THE BIG IDEA
It’s human nature to defer toward long-standing, widely accepted practices and beliefs. The would-be insubordinates among us must acknowledge this reality so that they can deal with it and ultimately overcome it. The rest of us must, too, so that we can overcome our internal resistance to change and support progress.
It’s f*#$ing hard to be different, to dissent, to deviate from traditional thinking. Fitting in offers a short-term respite from the turmoil of being the target of animosity and rejection. If you’re suffering in an unjust system, sometimes you just want a break from thinking about it. But sticking by the system is ultimately unworkable, as it will compromise your well-being over the long term by making change impossible.
Let’s all become more aware of our tendency to conform, opening our minds to the prospect of change. This cookbook provides psychological recipes for the rebels and renegades among us, those who have found a mission worth fighting for. I’ve also written it for the rest of us who are less inclined to resist but still seek a better life than the one we’re living. As we’ll see, non-conformists can get more people onboard if they make small tweaks in their behavior. And the rest of us can adopt tactics to help us glean the most benefit from non-conformists and their brave interventions. But before we get to all that, let’s set the stage just a little more. We acknowledge the strange things we do to be liked, and some key psychological mechanisms underlying and influencing our behavior. Now let’s examine why principled insubordination is necessary. Let’s unpack why renegades rock.
RECIPE STEPS
1. Point out the cost of inaction. Adults rarely (if ever) switch brands of soap, yogurt, and cable providers, even when they don’t like them. Non-partisan voters overwhelmingly vote for the incumbent in political elections. By sticking with undesirable goods, services, and decisions, we allow negative events to dominate daily life when healthier, more meaningful alternatives exist. Next time you want to convince someone of an idea or approach, remind them that doing nothing when problems exist harms your well-being.
2. Know the four psychological boosters. Gaining insight into the mechanisms that fuel voluntary conformity on our part will help you to resist conformity pressures. What pulls for conformity and legitimization of a corrupt state of affairs include a lack of personal control, threats to the system, dependence on the system, and hope of upward social mobility.
3. Acknowledge your status quo bias. It’s human nature to defer to long-standing, widely accepted practices and beliefs. Would-be insubordinates among us must acknowledge this bias so that they can deal with it and ultimately overcome it.
CHAPTER 3 Renegades Rock
Why principled rebellion matters so much
In American history, institutionalized racism was always a Southern thang. The Northerners were righteous warriors fighting for freedom and equality. That’s the stereotype, right? A feisty young teacher named Elizabeth Jennings would beg to differ. Institutionalized racism was a Northern thang, too. She had the cuts and bruises to prove it. As well as $225.
The date was July 16, 1854. The place, New York City. Jennings headed to church, where she played the organ. It was too far to walk, so she hailed one of those newfangled, eco-friendly, biofueled vehicles known as a horse-drawn streetcar. No sooner did she get on than the conductor reminded her of three pertinent facts: (1) she was a Black person; (2) according to New York City’s transport system policy, any White passenger who was a racist hater could have a Black person thrown off the streetcar; and (3) if a White patron asked, the conductor would enforce rule two. Jennings received no respect, no gentle plea, only a barked order from the conductor: if anyone here objects to your presence, you can get the f%$# off and walk.
Jennings could have nodded her head, sat down, and enjoyed the ride. But she was having none of it. It was one too many times that someone told her what she could or could not do because of the color of her skin. She lit into him, “I am a respectable person, born and raised in New York, and I have never been insulted before while going to church!” Not to mention, in her humble opinion, “you are a good for nothing impudent fellow, who insults genteel people on their way to church.”
The conductor wasn’t used to Black people talking back. Because at the time, they tended to keep quiet. He grabbed Jennings and, with the help of a nearby police officer, physically dragged her off the streetcar and onto the road. They tried to rip her off the platform steps, but she held her own. As a result of the struggle, her dress became soiled and her body cut and bruised. When additional police arrived, they didn’t help her. They arrested her.
The only lawyer who agreed to represent Jennings during her court appearance was a sprightly twenty-one-year-old White dude named Chester Arthur (who would later go on to become the twenty-first President of the United States). In the view of one expert, Chester sported “both the bushiest and boldest mustache of any president.” Chester did his thing. Not only did Jennings not pay a fine or serve jail time; she sued the transit service. The court granted Jennings $225—quite a princely sum back in the day, about as much as a civil servant made in a year. But that’s not all. News of the incident spread. Black folk in the city were pissed. Others stood up against the transit service’s racist policy. The following year, in response to another court case, the transit authority installed a racially neutral policy giving Black people equal access to their choice of public transportation and seat selection.
It’s time to set the record straight. Although segregation in the South only ended during the second half of the twentieth century, the Northern states weren’t exactly paragons of virtue. The government of New York State abolished slavery in 1827, almost three decades before Jennings’s tangle on the streetcar. And yet New York retained racist laws, regulations, and policies for decades after abolishing slavery. It took brave souls like Elizabeth Jennings to challenge the powers that be and show society a new and better way. Over a hundred years before Rosa Parks allegedly pioneered the tactic of civil disobedience by refusing to sit in the back of an Alabama bus, Elizabeth Jennings was already doing it.
Nobody placed Jennings on a U.S. postage stamp or mentioned her in history textbooks. Elementary schools don’t teach kids her story. But forgotten acts of insubordination like hers make a big difference. We need rabble-rousers in society as well as in our organizations and teams. As we’ll see in this chapter, the very presence of non-conformists pushes us forward, even when we disagree with them, and even if their proposed solutions are wrong. Creating space for principled insubordination enables an upward spiral to take root, affirming that nothing is ever “finished” and that we should always strive for improvement. Principled insubordination makes individuals more rational, and groups more creative and productive.
That’s not to say that having principled insubordinates in our midst is easy. Quite the contrary. As Bill Clinton told an audience in 2016: “America has come so far. We’re less racist, sexist, homophobic and anti-specific religions than we used to be. We have one remaining bigotry: We don’t want to be around anyone who disagrees with us.” His audience laughed. It’s no laughing matter. Humanity today continues to struggle with injustice, and we face existential challenges, from global warming to nuclear weapons to global pandemics. If we want to survive, we better up our game, and fast. That means seeking out brave souls—unsung heroes like Elizabeth Jennings and famous ones like Rosa Parks—to point out problems, provide their best ideas, and rally others to do the same.
THE BIG IDEA
To nurture bravery, we must improve at not just tolerating people who disagree with us, but welcoming and fostering them.
DISSENT EQUALS PROGRESS
The power of principled insubordination becomes obvious in situations when non-conformists have taken down unjust systems like segregation. Less obvious are the multitude of ways a non-conformist’s spirit fuels incremental progress across society, making daily life more efficient, productive, prosperous, safer, and just plain better.
I hate to be a downer, but we desperately need more progress. Although we do have The Simpsons, self-cleaning fish tanks, and an ability to 3D-print a fully functional acoustic guitar, other important dimensions of daily life either totally suck, largely suck despite some recent improvement, or only moderately suck but could still be better. Doctors might not bore holes in people’s skulls any longer, drain blood from bodies, or give poisonous mercury and arsenic elixirs as a wellness treatment (I’ll save the Egyptian dung ointments for the endnotes). Still, at least 44,000 patients die each year in the United States from avoidable medical errors. Astronomy has improved since the days when humans thought they resided at the center of the universe. Still, scientists in 2019 discovered they had been somewhat off when estimating the universe’s age—like, by more than a billion years. Our educational system is better than it was in Elizabeth Jennings’s day, when virtually no Black people attended school and only about half of White kids aged five through nineteen did. Still, as of 2019, 22 percent of American citizens failed to name a single branch of the U.S. government; only 39 percent could name all three. Not to mention, school-based physical education affords students a mere sixteen minutes of bodily movement per class, with “a few jumping jacks before a halfhearted game of softball.” Will 960 seconds of exercise prevent kids from growing into morbidly obese adults? C’mon, people!
The way to do better, in these areas and practically any other, is to actively recruit people like Elizabeth Jennings. More frequently than you imagine, diverse perspectives lead in turn to refreshingly counterintuitive ideas and highly workable solutions.
Consider the issue of how to prevent or stop mass shootings. One of the most popular solutions advocated around the country is to allow teachers and other employees to carry weapons. That way, teachers can fight back when an active shooter menaces their classrooms—they don’t have to wait for law enforcement.
In the wake of a 2013 attack on a heavily secured Washington Navy Yard building that killed a dozen people and injured eight, the Federal Law Enforcement Training Centers convened a panel of experts to proffer their opinions. The panel’s goal: Generate new solutions to prevent future tragedies and, specifically, to keep the body count in every workplace targeted by active shooters to one victim or fewer. Instead of inviting the usual collection of bureaucrats, the Centers brought in a collection of outsiders, including a forensic psychologist, a psychiatrist, a surgeon, an architect, a Navy SEAL, and frontline responders who had experience with mass shootings.
The forensic psychologist offered up the creative but seemingly odd idea of training kids in schools to head straight for the girls’ bathroom. “Nearly every shooter is male,” he said, “and if you watch the video footage, they always walk past the girls’ room.” The Navy SEAL had a completely different idea. “I would grab a fire extinguisher,” he said, describing what he’d do in an active shooter situation. Other panelists assumed he would advise using the fire extinguisher to hit the shooter in the head and take him down, but that wasn’t it. “I’d spray it to create a smoke screen and plus the chemicals remove oxygen from the air making it harder for shooters to breathe and easier to take down.” Remarkable for their simplicity and pragmatism, these ideas required mental leaps that only non-conformists—in this case, outsiders—were likely to make.
Of course, these tactics might not work. But it’s not like arming teachers is such a great idea, either. When researchers asked 15,000 law enforcement professionals for solutions to gun violence, 86 percent believed that legally arming citizens would reduce the death count. In truth, when highly trained New York City police officers participate in gunfights, shooters miss the target 82 percent of the time. When only police fire the bullets, they still miss the target 70 percent of the time. Each bullet could inadvertently kill or wound an innocent person. Shouldn’t we let the poetry teachers out there stick to rhyme and meter?
In this instance as in countless others, conventional wisdom is flawed. Room for improvement exists. Maybe girls’ bathrooms and fire extinguishers would work better than having poetry teachers play Call of Duty in real life, but maybe not. But one truth seems clear: unleashing more non-conformity will probably allow us to find other potentially helpful solutions nobody has thought of or had the ovaries (or cojones) to put forth.
As evidence shows, groups of people perform better when we encourage principled insubordination. In 2012, Google began a much-publicized research initiative called Project Aristotle, seeking to identify what distinguished top performing teams. Frequently voted one of the greatest places to work, Google wanted to know why only a few teams fulfill their promise and produce higher quality work than any individual could do. After two years, researchers had their answer: psychological safety. Exceptional teams created conditions that encouraged team members to participate without fear of ridicule, chastisement, intellectual theft, a hit to their career, and so on. The media loved it. The New York Times published a front-page story, “What Google Learned from Its Quest to Build the Perfect Team.” As of June 2019, 10,600 articles and videos have covered Project Aristotle’s results. Organizations have undertaken a “safe place” revolution in the hope of boosting motivation, learning, performance, and innovation.
And yet, Google missed half the story. A year after Project Aristotle ended, two psychologists dissected fifty-one studies on the importance of psychological safety to team performance. The result: psychological safety often didn’t correlate with performance. Sometimes teams that spent hefty sums training and hiring with psychological safety in mind did fantastically. Other times, they tanked. One factor does determine whether psychological safety works or not, and that’s principled insubordination. Group members want to feel psychologically safe. But as research has shown, psychological safety reliably translates into superior performance only when sufficient minority viewpoints exist, and we permit and embrace them when present. You might tolerate minority dissent but this says nothing about whether its stimulation exerts influence on other group members. As emphasized by organizational psychologists Drs. Katherine Klein and David Harrison, “It is not sufficient for a group member to improve on another’s solution; he or she must also win others’ approval of the improved solution as the next best course of group action.” Too many people fail to capitalize on the stimulation of principled insubordination. Teams need psychological safety and a welcoming of constructive dissent and deviance before they can consistently be open-minded to divergent thinking, make more informed, high-quality decisions, and be innovative.
If principled insubordination is so important, how exactly does it work? Here are three of the best explanations set forth by psychologists:
Reason 1: Principled Insubordination Neutralizes Our Cognitive Biases
As smart as we humans are, we struggle to form rational judgments. When confronted with information that threatens closely held beliefs, we respond automatically and defensively, dismissing perspectives that clash with our worldview. One big reason: cognitive biases. Our capacious sapiens brains possess limited processing power. We can only pay attention to a limited amount of stimuli at any given time. To make do in a world of infinite information, our brains take cognitive shortcuts, causing us to default to biases.
We also feel motivated to experience certain emotions and beliefs and prefer to avoid others. We want to be right. We want to be liked. We seek to validate our identities. We care about certain people, objects, sports teams, and ideas because of what they say about us. We defend what we care deeply about against detractors. Our sense of reality becomes biased and skewed.
To date, psychologists have identified about a hundred cognitive biases to which we fall prey, divided into three categories. The first category of biases relates to our need to feel like we belong to an in-group. We love in-groups. Thanks to our evolutionary experience, our brains tell us it’s better to mistakenly avoid a kind, compassionate, altruistic stranger than to mistakenly approach a dangerous one. So, we pledge fidelity to all sorts of in-groups, including those based on race, gender, nationality, social status, political beliefs—even vegetarianism. We treat members of our in-group better than we do outsiders, hold them to different moral standards, interact with them more, evaluate their ideas and proposals more favorably. Most important for our purposes, we tend to associate unfamiliar ideas with the unfamiliar people who promote them, thus becoming resistant to changing our beliefs.
The second category of biases has to do with what scientists call “motivated reasoning,” a jargon-y way of saying that we tend to evaluate evidence not in a perfectly objective way but based on what we hope to conclude. When we hear of information that confirms what we already think we know, we accept it more readily than information that doesn’t. We tend to avoid information that doesn’t conform to our beliefs. Thus, we tend to surround ourselves with like-minded people who say like-minded things. We delude ourselves into thinking that our perspective alone is the very embodiment of fairness and truth. Deluded approaches to acquiring and processing information interfere with our ability to recognize and accept alternative ideas that might serve us better.
The third category of biases relate to what scientists call “motivated certainty.” As political psychologists Cory Clark and Bo Winegard note, motivated reasoning concerns “the substance of a belief, [whereas] motivated certainty refers to the ‘momentum’ of that belief.” Simply put, we humans tend to feel overconfident in our positions and fail to see the costs of adopting them. We think we’re so smart—or at least correct. For instance, we might believe immigrants should be able to cross borders freely and live wherever they want, that any human being can decide on their gender for whatever reason at any time, and that genetics fails to explain differences between men and women. In a dream world, such positions cost us nothing to hold. In the real world, holding a position comes with costs. We invest money, attention, and emotion into our ideas and their implementation, becoming increasingly motivated to feel certain about our beliefs. Weirdly, we become more motivated—and feel even more confident in our beliefs—as uncertainty increases. Our grasp on reality slips away, without our even realizing it. Ten Biases That Eff Up Our Thinking
1. Confirmation bias—We tend to prefer information that matches our existing beliefs.
2. Familiarity bias—We prefer what or who is already known.
