On Balancing Critical Thinking and Group Dynamics

“Learn how to ignore the examples from others when they are wrong, because few skills are more worth having.”  —  Charlie Munger

“You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”  —  Buckminster Fuller

“A critical requirement is learning how to filter feedback. Not all of it is useful. The more quickly you learn to identify good feedback and accept and incorporate it, the more progress you will make toward what you want to achieve. … There is a larger implication here about working with the world. The world offers us feedback, but do we listen and incorporate, or do we just keep wanting it to work differently than it does?  —  Farnam Street

“The first principle is that you must not fool yourself – and you are the easiest person to fool. So you have to be very careful about that. After you’ve not fooled yourself, it’s easy not to fool other scientists. You just have to be honest in a conventional way after that.”
— Richard P. Feynman

The Challenge of Balancing Individual and Group Conclusions

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about collaboration, incorporating feedback, and critical thinking. We are often told about the importance of critical thinking, thinking for yourself, first principles thinking, etc. We are also told about the importance of working with others, the enormous value in human collaboration, the difficulty of doing anything of significance on your own, etc. Yet, what do we do when the conclusions we reach individually clash with the conclusions of others or the group?

There are countless examples of effective groups working together to produce something far greater than each individual could have produced on their own. There are also countless examples of individuals creating things on their own or in small groups that changed the world but were initially rejected or even even ridiculed by the larger community. 

The Semmelweis Effect: A Case Study in Rejection of Innovation

The “Semmelweis effect” is a metaphor for the reflex-like tendency to reject new evidence or new knowledge because it contradicts established norms, beliefs, or paradigms. It was coined after Ignaz Semmelweis, a surgeon who, before the discovery of germs, claimed washing hands could help prevent patient infections. He was ridiculed and locked away in a mental asylum.

The Risks and Rewards of Going Against the Crowd

It is clear that we cannot effectively reason based solely on whether other people agree with us or not. Social proof tendency is powerful and groups of individuals will often reach very incorrect conclusions that get perpetuated since “everyone else is doing it so it must be right”. Aligning yourself with the people around you is almost always the “safe” option. You will almost never be judged negatively by following the crowd, even when the crowd turns out to be wrong. If you go against the crowd and are wrong, you will often be judged very harshly. Hell, even if you are right but went against the crowd, you can still sometimes be judged harshly depending on how how you handled the disagreements and how many enemies you made in the process (just look at Michael Burry). That outcome seems to be relatively rare though. Most people who go against the crowd and are right are hailed as prophets or geniuses and are rewarded handsomely. This is where opportunity lies.

Recognizing the difficulty in going against the crowd and the opportunity for enormous value that lies there is a highly valuable trait. Many people and organizations don’t recognize the value in risk taking like this. They will punish bad outcomes harshly, and only slightly reward good outcomes (if at all) which encourages conservative behavior, group-think and stagnation.

However, it is also clear that humans are fundamentally social creatures, and that collaborating with others effectively is a powerful force multiplier. If past humans had never cooperated en-masse, culture and language never would have evolved and our species would never have risen above the other ape species. So, we want to collaborate, but we also need to leave space for individual reasoning and going against the grain. 

Individual Differences

Some individuals will be better at working in groups and doing what others tell them to do. This can be simply a result of their personality, or as a result of a personal development based on feedback from others and frequent reflection. Some individuals will struggle to work in groups and take directions from others. This may be as a result of poor social skills, introversion, a lack of ability to reflect and incorporate feedback from others, inadequate trust and relationships with the group’s members, etc. However, it could also be that they are simply misaligned with the group they are currently working with. The individual may have different values, objectives, or wants to pursue different strategies from the group. They may feel the group is suffering from group-think, inconsistency avoidance, social proof, etc. and are making poor choices to these ends. They may feel the other individuals in the group lack the intelligence, skills, conscientiousness, etc. to effectively define or accomplish the group’s objectives, or that the group is holding them back in some way. Without an effective external perspective, it can be difficult to know whether the individual or the group is the problem.

Addressing Misalignments

We have varying degrees of freedom in selecting the group in which we find ourselves working. Sometimes we are assigned to groups by our teacher, professor, manager, or by whoever happens to be available in our current location, organization, etc. We also have varying options at our disposal when we find ourselves in groups that don’t appear to be a good fit. We can attempt to change ourselves or the group to improve the fit or we can attempt to leave the group and work alone, seek out a different existing group, or create a new group entirely.