Conflicted Read online

  If I asked you to imagine someone doing some really deep thinking, you might conjure up something like Rodin’s The Thinker. A solitary figure lost in introspection, exploring the recesses of their own mind. This way of thinking about thinking, as something best done alone, is relatively modern. In a much older tradition, thinking and reasoning are essentially interactive, a way of harvesting the intelligence of a group.

  Let’s take a look at the original thinker. Socrates, the father of Western philosophy, did not write down his ideas so we instead know about him mostly through the accounts of contemporaries. The reason Socrates mistrusted the relatively new technology of writing is because it could not respond to questions. He preferred talking, and he liked to talk with people who disagreed with him – or at least thought they did. His trick was to make them see, through gentle questioning, that they didn’t agree with themselves.

  Socrates believed that the best way to dispel illusions and identify fallacies was through the exchange of arguments. His took place face to face, in the town square of Athens, often with the town’s most respected intellectuals. His favoured technique was to invite someone to put forward an argument (on the nature of justice, say, or happiness) before asking why they believed that – how could they be so sure? Could they account for these exceptions? Eventually, under persistent questioning, the intellectual’s initial confidence would be revealed to be based on very little. Socrates was not out to humiliate anyone, but to reveal that we all know a lot less than we think.

  Agnes Callard, a professor of philosophy at the University of Chicago and an expert on the ancient Greeks, explained to me that Socrates wasn’t just an original thinker, but an innovator too. He was the first to propose, for example, that truth can be reached more reliably and quickly if, instead of one person weighing up both sides of an argument, two or more parties are involved, each assigned a distinct role. Callard calls this method the ‘adversarial division of epistemic labour’. One party’s job is to throw up hypotheses, the other’s is to knock them down. People can co-operatively disagree in order to get to the truth – just as, in a modern courtroom, prosecutor and defender co-operate in a quest for justice by ripping each other’s arguments apart.

  Theory is one thing, however; practice is another. In order to make this work, Socrates had to innovate in a different way: he had to inculcate a new set of social norms. It’s not that Socrates’ interlocutors were unaccustomed to debate. This was Athens, after all, a city that prided itself on its vigorous democracy, a city in which every man (although you did have to be a man, with property) was free to express his opinions in public. Athens was a culture of persuasion, however, and so most Athenians conceived of disagreement as a zero-sum game: you either won or lost. Arguments were means to achieve instrumental ends, subordinated to political goals. It was also a culture of one-upmanship. Men competed to be the finest orators, the most skilled debaters. They were not pursuing truth, but prestige.

  And so Socrates had to model a new and different kind of conversation. There are moments in the dialogues, says Callard, where Socrates steps aside from the topic under discussion in order to explain to his interlocutors what he, and they, are engaged in. I don’t see myself as superior to the person I’m talking to, he would say. Enquiry isn’t a status competition, it’s about testing the quality of arguments. Spend time getting clear on your interlocutor’s view, and don’t worry about finding answers – we’re just trying to understand each other a little better. Arguing with someone is a sign of respecting them. From Hippias Minor (one of the accounts of Socrates’ dialogues made by his pupil Plato): ‘Hippias, I don’t dispute that you are wiser than I, but it is always my custom to pay attention when someone is saying something, especially when the speaker seems to me to be wise. And because I desire to learn what he means, I question him thoroughly . . . so I can learn.’

  Socrates worked hard at communicating to his fellow Athenians that he wasn’t trying to beat them at anything. He had no instrumental goal or ulterior motive. He was engaging them in a quest to dispel falsehoods for the sake of it. Nobody had debated like this before, which is why Socrates had to describe what he was doing, as he was doing it, over and again. He was laying the foundation stones of a cathedral: our whole idea of free intellectual enquiry, in philosophy and science, derives from the premise that enquiry is a worthy goal in itself and that people of different views can pursue it together.

  To Socrates’ listeners, this approach to debate was new, and somewhat strange and unsettling. The intellectuals of Athens would have felt uneasy and sometimes upset as Socrates chiselled away at their arguments. What if I lose face? What if I come out of this looking bad? Socrates had to do a lot of reassuring and soothing; it would hardly be an exaggeration to call it anger management. Callard pointed me to this incident, described in Plato’s Republic:

  While we were speaking, Thrasymachus had tried many times to take over the discussion but was restrained by those sitting near him, who wanted to hear our argument to the end. When we paused after what I’d just said, however, he couldn’t keep quiet any longer. He coiled himself up like a wild beast about to spring, and he hurled himself at us as if to tear us to pieces.

  Socrates was a troublesome, gadfly-like presence in Athens, always niggling at sacred cows. During his life, the threat of physical violence was never far away, and eventually, the authorities sentenced him to death. We shouldn’t regard this as surprising, says Callard – instead, we should be surprised he survived for so long. Athenians were not used to being disagreed with by someone who wasn’t clearly trying to best them or persuade them to do something. ‘They let him have this flourishing career,’ says Callard. ‘Why weren’t they angrier?’ She thinks it was because Socrates worked so hard at assuaging insecurities. In a co-operative disagreement, somebody has to be wrong and Socrates made every effort to let Athenians know that, not only is being proved wrong OK, it is something to be grateful for. In Gorgias, for example, Socrates says to Callicles, ‘If you refute me, I shan’t be upset with you as you were with me; instead you’ll go on record as my greatest benefactor.’

  The other founding fathers of Western philosophy adopted and developed the Socratic method. We know about Socrates from his pupil Plato, who presented his own ideas in a series of dialogues. Aristotle, Plato’s pupil in turn, wrote a textbook on how to be an effective debater, and developed the art of rhetoric: a series of techniques for persuasion. For all these thinkers, however, the clash of views was not just a battle to persuade but a way of generating truth – or at least, dissolving falsehood. Tellingly, the Greeks also founded drama, a form of storytelling that distils truth from conflict.

  In medieval Europe, Christian scholars incorporated the rules laid down by the Greeks into the practice of ‘disputation’: a method of debate, developed first in the monasteries and later in early universities, designed to teach and uncover truths in theology and science. Disputations took place both privately, between master and student, and publicly, in front of the university community. Every disputation followed a similar format. A question is asked. Arguments in favour of one answer to the question are sought and examined. Next, arguments in favour of an opposing answer are considered. The arguments are then weighed against each other, before one or other answer is chosen, or a third one is found. Disputation was competitive; the goal was to convince each other, or an audience. But it was also believed that by examining a problem from different angles, new truths could emerge. The practice was essentially Socratic dialogue, formalised and scaled up. Historians of the period talk of the ‘institutionalisation of conflict’.

  Institutions have a habit of stagnating. In the sixteenth century, Renaissance thinkers criticised universities for indulging in arid intellectual debates instead of engaging with the real world. But it was the seventeenth-century French philosopher René Descartes who really made the practice seem obsolete. He scorned scholastic disputation as an artificial game that had become entirely about
how to win arguments, instead of the discovery of new truths. Sitting alone by the fireplace, Descartes invented a new kind of philosophy, grounded in his certainty of his own existence (‘I think, therefore I am’). If you want truth, said Descartes, look within.

  The Protestant Reformation, with its emphasis on individual conscience, encouraged this turn towards inner contemplation. The practice of disputation was dealt another blow by the invention of printing; the spread of books meant that individuals could self-educate instead of subjecting themselves to arguments with pettifogging teachers. In the eighteenth century, Enlightenment philosophers presented individual rationality as humanity’s supreme gift. Immanuel Kant located the operation of reason in fundamental structures of the mind. Making a ‘judgement’ had until then been regarded only as an action – as something that officials did in public. Kant was the first to conceive of it as a mental operation, a private act of understanding.

  Intellectual exploration had come to be seen as something that happens inside the mind. Only brilliant individuals who freed themselves of the traditions laid down by ancient scholars could make breakthroughs. The idea of the individual genius, exemplified by Newton, became paramount. The irony is that this exaltation of the individual mind took place at a time when thinking was becoming more intensely social and argumentative than ever: scientific societies were formed, philosophers exchanged letters, intellectuals gathered in coffee houses to swap stories and debate ideas.

  Even as thinking became more social, thinking about thinking became more abstract. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the study of reason, now identified with the study of formal logic, became increasingly mathematical. The correctness of an argument was something you could calculate, using algebraic symbols. Ordinary language was not up to the task. Two millennia after Socrates debated all comers in the centre of Athens, the study of reasoning had become truly asocial.

  Our ideas about what constitutes good decision-making and judgement still centre around the individual. We are more likely to celebrate individual thinkers, innovators and scientists, than the group or milieu from which they arose. Psychologists study the individual mind, divided into System One and System Two: conscious and unconscious mental operations. The advent of brain imaging has intensified this focus. Neuroscientists can look at pictures of individual brains, but they can’t yet study, with any precision, what happens to brains when we interact with others (you can only fit one person in an MRI scanner). And so, with a few exceptions, they ignore it.

  We don’t just do our thinking ‘in the brain’, however. We do it with each other. Our focus on individuals means we underrate disagreement as a route to insight, ideas and good choices.

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  Scientists who study group decision-making have observed two major ways in which an absence of disagreement within a group of intelligent people can lead to bad decisions. The better known one is driven by the desire to conform, to follow the lead of a dominant person or people in the room. A popular view instantly prevails and the group herds towards a decision without a full exploration of potential pitfalls or alternatives. The social psychologist Irving Janis, the first to name this phenomenon, in 1972, called it ‘groupthink’. The problem here, you might say, is that the group acts like an impulsive individual. The second problem is related to this, but subtler. It’s called ‘shared information bias’. This is what happens when everyone in the room assumes that everyone else knows more than them about the topic at hand. With nobody seriously challenging each other, the participants end up having only a superficial discussion. (‘When two men always agree, one of them is unnecessary,’ remarked the chewing gum entrepreneur, William Wrigley Jr.)

  Disputing a question flushes out new reasons, information and insights that would otherwise remain trapped inside people’s heads. These days, we rightly put a lot of emphasis on constructing diverse teams, not just for reasons of social equality but because the more varied the perspectives around a table, the more creative and insightful the discussion will be. But that insight and creativity will only materialise if the people on the team are prepared to challenge each other openly. Disagreement unlocks the benefits of diversity.

  As Socrates knew, this may all be good in theory, but in practice, people find it uncomfortable and unpleasant to disagree. Dissenters from a consensus are often disliked, and disagreements can turn into bickering matches. After the notion of groupthink became widely known, some organisations started to look for ways to prevent teams from arriving at a consensus prematurely, without things turning personal, by adopting a solution proposed by Irving Janis: assign a ‘devil’s advocate’. The practice has its origins in the Roman Catholic Church: when an individual is proposed for beatification or canonisation, the devil’s advocate is employed to make the case that the candidate is not worthy. In theory, by explicitly asking someone on the team to argue against whatever decision is being proposed you get the benefits of disagreement – forcing out new information and better solutions – without the costs to team harmony.

  There’s one problem: it doesn’t work. Charlan Nemeth, a professor of social psychology at Berkeley University, ran experiments in which she compared authentic dissent – a group discussion in which the dissenter really believed in her point of view – with a devil’s advocate group, in which the dissenter was faking it, and a group in which there was no dissenter. Nemeth found that authentic dissent generated much more productive discussions, with more original thoughts, than either the consensus or devil’s advocate conditions. In fact, the devil’s advocate condition was counter-productive: it stimulated members of the group to produce more arguments in support of their initial plan, without truly considering the other view (Nemeth calls this behaviour ‘cognitive bolstering’). My reading of this is that people became complacent when there was an assigned devil’s advocate, believing that they had inoculated themselves against narrow-mindedness. They knew that the devil’s advocate didn’t really believe what she was saying, so they didn’t push themselves to reflect on what she said.

  In further studies, Nemeth tested a subtler distinction. In one condition, someone spontaneously dissented from the majority view. In another, that same person was asked to make those same arguments – arguments that the rest of the group knew she truly believed in – after being publicly assigned the role of devil’s advocate. Under both conditions, the disagreement created tension in the group, and stimulated some dislike of the dissenter. But the spontaneous condition gave rise to a better discussion, generating more and better (that is, more creative) solutions than the role-play condition, even though the arguments and the person making them were identical.

  Nemeth’s speculative explanation for the difference in productivity between the discussions is that the group sensed there was less at stake for the dissenter when she was playing the devil’s advocate. In the spontaneous discussion, her dissenting position felt more courageous. When she was seen to be carrying out the researcher’s instructions, the group perceived someone making smooth, confident arguments, but felt less responsibility to question their own position. In the authentic condition, the other participants responded to the dissenter’s vulnerability by opening up a little more themselves, resulting in a much richer discussion in which both sides allowed for the possibility of being persuaded. In other words, people are more likely to confront the possibility that they’re wrong when faced with someone who appears truly to believe what they are saying and who is prepared to take a risk by saying it.

  Productive disagreement depends on how people feel about each other. We spend a lot of time thinking about how to argue, and not enough on how to shape the relationship that will define how the argument goes. It’s often said that in order to disagree well, people need to put emotions aside and think purely rationally, but this is a myth. Disagreeing productively requires a bond of trust: a sense that we’re ultimately working with, and not against, each other. That’s an inherently emotional question as well
as a cognitive one, which is why the previous chapter is crucial to understanding this one. People are not purely rational, and acting as if they are leads to dysfunction. We release the full potential of disagreement when we incorporate our unreasonableness into the process.

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  When a company is considering a takeover bid it often hires an investment banking firm, like Goldman Sachs, to advise on the acquisition. The bankers have a strong incentive to persuade the board to do the deal. After all, no deal, no fee. There’s an obvious conflict of interest there. The world’s most successful investor, Warren Buffett, proposes that companies adopt a counterbalancing measure:

  It appears to me that there is only one way to get a rational and balanced discussion. Directors should hire a second advisor to make the case against the proposed acquisition, with its fee contingent on the deal not going through.

  The genius of this approach lies in the fee. Buffett doesn’t just advise getting a second opinion; he advises giving the second advisor a financial incentive to win the argument. Why? Because by doing so, the directors can harness the power of biased thinking, while guarding against their own. The second advisor is now strongly motivated to think of as many good reasons as it can that the deal should not go through. The board will then have generated a set of arguments for and a set of arguments against, and so be in a stronger position to make the right call.

  When you bring your arguments to the table and I bring mine, and we’re both motivated to make the best case we can, the answers that emerge will be stronger for having been forged in the crucible of our disagreement. In 2019, a team of scientists led by James Evans, a sociologist at the University of Chicago, tested this proposition using a vast database of disagreements: the edits made to Wikipedia pages. Evans is interested in the effects of political polarisation, and whether it is possible for polarised individuals to have productive disagreements. Does the clash of strongly opposed political perspectives always lead to hostility or avoidance – fight or flight – or can it be turned into something more fruitful?