The legal concept of willful blindness: You are responsible if you
could have known, and should have known, something that instead you strove not
to see. there is an opportunity for knowledge, and a responsibility to be
informed, but it is shirked. The law doesn’t care why you remain ignorant, only
that you do. We can’t notice and know everything: the cognitive limits of our
brain simply won’t let us. That means we have to filter or edit what we take
in. We mostly admit the information that makes us feel great about ourselves,
while conveniently filtering whatever unsettles our fragile egos and most vital
beliefs.
That willful
blindness is so pervasive does not mean that it is inevitable. We may think
being blind makes us safer, when in fact it leaves us crippled, vulnerable, and
powerless. But when we confront facts and fears, we achieve real power and
unleash our capacity for change. Embedded within our self-definition, we build
relationships, institutions, cities, systems, and cultures that, in reaffirming
our values, blind us to alternatives. This is where our willful blindness
originates: in the innate human desire for familiarity, for likeness, that is
fundamental to the ways our minds work.
We may think that
opposites attract, but they don’t get married. “positive assortative mating”—which
really just means that we marry people like ourselves. Familiarity, it turns
out, does not breed contempt. It breeds comfort. The familiar makes us feel
secure and comfortable. Human beings want to feel good about themselves and to
feel safe, and being surrounded by familiarity and similarity satisfies those
needs very efficiently. The problem with this is that everything outside that
warm, safe circle is our blind spot.
This is natural but
it isn’t neutral. In what he calls the “group polarization effect,” legal
scholar Cass Sunstein found that when groups of like-minded people get
together, they make each other’s views more extreme. Our intellectual homes are
just as self-selected and exclusive as our physical homes. In theory, the
Internet was going to change all of this. Living, working, and making decisions
with people like ourselves brings us comfort and efficiencies, but it also
makes us far narrower in how we think and what we see. The more tightly we
focus, the more we leave out. conscious, deliberate choices to be blind, but in
a skein of decisions that slowly but surely restrict our view. We don’t sense
our perspective closing in and most would prefer that it stay broad and rich.
But our blindness
grows out of the small, daily decisions that we make, which embed us more
snugly inside our affirming thoughts and values. And what’s most frightening
about this process is that as we see less and less, we feel more comfort and
greater certainty. We think we see more—even as the landscape shrinks. that is
why physicians aren’t supposed to treat family members—because love blinds them
to the realities of the case. This doesn’t, unfortunately, stop family members
from asking for advice and even, on occasion, free care. And it has proved
impossible for professional organizations to prevent doctors treating their own
families.
The dangers are
twofold: a tendency either to underplay the problem (I love you and can’t bear
for you to be ill) or to overplay the problem (I couldn’t bear to lose you so
will treat the tiniest symptom). This is the true cost of blindness: as long as
it feels safer to do and say nothing, as long as keeping the peace feels more
benign, abuse can continue. Our desire to protect our self-worth results in
others paying a very high price. Nations, institutions, individuals can all be
blinded by love, by the need to believe themselves good and worthy and valued.
We simply could not function if we believed ourselves to be otherwise. But when
we are blind to the flaws and failings of what we love, we aren’t effective
either. As Colm O’Gorman said, we make ourselves powerless when we pretend we
don’t know. That’s the paradox of blindness: We think it will make us safe even
as it puts us in danger.
IT’S AS EASY to fall
in love with an idea as with a person. Big ideas are especially alluring. They
bring order to the world, give meaning to it. Our brains treat differently any
information that might challenge our closely held beliefs. The brain doesn’t
like conflict and works hard to resolve it. Which means that when we work hard
to defend our core beliefs, we risk becoming blind to the evidence that could
tell us we’re wrong. Dissonance is eliminated when we blind ourselves to
contradictory propositions. And we are prepared to pay a very high price to
preserve our most cherished ideas. we can stay awake for long periods of time
with little sleep—but what we lose, progressively, is the ability to think. we
see what we expect to see and are blind to the unexpected.
“For the human
brain,” says Simons, “attention is a zero-sum game: If we pay more attention to
one place, object, or event, we necessarily pay less attention to others.” “Resource
depletion specifically disables cognitive elaboration,” Because it takes less
brain power to believe than to doubt, we are, when tired or distracted,
gullible.25 Because we are all biased, and biases are quick and effortless,
exhaustion makes us favor the information we know and are comfortable with. We’re
too tired to do the heavier lifting of examining new or contradictory
information, so we fall back on our biases, the opinions and the people we
already trust. When people felt overloaded, he said, they restricted their
social and moral involvement. If it is hard to doubt when you’re tired, it may
be even harder to care. Propagandists and brainwashers know what managers and
corporate leaders choose to forget: the human mind, overloaded and starved of
sleep, becomes morally blind. If you don’t eat, you starve and everyone can see
there’s a problem. But when we don’t sleep, or when we work too hard, often
even we can’t see there’s a problem. Sure, we don’t feel great; but what we
can’t see is what we are losing: the capacity to reason, to judge, to make good
and humane decisions, to see consequences and complexity.
When they apply the
legal concept of willful blindness in court cases, they are said to be issuing
“the ostrich instruction.” Whether the metaphor is scientifically accurate or
not, we all recognize the human desire at times to prefer ignorance to
knowledge, and to deal with conflict and change by imagining it out of
existence. Nobody likes change because the status quo feels safer, it’s
familiar, we’re used to it. Change feels like redirecting the riverbed:
effortful and risky. It’s so much easier to imagine that what we don’t know
won’t hurt us.
You cannot fix a
problem that you refuse to acknowledge. We know—intellectually—that confronting
an issue is the only way to resolve it. But any resolution will disrupt the
status quo. Given the choice between conflict and change on the one hand, and
inertia on the other, the ostrich position can seem very attractive. Unconditional
obedience is, in brief, the only principle on which those in service must act.”
Hierarchies, and the system of behaviors that they require, proliferate in
nature and in man-made organizations. Obedience is even strong enough to blind
us to our own self-interest. as an admirable goal should give any executive
pause. Some of the gravest mistakes in both the business and the political
world have been caused by eager executives, keen to please, hungry for reward,
and convinced that blind obedience was their path to success.
Military law would
blame the boss. Madness is the exception in individuals but the rule in groups.
—Nietzsche Under social pressure, most of us would simply rather be wrong than alone.
There is a physical reality to the pain that we feel when we are excluded. In
other words, our desire to seek social connections with others comes from
chemical rewards as well as social ones. Conformity is compelling because much
of our sense of life’s meaning depends on other people.
Ostracism makes
individuals feel they lack purpose, have less control over their lives, are
less good moral beings, and lack self-worth. Those high school cliques aren’t
uniquely adolescent experiences: Human beings hate being left out. We conform
because to do so seems to give our life meaning. Because in choosing to stick
with the crowd, we steadily blind ourselves—to alternatives, to bad news, to
doubt, to the individual values that we think are steady but turn out to also be
susceptible—until we find ourselves dazed and confused in the dark.
The bystander effect
demonstrates the tremendous tension between our social selves and our
individual selves. Left on our own, we mostly do the right thing. But in a
group, our moral selves and our social selves come into conflict, which is
painful. We are more likely to intervene when we are the sole witness; once
there are other witnesses, we become anxious about doing the right thing
(whatever that is), about being seen and being judged by the group. Bystanders
do play a major part in bullying. Some student bystanders act as “reinforcers,”
providing an encouraging audience, while others merely protect the bully by
failing to act. This is, of course, why some leaders prefer distance; they feel
that they could not do their jobs if they were immersed in the messy, human
detail of the mission.
The argument for
distance is that eliminating proximity clarifies the mind and facilitates more
objective decision making. But it can also blind one to the details that one
would prefer not to see. Structural blindness was built into the way BP did
business, not because its leaders wanted to be blind but because, to be
competitive, The distance imposed by geography and implicit in power is
reinforced by the structures within which work gets done.
It’s challenging to
recognize that outsourcing has become so embedded in Western economies, that
there are no areas in which it is not considered. Why do we build institutions
and corporations so large and so complex that we can’t see how they work? In
part, it’s because we can. We are so delighted with our own ingenuity and
intelligence and it gives us a sense of mastery and power. And we are blind to
the blindness these complex structures necessarily confer. Money blinds us to
our social relationships, creating a sense of self-sufficiency that discourages
cooperation and mutual support. Money and willful blindness make us act in ways
incompatible with what we believe our ethics to be, and often even with our own
self-interest. All the other organizational forces of willful
blindness—obedience, conformity, bystander effects, distance, and division of
labor—combine to obscure the moral, human face of work.
Cassandra must have
known she was doomed to die then, too, because that was her unique gift: to see
what others did not. The savage irony of Cassandra is that, as we read her
prophecies, we know that they are true, but no one else does. The world
contains millions of Cassandras, in all walks of life and all of them
different. Being able to draw a cognitive map requires traveling well outside
of our immediate knowledge and safety. It means meeting people not like
ourselves, in industries and neighborhoods far from our own, and, when we’re
there, having the confidence and curiosity to keep asking questions.
Drawing our
cognitive map calls on a breadth of experience, either from different
disciplines or different life experiences. CASSANDRAS SHOW US that we don’t
have to be blind. They are inspiring individuals because they believe in the
possibility of change. Unafraid of conflict, they are more interested in
exploring ideas than in defending them. Many people, admiring Cassandras from a
distance, hesitate to step into their shoes. The role looks too demanding, the
costs too high. We can start by recognizing the homogeneity of our lives, our
institutions, neighborhoods, and friends, putting more effort into reaching out
to those who don’t fit in and seeing positive value in those that prove more
demanding.
The sooner we
associate long hours and multitasking with incompetence and carelessness, the
better. Their own people, living their own lives: That is what we should aspire
to in the schools that we build and the teaching that we deliver. Not
compliant, obedient conformists but individuals who insist on thinking for
themselves. “The goal is to change people’s patterns of understanding, altering
their thinking from ‘me’ to ‘we.’ Changing the game can require surprisingly
little: A simple question—Do we mean this? Did I understand correctly?—can turn
the tide. If one of the symptoms of blindness is comfort, so one of the
indicators of critical thinking may be discomfort. The sheer complexity of many
decisions makes blindness all the more tempting. I’ve begun to wonder whether
we now have organizations that are simply too complex to manage. If they are
too complex to grasp, either we need to change, or they do. we do know is that
hierarchies exacerbate blindness and obedience.
“We have monuments
for people who have displayed physical courage in war,” Lieutenant Colonel
Krawchuk mused. “But where are the monuments to people who said no, we won’t do
this because it’s a bad or wrong or unethical decision?” When we are willfully
blind, it is in the presence of information that we could know, and should
know, but don’t know because it makes us feel better not to know. We make
ourselves powerless when we choose not to know. But we give ourselves hope when
we insist on looking. The very fact that willful blindness is willed, that it
is a product of a rich mix of experience, knowledge, thinking, neurons, and
neuroses, is what gives us the capacity to change it.
As all wisdom does, seeing starts with simple questions: What could I
know, should I know, that I don’t know? Just what am I missing here?
