Withstanding External Pressure When Making Decisions

Source: NFL.com

Conventional wisdom often asserts that strong familiarity and cohesion within a group leads to a high risk of groupthink.  In other words, a strong sense of social belonging within a team can lead to pressures to conform, which in turn can diminish the quality of decisions that a team makes.  However, might that strong in-group familiarity be helpful when it comes to resisting external pressures?  Amanda Ferguson and her colleagues studied that question in a new paper titled, "Relieving the Pressure: Team Familiarity Attenuates External Conformity Pressure on Team Member Decisions."  

Ferguson and her colleagues conducted an ingenious study of NCAA football officiating crews.  They examined data from 2012-2015 to measure "crew familiarity" - i.e., how often had referees worked together.  Then, they evaluated officiating crews' performance during the 2016 football season.  Ferguson and her co-authors studied whether crews with more experience working together were more or less vulnerable to pressure from the home crowd when making penalty calls.  In short, the home crowd represented what they called "external conformity pressure."  They discovered a meaningful relationship between in-group familiarity and external conformity pressure, particularly when the stakes are very high: 

"Crews with 20 games of experience working together call 0.92 fewer penalties on the visiting team when under high pressure, and crews with 30 games of experience working together call 1.56 fewer penalties on the visiting team under these conditions. Although the magnitudes of changes in penalties may seem small, they represent anywhere from a 15% to 25% difference from the average number of visiting team penalties, which is consistent with effects reported in previous studies on the influence of crowds on referee penalty calls."  

In other words, in-group familiarity and cohesion seems to provide a protective effect, leading teams to not be as susceptible to external conformity pressure, particularly in high-stakes situations.  The scholars conducted a second experimental study examining the same factors.  That study largely corroborated the findings from the NCAA referee research. 

What's the practical implication for business leaders?  We know that many managers feel pressure to conform to industry standards and conventional wisdom.  Companies often tend to exhibit herd behavior in industries, with competitors mimicking the actions of industry market share leaders. Perhaps, more seasoned management teams with a history of working together are less likely to succumb to the pressure to conform to "standard practice" within the industry.  They might be more likely to take risks, be different, and stake out a distinctive competitive position.  Teams with less familiarity may not be able to resist the pressure to conform to conventional wisdom.   

Does Collaboration Actually Hurt Organizations At Times?

We all want more collaboration in our organizations, right?  Of course, we do!  Well, you might want to rethink your answer in light of new research by Jesse Shore, Ethan Bernstein, and David Lazer.  They conducted a fascinating experiment using a game created by the Defense Department.  This game asks people to try to determine the location and timing of a potential terrorist attack, as well as to determine the perpetrators.  HBS Working Knowledge describes the set-up of the experiment:

For the study, the researchers hired 417 participants to play the game. Players received two clues at the start of each round and were allowed to search for more clues once per minute; they had 25 minutes to solve the problem. (The experiment took place at Harvard Business School's Computer Lab for Experimental Research.)  Participants were randomly assigned to one of 70 16-person networks, some of which were more interconnected—or "clustered," in academic parlance—in terms of who could share information with whom during the game. "In the most-clustered conditions, people were connected in a clear team structure," Shore explains. "In the least clustered, nobody's partners were also partners with each other."

Interestingly, the most-clustered groups tended to engage in more extensive information gathering.  However, the least-clustered groups developed more hypotheses regarding the potential terrorist attack (17.5% higher).   The least-clustered groups also had tended to be more likely to arrive at a correct solution.  What happened in the high-collaboration groups that led to inferior problem-solving?  According to the scholars, "Those in very clustered positions were more likely to copy an incorrect theory from a neighbor than their less-clustered counterparts."   In short, these "high collaboration" groups have a tendency to prematurely converge on a particular alternative.   If you step back for a moment, you should not be surprised at all by these findings.  We have known for decades that pressures for conformity arise in groups at times.  Premature consensus is a classic outcome in a cohesive group where conformity pressures arise. 

Beware of How Venture Capital Firms Team Up

Drew Graham, Managing Partner of Ballast Point Ventures, pointed me in the direction of a great new study by Paul Gompers, Yuhai Xuan and Vladimir Mukharlyamov.  The scholars examined over 3,500 venture capitalists and their investments in over 12,000 start-ups over a thirty-year period.  They discovered, not surprisingly, that venture capitalists tend to invest in deals alongside other venture capitalists who were quite similar to them (in terms of ethnic background, education, employment experience).   What was the effect on performance?  Here's a summary from HBS Working Knowledge:

They found that the probability of success decreased by 17 percent if two co-investors had previously worked at the same company—even if they hadn't worked there at the same time. In cases where investors had attended the same undergraduate school, the success rate dropped by 19 percent. And, overall, investors who were members of the same ethnic minority were 20 percent less successful than investors with different ethnic backgrounds.

Two major factors might be driving this drop in performance.   The venture capitalists might be picking bad deals (perhaps one is convincing the other to invest in a deal that has concerns).   Alternatively, the venture capitalists might be making poor decisions after the deal, in terms of how they influence the firm's strategy and management.  The scholars argue that "groupthink" leads to inefficient decisions after the deals, when venture capitalists are co-investing with folks with whom they share many similar characteristics.  We shouldn't be surprised by this finding, but it certainly offers a warning sign not only for investors, but also for start-ups as they seek funding. 

Amazing Evidence for the Wisdom of Crowds

Check out the amazing results of something called the "Good Judgment Project," profiled here by NPR.   Three psychologists - Philip Tetlock, Barbara Mellers and Don Moore - have created this project in collaboration with members of the government intelligence community.   Over the past three years, the researchers recruited roughly 3,000 people to make probability estimates about geopolitical issues such as the threat of a North Korean missile attack.   The NPR article profiles one such person, who happens to be a pharmacist living in Maryland.  She does not have any special expertise in international affairs.  She received some basic training in probability estimation, and then set out to respond to various questions posed to her by the researchers.  Her responses are among the most accurate of all 3,000 average citizens participating in the study.   She credits Google searches as her most useful tool for learning about an issue before making a prediction.  The NPR story indicates that, "According to one report, the predictions made by the Good Judgment Project are often better even than intelligence analysts with access to classified information, and many of the people involved in the project have been astonished by its success at making accurate predictions."  

What's going on here?  First, it clearly demonstrates the concept of the wisdom of crowds.  If you pool the collective intellect of a large, diverse group of people, you can often get the right answers more frequently than you can by relying on a few experts.  Of course, the wisdom of crowds only works if you have members of that large diverse group making independent judgments.  If people are influenced by others, then the wisdom of the crowd breaks down.  Second, as the story indicates, "If you want people to get better at making predictions, you need to keep score of how accurate their predictions turn out to be, so they have concrete feedback."  The researchers have done that throughout the study.  Finally, why do the experts often stumble?  Well, they are subject to many biases.  For instance, they often fall into the confirmation bias trap.  They may have more data at their disposal, but they often rely on the information that confirms their pre-existing views.   Moreover, the experts perhaps are not making independent judgements.  They may be influenced to a large degree by others in their work group or agency.  In that way, they may be subject to conformity pressures.  

Why Great Leaders Don't Take Yes for an Answer

Here's a fun video that we produced to introduce readers to the new edition of my book, Why Great Leaders Don't Take Yes for an Answer.   Enjoy!

Elevator Groupthink

Thank you to Maria Popova for discovering this old video and posting it on her blog, Brain Pickings.  It's called "Elevator Groupthink." 

The Debate about Brainstorming

Jonah Lehrer recently wrote a fascinating New Yorker column in which he argued that brainstorming doesn't work.   In some ways, he's right on the money.   Academic studies often have demonstrated that individuals could perform better at a creative task than a group engaged in brainstorming.  For instance, Lehrer cites one of the early studies at Yale:

The first empirical test of Osborn’s brainstorming technique was performed at Yale University, in 1958. Forty-eight male undergraduates were divided into twelve groups and given a series of creative puzzles. The groups were instructed to follow Osborn’s guidelines. As a control sample, the scientists gave the same puzzles to forty-eight students working by themselves. The results were a sobering refutation of Osborn. The solo students came up with roughly twice as many solutions as the brainstorming groups, and a panel of judges deemed their solutions more “feasible” and “effective.” Brainstorming didn’t unleash the potential of the group, but rather made each individual less creative.

Unfortunately, Lehrer's column draws some misleading conclusions as well.  Scott Berkun, author of Mindfire: Big Ideas For Curious Minds, has written a strong rebuttal to Lehrer's essay.   Berkun offers four key criticisms of Lehrer's conclusions:


1. Nothing matters if the room is filled with morons or strangers (or both).

2.  Brainstorming is designed for idea volume, not depth or quality. 

3.  The person leading an idea generation session matters.

4.  Generating ideas is a small part of the process.  

Berkun takes particular issue with the conclusions that Lehrer draws from a study by Charlan Nemeth.  Brainstorming typically involves a shared norm called "deferred judgment."  Under that norm, participants do not criticize each others' ideas during the idea generation process.   Berkun explains Nemeth's study:


The primary thrust of Lehrer’s critique is based on a 2003 study by Nemeth, where students were divided into groups and given 3 different sets of instructions.  In one group, no instruction was given (‘Minimal’). In the second group, basic brainstorming rules were given (‘Brainstorming’). In the last, brainstorming rules were given, plus students were allowed to critique each others ideas (‘Debate’).... The results do show that the group that could critique generated more ideas... [However] The debate groups was given brainstorming instructions, as well as an instruction to debate. It should be labeled “Brainstorming with debate“. If the only instruction they were given was to debate, it’d be a fair comparison. But it isn’t.

Lehrer concludes from this Nemeth study that stimulating dissent and debate works much more effectively than brainstorming.  I'm with Berkun - that conclusion is a step too far.   My work over the past fifteen years has focused a great deal on the importance of debate and dissent.  I'm glad that Lehrer has chosen to emphasize its importance.  However, an effective group process doesn't employ either deferred judgment or dissent and debate.  It involves both!  In the idea generation phase, deferred judgment makes sense as a norm employed to encourage the generation of many different ideas and options.  Later, dissent and debate become critical as a means of comparing and contrasting those options, and perhaps facilitating the development and generation of more ideas and alternatives.

One final point - Later in the article, Lehrer describes the many innovations that emerged from Building 20 at MIT over the years.  He concludes, "The lesson of Building 20 is that when the composition of the group is right—enough people with different perspectives running into one another in unpredictable ways—the group dynamic will take care of itself."  In other words, if you get the team composition right, you will automatically get lots of constructive dissent and debate.  I disagree wholeheartedly with this conclusion.  It's just not right.   You do not guarantee constructive dissent and debate simply by building a diverse team and giving them a forum for dialogue.  In many settings, people simply don't speak up.  Groupthink occurs even in diverse teams at times.  Yes, you have to get the composition right, but group dynamics do not take care of themselves. They take hard work on the part of a leader.   Leadership matters!  Process matters!