Perusing daily headlines is always a bit depressing. There rarely is a story about something good, someone doing good, or a good outcome. Instead, it’s a sharp needle looking to blow up whatever balloon of joy you might have picked up in your sleepy landscapes.
Last week, I had a dream where I was flying over water, through the clouds, and came to land on a sailing vessel where all my friends were having a good time. Wake up and it’s war, famine, Trump, protests, guns, and the daily slop of outrage. So much for a good time. Oh Well.
What stands out is that the entire world is now neatly divided between two groups. US. THEM. If you’re with US, we agree with you. If you’re with THEM, you’re an idiot. If you’re with US, you support survivors, you BELIEVE ALL WOMEN. If you’re with THEM, you’re a rape apologist, a misogynist, and WE SEE YOU.
It doesn’t seem to matter what the issue is. Everything divides into groups, and those groups become something like an amoeba — a membrane thickens, keeping out anything that challenges the status belief of the group. Early in COVID, officials said everyone needed to wear a mask outdoors. The CDC later reversed that. People kept wearing masks outside anyway, alone in their cars. Facts don’t always change behavior. The membrane holds.
I’ve really struggled with how group dynamics so adversely affected my experience after I was accused.
How could so many people I respected and worked with turn on me, or at the very least remain silent in the face of evidence that clearly exonerates me? The same question can be asked about any issue where evidence changes the calculations — but the group refuses to change its formulations in response.
In the 1950s, psychologist Solomon Asch ran a simple experiment. He showed people two lines and asked which was longer. The answer was obvious. But Asch planted actors in the room who all confidently named the wrong line. One by one, real subjects went along with the wrong answer. Not all of them, but most. Not because they were stupid or spineless, but because the social cost of dissent is immediate and visceral, and the cost of being wrong about a line is abstract and distant. The math isn’t complicated. It just isn’t the math we like to think we’re doing.
We tell ourselves we’re rational actors weighing evidence. What we’re actually doing, most of the time, is weighing belonging. The group is the variable that matters. The facts are secondary.
Irving Janis gave this a name in 1972. Groupthink. He wasn’t describing fringe movements or mobs. He was describing rooms full of intelligent, credentialed people making catastrophic decisions. The Bay of Pigs. Pearl Harbor. The pattern was consistent across events, across decades, across administrations. Cohesive groups suppress internal doubt. They exclude information that challenges the consensus. They punish the person who raises a hand and says, wait.
The need for unanimity overrides the need for accuracy. Every time.
Janis wasn’t making a cynical argument. He was making a structural one. The same qualities that make a group functional, shared identity, mutual loyalty, common purpose, are the qualities that make it blind. You can’t have one without risking the other. Cohesion and correction are in permanent tension. Usually cohesion wins.
Which brings us to the deviant.
The deviant is the person holding the correct minority position. They have looked at the same evidence as everyone else and arrived somewhere different. In the room, in real time, they are not experienced as someone who might be right. They are experienced as a threat. To the narrative. To the solidarity. To the membrane itself.
Because that’s exactly what they are. A threat to cohesion is a threat to the group. The group responds accordingly. The deviant gets managed, marginalized, expelled. The system isn’t malfunctioning when this happens. It’s working as designed. The group is protecting itself the only way it knows how.
Being right is beside the point. Being right, in fact, makes it worse.
Groups don’t typically correct from the inside. The pressure required to change a group’s position has to come from outside, and it has to be undeniable. An external event. A documented fact that the membrane simply cannot process and survive intact. Even then it takes time. Even then there are holdouts. This is the ordinary story of how groups eventually come around. Slowly, grudgingly, usually without acknowledging what they’re doing. The position shifts. The memory of the previous position fades. Nobody says they were wrong because the group, as an entity, doesn’t have a mechanism for that. It just moves.
Here is where my case gets instructive, and inconvenient.
I was acquitted. That is not an opinion or a characterization. It is an adjudicated fact, documented in a court of law, arrived at by people whose job was to weigh the evidence. A landmark UCL study analyzing nearly six million charges found that jury conviction rates for rape exceed those for attempted murder, manslaughter, and grievous bodily harm. This was not a system tilted in my favor.
An acquittal is about as external and undeniable an event as the justice system produces. If you believed the accusation, the acquittal is the moment the calculation is supposed to change.
For many people, it didn’t. The silence continued. The distance held. The membrane, already thick, simply absorbed the verdict and kept its shape. People who had known me for decades, who had worked alongside me, who had access to the same documented evidence, chose the group position over the factual record.
That is not ordinary groupthink failing in the ordinary way. Ordinary groupthink at least updates when the external event is large enough. What I experienced was something more deliberate. A choice, made repeatedly, by individuals who knew better, to hold a position the evidence didn’t support.
That has a different name. It isn’t confusion. It isn’t tribalism in the passive sense. It’s a decision.
Being wrong is the ordinary condition of anyone paying attention. Being wrong is why we remain intellectually curious. The catastrophe isn’t being wrong. The catastrophe is knowing we were wrong and deciding silence is the right response.
It isn’t.
Solomon Asch — conformity experiments https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asch_conformity_experiments https://www.simplypsychology.org/asch-conformity.html
Irving Janis — Groupthink https://archive.org/details/janis_groupthink https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Groupthink
UCL / Professor Cheryl Thomas — jury conviction rates Criminal Law Review paper: https://www.ucl.ac.uk/news/2023/feb/juries-convict-defendants-rape-more-often-acquit
