Resist hostage negotiations in groups
Resist hostage negotiations in groups
The process is as important as the outcome
I remember being at a university faculty meeting. As usual, productive disagreement arose about which of approximately 120 candidates deserve the lone job opening.
After reviewing applications, reading letters of recommendation, calling recommenders, dissecting past contributions, and debating what the organization needs, the vast majority reached the conclusion for who to hire. She was a stellar candidate.
Then something unusual happened. Two senior faculty members interrupted the proceedings to declare - “if you hire her, I’ll quit!” You could feel the shock, confusion, and anxiety in the room. A declaration best described as a hostage negotiation from the two faculty members with the longest tenure in the organization. They had power and status. They knew they could force compliance with their requests because group members feared their wrath.
What’s interesting about this hostage negotiation is that it wasn’t based on objective information. It was a subjective preference. It just so happened the two senior faculty members didn’t respect the topic studied by the candidate.
Consider an analogy - everyone acknowledges the ice cream at a particular location is spectacular. Creamy, flavorful, with rainbow colored sprinkles, hot fudge, caramel, and grinded morsels of Twix and Kit-Kats on top. An unprecedented number of delicious topping. But two people refuse to let people drive to the ice cream parlor because while chocolate toppings are ideal, they want M&M’s. Where are the goddamn M&M’s they aske? Nobody is getting ice cream they complain, because there are no freaking M&M’s.
Here’s the thing - the hostage negotiations didn’t work. And the faculty members didn’t quit. And that job candidate has been exceptional. But let’s think about the organizational repercussions of this approach. In the aftermath, those two faculty members lost trust. Instead of collaborating, they chose to threaten colleagues. The threat lacked a compelling rationale. Worse, it was an empty threat. As a result, their future dissenting opinions can be discounted with greater ease. A loss of good faith negotiations is hard to repair. Even worse, the entire culture took a hit as everyone dreads who will be next to threaten the group. Notably, the group never discussed this event (ten years later).
Imagine a counterfactual where the hostage negotiations did work. Instead of being influenced and persuaded by high-quality arguments, the rest of the group complies. Minds are not changed. Quite the contrary. Group members nod in agreement while privately thinking and feeling that they are victims of an abuse of power. The two senior faculty members use their power effectively. This incentivizes other group members to rely on the same strategy. Constructive dialogue is supplanted by a round robin of future threats. A group that supports hostage negotiations strays from promoting aspirational thinking to preventing disorder.
Regardless of whether the hostage negotiations are effective, the group becomes weaker and less intelligent.
Is There a Better Alternative to Hostage Negotiations?
The short answer is of course! Consider research on the value of adopting diverse perspectives. Across five studies with 6,425 adults, researchers discovered that merely imagining the perspective of a person that disagrees with you leads to better, accurate decisions.
Adults received instructions to consider a diversity of viewpoints. The exact prompt before making a decision was this:
“Now picture a friend whose views and opinions are very different from yours. To illustrate, when discussing politics, you often find yourself disagreeing on various issues. How would he or she answer these [ten/six] questions? Please answer these questions again, but now as this friend.”
In the comparison condition, adults were asked to imagine being around like-minded people:
“Now picture a friend whose views and opinions are very similar to yours. To illustrate, when discussing politics, you often find yourself agreeing on various issues. How would he or she answer these six questions? Please answer these questions again, but now as this friend.”
Reminded of alternative, disagreeing perspectives, adults produced more accurate estimates in ambiguous situations. Which is exactly what groups need: the ability to arrive at wise decisions when the conditions are volatile, uncertain, and ambiguous. These findings contribute to a body of research showing that the mere presence of a single principled dissenter:
Don’t sacrifice the health and longevity of a group to satisfy the subjective whims of the loudest, forceful person (or two) in the room.
Don’t skip constructive disagreements for the nuclear option. You might arrive at the right solution but how you get there matters.
Set the conditions for better decision-making today.
Stay attentive to the precedents set for tomorrow.
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Extra Curiosities
I could not be excited about this new publication with one of my favorite collaborators in one of my favorite journals, Current Directions in Psychological Science. Check out “Well-being after psychopathology: A transformational research agenda.” Let me know what you think.
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As I get older, I almost cry far more often in movies. At least three times during this freaking movie on basketball, that’s really not about basketball. It’s about what you are willing to sacrifice to reach your potential and how central it is to cultivate an agile mind and the proper allies. I know you want to resist popular movies. Don’t. Go see Hustle.
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Dr. Todd B. Kashdan is the author of The Art of Insubordination: How to Dissent and Defy Effectively (Avery/Penguin) and a Professor of Psychology who leads The Well-Being Laboratory at George Mason University.
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