that the Earth orbits around the Sun, but we rely on commonly agreed upon knowledge, and at least most of us would argue supporting this statement against alternative positions. We can and do stand on the shoulders of giants, as per the famous metaphor. But this mechanism also makes us vulnerable to a form of hacking of our intelligence.

The subtitle of the book includes the statement “we never think alone”, something that - as some book reviewer said - is at the same time obvious as well as profound. We live in a world of communities, groups, teams, committed to values and knowledge systems. These systems can be sound or flawed, acceptable or aberrant, but that strongly depends from the point of view. Someone inside the group is, after all, at home, and quite ready to defend it in case of an attack, physical or metaphorical. This is one of the reasons making conspiracy theories so resilient (another one is that real conspiracies do exist, so it is sometimes inherently hard to tell true from false).

In my mind this book is very close to The Enigma of Reason, by Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber (I talked about it in a previous post). They both talk about the working of our cognitive system, and its limits. They also act as a warning to everyone of us. We should be sufficiently humble to be skeptical of our beliefs and convictions. We should be more used to taking a walk in the shoes of the others.

But the book, and its implications, suggest me an organizational consideration. When we create groups, departments, areas, committees within an organization, we should be very careful. In particular when one such bodies has some form of power over another. First of all, members of a group, at least a group that works - not just a set of people in which an individual forces positions, decisions, duties unto the others, will eventually develop a sense of belonging. If the group value system is not well aligned with the one of the overall organization some form of tension will develop, sooner or later. Any group, in time, can develop dysfunctional dynamics due to groupthink: when harmony or conformity prevail over reason, collective decisions can even be worse than individual ones.

Unless there is a level in which tensions and even contrasts are acknowledged, recognized, in which parts, and their positions are represented, with dignity and citizenship, given room for discussion, the organization might end up developing dysfunctional dynamics. Sense of belonging might drop in many members, turnover can rise, and somehow the recent phenomenon called quiet quitting can be one of the consequences of the eventual feeling of powerlessness outside the most powerful groups. Quiet quitters don’t believe anymore in what they’re doing: to them, work is not part of their actual life, it’s just a duty somehow allowing them to live, to do things that actually matter.

At an individual level, allow me a few suggestions:

• if you are the go-to person for a certain kind of organizational task, if you have been in charge of something for a very long time, consider stepping down. Or, at least, consider paving the way for someone else to take up your role.
• if you are in charge of selecting members for a group, or have some influence on the selection process, bring on board someone that you know has a different point of view on some relevant part of the job the group needs to carry out, or some well known troublemaker. Friction, might be annoying, but it is not necessarily a problem: it might be actually helping you keeping away from groupthink and bad decisions.
• preserve and pursue doubt: some decisions can be obvious, but when tackling complex issues, after having listened to all relevant positions, should we always strive for complete agreement? Perhaps not. But keep the door open to getting back to the point in the future.