Diversity of Viewpoints

The group ideally exposes us to a diversity of viewpoints

John Stuart Mill is one of the heroes of thinking in bets. More than one hundred and fifty years after writing On Liberty, his thinking on social and political philosophy remains startlingly current. One of the frequent themes in On Liberty is the importance of diversity of opinion. Diversity and dissent are not only checks on fallibility, but the only means of testing the ultimate truth of an opinion: “The only way in which a human being can make some approach to knowing the whole of a subject, is by hearing what can be said about it by persons of every variety of opinion, and studying all modes in which it can be looked at by every character of mind. No wise man ever acquired his wisdom in any mode but this; nor is it in the nature of human intellect to become wise in any other manner.”

There is a simple beauty in Mill’s insight. On our own, we have just one viewpoint. That’s our limitation as humans. But if we take a bunch of people with that limitation and put them together in a group, we get exposed to diverse opinions, can test alternative hypotheses, and move toward accuracy. It is almost impossible for us, on our own, to get the diversity of viewpoints provided by the combined manpower of a well-formed decision pod. To get a more objective view of the world, we need an environment that exposes us to alternate hypotheses and different perspectives. That doesn’t apply only to the world around us: to view ourselves in a more realistic way, we need other people to fill in our blind spots.

A group with diverse viewpoints can share the work of testing beliefs and examining how much decisions contributed to outcomes. When we think in bets, we run through a series of questions to examine the accuracy of our beliefs. For example:

• Why might my belief not be true?
• What other evidence might be out there bearing on my belief?
• Are there similar areas I can look toward to gauge whether similar beliefs to mine are true?
• What sources of information could I have missed or minimized on the way to reaching my belief?
• What are the reasons someone else could have a different belief, what’s their support, and why might they be right instead of me?
• What other perspectives are there as to why things turned out the way they did?

Just by asking ourselves these questions, we are taking a big step toward calibration. But there is only so much we can do to answer these questions on our own. We only get exposed to the information we have been exposed to, only live the experiences we have experienced, only think of the hypotheses that we can conceive of. It’s hard to know what reasons someone else could have for believing something different. We aren’t them. We haven’t had their experiences. We don’t know what different information they have. But they do.

Much of our biased information processing stems from the amount of rope that uncertainty affords us. Well-deployed diversity of viewpoints in a group can reduce uncertainty due to incomplete information by filling in the gaps in what we know, making life start to fit more neatly on a chessboard.

Others aren’t wrapped up in preserving our narrative, anchored by our biases. It is a lot easier to have someone else offer their perspective than for you to imagine you’re another person and think about what their perspective might be. A diverse group can do some of the heavy lifting of de-biasing for us. A poker table is a naturally diverse setting because we generally don’t select who we play with for their opinions. Even better, when there is disagreement stemming from the diverse opinions represented at a poker table, the discussion may naturally progress toward betting on it. These are ideal circumstances for promoting accuracy.

Numerous groups have recognized the need to engineer the kind of diversity and encouragement of dissent that naturally occurs at a poker table. The State Department, since the Vietnam War, has had a formal Dissent Channel, where employees can have their dissenting views heard and addressed without fear of penalty. The American Foreign Service Association, the professional organization of foreign-service employees, has four separate awards it gives annually to members “to recognize and encourage constructive dissent and risk-taking in the Foreign Service.” The Dissent Channel has been credited with a policy change that helped end the genocidal war in Bosnia. In June 2016, fifty-one State Department employees signed a memo calling for President Obama to strengthen American military efforts in Syria. In late January 2017, approximately one thousand employees signed a dissent cable in response to President Trump’s executive order suspending immigration from seven Muslim-majority countries. The Dissent Channel represents something hopeful in our nation’s decision-making process. In an environment of increased polarization, foreign-service employees can make their voices heard about policies with which they disagree, and do it regardless of whether the administration is Democrat or Republican. Allowing dissent has a value that transcends party politics.

After September 11, the CIA created “red teams” that, according to Georgetown law professor Neal Katyal in a New York Times op-ed, “are dedicated to arguing against the intelligence community’s conventional wisdom and spotting flaws in logic and analysis.” Senior Obama administration officials, following the raid that killed Osama bin Laden, mentioned red-team analysis among the methods used to measure the degree of confidence that bin Laden, in the absence of visual or auditory confirmation, was in the compound subject to the raid.

Dissent channels and red teams are a beautiful implementation of Mill’s bedrock principle that we can’t know the truth of a matter without hearing the other side. This commitment to diversity of opinion is something that we would be wise to apply to our own decision groups. For example, if a corporate strategy group is figuring out how to integrate operations following a merger, someone who initially opposed the merger would be good to have as part of the group. Perhaps they have reasons why the two sales departments won’t mesh—whatever their reasons, they could help the majority move forward with a wiser approach by taking those reasons into account.

Diversity is the foundation of productive group decision-making, but we can’t underestimate how hard it is to maintain. We all tend to gravitate toward people who are near clones of us. After all, it feels good to hear our ideas echoed back to us.