Being Wrong - Kathryn Schulz [76]
It is not impossible, however, to deliberately stave off the dangers of groupthink. Irving Janis proposed a list of ways to do so, including explicitly encouraging disagreement, assigning someone the role of devil’s advocate, and actively seeking outside input. Many people cite President Kennedy’s handling of the Cuban Missile Crisis as a successful effort to counteract groupthink (it seems he learned something from the Bay of Pigs), and others see reason for optimism in President Obama’s stated commitment to “vigorous debate inside the White House.” My favorite example, however, comes from the Talmud, the rabbinical writings that serve as a commentary on the Torah and the basis of Orthodox Judaism. According to these writings, if there is a unanimous guilty verdict in a death penalty case, the defendant must be allowed to go free—a provision intended to ensure that, in matters so serious that someone’s life is on the line, at least one person has prevented groupthink by providing a dissenting opinion.
Groupthink arises from the parts of our disagreement deficit that I’ve already introduced: disproportionate exposure to support for our beliefs, underexposure to the opposition, and a tendency to discount that opposition even if we do encounter it. But it also hints at the fourth and final part: the suppression of doubt or differences of opinion within a community. Sometimes, this suppression is subtle, or even self-imposed—just an instinctive shying away from anything that could disturb a group to which we are loyal, or disrupt the material and psychological infrastructure of our lives. This kind of self-censorship almost certainly played a role in the widespread opposition to women’s suffrage in the Appenzells. Not only did 95 percent of male citizens there vote against the initial suffrage referendum, they did so publicly, by a show of hands. Think about trying to raise your own hand when 95 percent of your neighbors aren’t raising their own—and then think about the Asch line studies.
Sometimes, though, the suppression of dissent within a community is deliberate and overt. As Joseph Jastrow observed in The Story of Human Error, group conformity has long been enforced through ostracism, exile, and violence. “The laboratory is a latecomer on the human scene,” he wrote. “The scepter, the battlefield, the arena, the mob, tribunals for heresy, the stake, are far older as moulding instruments of belief, and more direct and effective.” His point was the old familiar one: might makes right. In countless communities, historically as well as today, the accuracy of a belief is essentially established by fiat,* and community members are dissuaded from dissent by the threat of force. This kind of suasion was not a factor in the battle over suffrage in the Appenzells. To see it in its full-blown form, we need to make a brief layover in a very different part of the globe.
In 1990, an Afghan man named Abdul Rahman converted to Christianity. Such conversions are extremely rare in Afghanistan—the country is 99 percent Islamic—but Rahman had been working for a Catholic charity that provided medical assistance to refugees, and he came to believe in the religion of his colleagues. In the aftermath of his conversion, Rahman’s life as he had known it collapsed around him. His wife, who remained a devout Muslim, divorced him on the grounds that he was an infidel. He lost the ensuing custody battle over his two daughters for the same reason. His parents disowned him, stating that, “Because he has converted from Islam to another religion we don’t want him in our house.”
All that was bad enough. But then, in 2006, Rahman was arrested by the Afghan police on charges of apostasy and imprisoned. In accordance with the Hanafi school of sharia law, the prosecutors asked for the death penalty. One of them, Abdul Wasi, said that Rahman “should be cut off and removed from the rest of Muslim society and should be killed.” The Afghan