Being Wrong II (Summer Reading)

Anonymous

Wed, 07/27/2011 - 03:19

Whistleblowers

This is the second of two posts looking at Kathryn Schulz's excellent book, <a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=5OCnB78Bsp0C&printsec=frontcover&dq=be…; target="”_blank”">Being
Wrong:
Adventures in the Margin of Error</a> (2010), as it applies to local government ethics. This post focuses on how to deal responsibly with one's mistakes, and to the extent possible prevent them.

Dealing Responsibly with Mistakes 
What is an official to do? Although the author does not deal with
government per se, she gets right at its heart in one of the
conclusions she arrives at late in her book, a conclusion about what
should be done in an organization to prevent mistakes:<ul>

[W]e can foster the ability to listen to each other and the freedom
to speak our minds. We can create open and transparent environments
instead of cultures of secrecy and concealment. And we can permit
and encourage everyone, not just a powerful inner circle, to speak
up when they see the potential for error. These measures might be a
prescription for identifying and eliminating mistakes, but they
sound like something else: a prescription for democracy.
That’s not an accident. Although we don’t normally think of it in
these terms, democratic governance represents another method ... for
accepting the existence of error in trying to curtail its more
dangerous incarnations.</ul>

The author also points out how useful these approaches have been in
medicine and industry. She quotes Nancy Berlinger, an authority
whose lecture I attended four years ago and wrote about in <a href="http://www.cityethics.org/node/257">a blog post</a>. There I
focused on the value of apology. But Schulz goes beyond this to set
out all the ways hospitals are starting to deal with making
mistakes. 
 
She notes that the traditional response to mistakes was the same
evasion, obfuscation, and denial we so often see in government officials. Most important, she notes that
students learn from their teachers and supervisors how to practice
the concealment of errors, and that this behavior is rewarded. Ms.
Berlinger is quoted as saying, "They learn how to talk about
unanticipated outcomes until a ‘mistake’ morphs into a
‘complication.’ Above all, they learn not to tell the patient
anything.” They also learn how to justify their habit of
nondisclosure. 
 
This is just what happens in government. 
 
Some hospitals now require explanations and apologies, as soon as
possible, even going so far as to e-mail the entire staff and send
out a press release about incidents, such as botched surgeries.
Shulz sagely points out, “If you want to try to eradicate error, you
have to start by assuming that it is inevitable.” And you have to
learn not how to conceal it or justify it, but rather how to
apologize for it and turn it into a learning exercise. 
 
It is important not only to admit you can make a mistake, but to
figure out what caused you to make particular mistakes. Saying "I
took my eye off the ball" or "I screwed up" is not enough to prevent
the same mistake from happening again. It's important to talk to
others, because one of the essential things about being wrong is
that, while it is hard for us to believe we're wrong, it's very easy
for others to see how wrong we are. 
 
An important part of preventing mistakes is to create a culture of
openness and honesty. Since we are unlikely to report our mistakes,
it is important to encourage others to do so, and to protect them
from punishment when they do. In the government ethics context, this
means not only open discussions of the ethical aspects of
situations, with someone playing devil's advocate so that criticism
is not taken as personal. It also means an independent system of
ethics advice that higher officials actively encourage everyone to
use, and an independent enforcement mechanism that is as open as any
other part of the process. 
 
Accountability 
Another aspect of government ethics upon which Schulz sheds some
light is the fact that negligence, doing something wrong without
meaning to, is the touchstone of government ethics. This is one of
the principal differences betweeen government ethics and criminal
law. Schulz notes that, because our mistakes are unforeseeable to
us, “we seldom feel that we should be held accountable for them.” If
we didn't know we were making them, why should we have to pay for
them? In effect, we want no-fault government ethics. 
 
She also notes that denial too involves an ethical dilemma: “should
we or should we not be held accountable for refusing to admit that
we are wrong?” She looks at prosecutors who are wrong, and yet deny
it. She notes that “people who have signed on to serve the cause of
justice generally see themselves, not unreasonably, as being on the
side of the angels.” They do not feel they should be held
accountable for their mistakes, because they were done for a good
cause. 
 
All sorts of local government officials feel this way. They have
sacrificed their careers for their communities, they feel, and
should not be held accountable when they help others, and
themselves. 
 
Government ethics is all about accountability. Clearly, it is not as
bad a thing to make a mistake as to do something intentionally. But
because it is so hard to prove crimes such as bribery, a tiny
percentage of government officials who do take bribes are held
accountable for it. Accountability is far greater in government
ethics, but officials do not go to prison, and in few cases are
their positions even jeopardized. But they are held accountable for
what might be mistakes or might be intentional conduct. The
difference from criminal law is that, in government ethics
proceedings, intent does not have to be proved. 
 
It's Really About Appearances 
One of the reasons we are wrong so often in a government ethics context is what Schulz calls the
’Cuz It’s True Constraint. We can't believe that there are selfish reasons
for our believing what we do. For example, we cannot believe that we
vote for a grant because our brother is the director of the charity
it is going to. We believe we vote for the grant because it's going
to a cause that is good for the community. And yet most neutral
people will believe we voted for the grant because of our brother. 
 
In fact, we would believe the same thing about someone else. “[W]e
impute biased and self-serving motives to other people’s beliefs all
the time. And, significantly, we almost always do so pejoratively. …
Psychologists refer to this asymmetry as ‘the bias blind spot.’” 
 
This asymmetry is produced by the fact that we can look into our own
minds, but not anyone else’s, so that we “draw conclusions about
other people’s biases based on external appearances — on whether
their beliefs seem to serve their interests — whereas we draw
conclusions about our own biases based on introspection. … Our
conclusions about our own biases are almost always exculpatory. At
most, we might acknowledge the existence of factors that could have
prejudiced us, while determining that, in the end, they did not.
Unsurprisingly, this method of assessing bias is singularly
unconvincing to anyone but ourselves.” 
 
And yet with stick with it ’Cuz It's True, no matter what anyone
thinks. 
 
But government is heavily dependent on what other people think, how
they perceive appearances. Appearances are, for the public, all
there is. 
 
Officials recognize this. For them, how they appear is extremely
important. They spend a great deal of time attempting to guide the
public's perceptions. Why should this not be equally as true with
respect to dealing responsibly with conflicts? But it's not. The
public's perceptions come into play not with respect to how we deal
with a conflict, but only when we try to justify our conduct, to look good, to save our face. 
 
Being Wrong Is a Learning Experience 
Being wrong does not have to be seen as a negative emotional
experience that undermines who you are and how you are perceived. As
Schulz notes, being wrong is how a child learns. It's also how
scientists learn. And it's not just that we learn from our mistakes.
Those around us also learn from our mistakes. If our community's
leaders stand strong on their rightness, even when they are wrong,
especially about ethical conduct, no one learns anything but bad
habits, and the public's trust is undermined. Don't local government
officials have an obligation not only to lead, but to teach, to help
their communities grow not just economically, but in other more
abstract but equally important ways? 
 
Some Good Quotations 
Being Wrong deals with many, many more aspects of wrongness. It's
one of the best books I've ever read on any topic. You would be
wronging yourself not to read it. I will leave you with a few
thought-provoking quotations from the book: 
 
On denial in politics: “The arena of politics ... is to denial
what a greenhouse is to an orchid: it grows uncommonly big and
colorful there.” 
 
On cutting our losses: “[W]e are quasi-rational actors, in
whom reason is forever sharing the stage with ego and hope and
stubbornness and loathing and loyalty. The upshot is that we are
woefully bad at cutting our losses.” 
 
On the emotional aspects of being wrong: “Our capacity to tolerate
error depends on our capacity to tolerate emotion. ... if we can’t
do the emotional work of accepting our mistakes, we can’t do the
conceptual work of figuring out where, how, and why we make them.” 
 
On certainty, something we usually value in our political leaders: "Our sense of certainty is kindled by the feeling of knowing — that
inner sensation that something just is, with all the solidity and
self-evidence suggested by that most basic of verbs. Viewed in some
lights, in fact, the idea of knowledge and the idea of certainty
seem indistinguishable. But to most of us, certainty suggests
something bigger and more forceful than knowledge. ... [But]
knowledge is a bankrupt category and ... the feeling of knowing is
not a reliable indicator of accuracy. We have seen that our senses
can fail us, our minds mislead us, our communities blind us. And we
have seen, too, that certainty can be a moral catastrophe waiting to
happen. 
"Moreover, we often recoil from the certainty of
others even when they aren’t using it to excuse injustice and
violence. The certainty of those with whom we disagree … never looks
justified to us, and frequently looks odious. … By contrast, we
experience our own certainty as simply a side effect of our
rightness, justifiable because our cause is just. … We cannot
imagine, or do not care, that our own certainty, when seen from the
outside, must look just as unbecoming and ill-grounded as the
certainty we abhor in others. 
"This is one of the most defining and dangerous
characteristics of certainty: it is toxic to a shift in a
perspective. If imagination is what enables us to conceive of and
enjoy stories other than our own, and if empathy is the act of
taking other people’s stories seriously, certainty deadens or
destroys both qualities.
On our relationship to evidence: “Ignorance isn’t necessarily
a vacuum waiting to be filled; just as often, it is a wall, actively
maintained. … The facts might contradict our own beliefs, not those
of our adversaries. Alternatively, the facts might be sufficiently
ambiguous to support multiple interpretations. ... We think the
evidence is on our side. It is almost impossible to overstate the
centrality of that conviction to everything this book is about.” and
"Evidence is almost invariably a political, social, and moral issue
… If we want to improve our relationship to evidence, we must take a
more active role in how we think — must, in a sense, take the reins
of our own minds. To do this, we must query and speak and
investigate and open our eyes. Specifically, and crucially, we must
learn to actively combat our inductive biases: to deliberately
seek out evidence that challenges our beliefs, and to take seriously
such evidence when we come across it.” 
 
On our ability to justify our beliefs and actions: “[I]f we
want to eat dinner rather than be dinner, we are well served by a
process so rapid and automatic that we don’t need to waste time
deliberately engaging it. As with our perceptual processes, this
automatic theorizing generally careens into consciousness only when
something goes wrong.” and “The creative ability to construct
plausible-sounding responses and some ability to verify those
responses seem to be separate in the human brain.” 
 
François de la Rochefoucauld: “Everyone complains about
their memories; no one complains about their judgment.” 
 
Robert Wechsler 
Director of Research-Retired, City Ethics 
 
203-859-1959

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Being Wrong II (Summer Reading)

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