We don’t always do the right thing, even when we know what’s right.
The “optimal unstoppable shot” in soccer is to go left or right for an upper corner in a penalty kick. However, kicks to the centre are seven percentage points more likely to succeed. But people will not try this because, although they will be heroes if they succeed, if the kick fails they will be ridiculed [1]. Soccer coaches know the stats, but they have a high “social threshold”. They are too scared to be different first and will only go against the social norm if enough people are doing so [2].
Similarly, in basketball, shooting underhand for free throws is more effective than the classic overhead shot. Malcolm Gladwell tells the story [2]: Wilt Chamberlain was one of the best basketball players of all time, but when he first began, he was terrible at free throws. Chamberlain was advised to shoot underhand and he gave it a go … and he becomes a good free throw shooter, in fact, he made more shots than anyone ever has. Then suddenly, he stopped doing this. Why? He had a problem, he tested a possible solution, the solution worked, and it fixed his biggest problem as a player. He had every incentive in the world to keep shooting underhand, yet he stopped. Gladwell says that this is not a case of people who don’t do what they ought to do out of ignorance but “this is doing something dumb when you are fully aware you are doing something dumb”. Chamberlain confessed he felt silly shooting underhand. “I know I was wrong, I know some of the best foul shooters in history shot that way. I just couldn’t do it”. He knew he was wrong, but he just did not want to look foolish. Chamberlain had a high threshold, he did not want to look foolish, he needed a lot of people to be shooting underhand, before he would [2].
In the business world, where the data is far less definitive than in sports which have tons of statistics, if you feel that something should be done a certain way, but the rest of your peers are going a different way, what do you do? While I don’t have an answer based on facts, I hypothesize that the social threshold applies here too. In other words, you would need to be pretty confident of your views before you are willing to challenge the others. How confident? Well, that depends not only on your level of confidence and the importance of the decision, but also on your social threshold in that context. What’s your trade-off between being right versus being liked?
In [2] Gladwell refers to Mark Granovetter’s [3] work. Granovetter says that our behaviour is influenced by both internal and external factors. The social threshold mentioned above is an external factor. Internal factors are beliefs that we hold. In The Mother of all Biases I wrote about the confirmation bias. This is our persistent and almost unavoidable tendency to protect or strengthen our beliefs by accepting information that supports our views and discounting or disregarding information that challenges our views.
In the political arena and even before the recent hype regarding fake news, it seems that facts make little contribution. Steven Levitt [1]: “Political decisions are rarely determined by looking at the data. […] Not once, ever, I am aware of changing a politician’s mind on any issue, ever. […] My research has been used but only by politicians who happen to have already made up their mind and looked to see how they could use my research to support their views.” This is a classic demonstration of confirmation bias.
Back to Granovetter. To understand someone’s behaviour it is not adequate to understand what they know and what they believe, we also need to understand the social context in which people operate. According to Granovetter’s social threshold model, despite the facts and even despite their beliefs, if the threshold is breached, people give in to follow the crowd.
What should we do?
Levitt advises [1]: “Put the morality and ethical considerations aside, and try to think about the problem in a clear-headed, data-driven way. Figure out how the world works and then go back and layer your ethical views on that”.
In closing …
Gladwell [2] compares Wilt Chamberlain to another basketball great, Rick Barry. Unlike Chamberlain, Barry didn’t care what people thought; he was a perfectionist who really cared about scoring. Someone who stands for perfectionism is someone who “puts the responsibility of mastering the task at hand ahead of all social considerations, who would rather be right than liked”.
Acknowledgements to Mark Wayland for his suggestions that informed this article.
References:
[1] iTunes, Intelligence Squared: “How to Think Like a Freak: Learn How to Make Smarter Decisions with the authors of “Freakonomics””, S. Levitt, S.J. Dubner
[2] iTunes, Revisionist History, “The big man can’t shoot,” M. Gladwell
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Granovetter