Advocacy

Advocacy

The hallmark of focusing is the revered human institution of advocacy— taking a position on an issue, marshaling supporting evidence, and defending that position against the arguments of those holding (focusing on) opposing views. We are a society of advocators. The most ignorant, uneducated person and the most intelligent, lettered scholar both instinctively take an advocatory, self-oriented approach to life. Advocacy is the traditional scholarly approach and one regularly used on radio and television talk shows and by newspaper columnists, scientists, researchers, and others to debate issues. It is, moreover, the way most of us—wives and husbands, children and parents, friends and relatives, supervisors and subordinates, labor and management—deliberate problems and seek solutions … through advocacy.

I hold our educational institutions largely responsible for this excess of advocacy. And it is excessive. From kindergarten to postgraduate school, through the mechanisms of classroom discussions, book reports, term papers, final examinations, dissertations, and debates in which advocacy is venerated and rewarded, these institutions teach us, the students, the art and skill not of objective analysis but of subjective argumentation. Select a thesis and defend it; take a position and defend it; make an argument and defend it; take a stand and defend it. In short, be an advocate! (I’m doing that very thing in this paragraph.) Educators did not, of course, invent advocacy; they have merely gone along with the way the human mind is genetically programmed. It’s the way the mind works. The question is whether it works to our advantage when analyzing problems.

There’s no question that advocacy works. It is, after all, the foundation of our judicial system, in which the prosecution prosecutes, the defense defends, and neither side does both. Advocacy is also the foundation of our political system; indeed, the foundation of our democracy, which guarantees to every citizen the right to advocate his or her interests. So advocacy does work, when someone other than the advocator makes the decision— such as a judge or a jury, the electorate, the board of directors, or the boss, whoever that might be.

But when the advocator is also the decision maker, advocacy can be destructive of sound, effective, and profitable solutions because advocacy feeds and perpetuates our mind-sets, biases, beliefs, and prejudices. It thus nurtures our tendency to focus and, in doing so, defeats objectivity. When we defeat objectivity, we limit, even prevent, our full understanding of problems.

7. We tend to cling to untrue beliefs in the face of contradictory evidence.

It turns out that a great many of our most cherished individual beliefs, upon careful examination, are simply untrue. Gilovich explains that we don’t hold questionable beliefs because we have not been exposed to the truth. On the contrary, we tend to hold fast to these beliefs in the very face of incontrovertible contradictory evidence. How? We simply rationalize away the disparity. A battered housewife believes her husband won’t beat her again because he loves her. An emaciated anorectic looks in the mirror and believes she is fat. The owner of a miserably failing business looks over his books and believes he is doing all right.

Why do we cling so tenaciously to our beliefs? The answer is, of course, as complicated as any other question about human behavior, but psychologist Robert Abelson offers compelling insight. He contends that we humans treat beliefs like material possessions. We acquire and retain material possessions because of the functions they serve and the value they offer. What it comes down to is that our possessions make us feel good, and for that reason we cherish and protect them. Abelson asserts that the same can be said of beliefs, and he notes that the similarity between beliefs and possessions is revealed in our language. We have beliefs. We adopt, inherit, acquire, hold, and cling to them. If we reject a belief, we say we don’t buy it. When we give up a belief, we lose, abandon, and disown it.

Sir Francis Bacon probably offered the best explanation of this trait when he observed long ago that we prefer to believe what we prefer to be true. How profound! That simple statement illuminates the rancorous dissidence that typifies today’s public discourse in which truth is often an obscure, unwanted orphan.

Clearly, our compulsion to embrace untrue beliefs can have disastrous impact on our ability to analyze and resolve problems.