All of us are equal, but some are more equal than others, and this Orwellian doublethink appears to be costing us dearly.
An “equality bias” that leads people to give the same weight to the opinions of others, regardless of whether they are experts, “damages” groups, according to a study.
Scientists have found that men give too much influence to colleagues with bad judgment and too little to those who are competent, even when the discrepancy is plain to see.
Bahador Bahrami, a neuroscientist at University College London and one of the researchers in the study, said that not even money was enough to make people abandon their fixation on equality. “People are incredibly bad at taking differences in competence into account when making group decisions,” he said. “Even when we showed them exactly how competent they were, they still gave each other more or less equal say. Incredibly, this still continued when people were rewarded with real money for making correct decisions.”
Psychologists split 98 men —30 from Denmark, 30 from Iran and 38 from China — into pairs and set them the task of spotting targets on a screen.
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When a pair disagreed with each other, one of them judged who was right. The more competent spotters, who were right about in about 70 per cent of cases, followed their hapless partners’ verdict almost half the time.
Conversely, the men who were bad at the game and picked the correct answer in only 30 per cent of contested rounds placed more confidence in their own judgment than they deserved.
The result was that both partners tended to lose out, even when the researchers displayed clearly on a screen who was more likely to be right and when the pairs were offered money for correct answers.
“We tend to think that everyone deserves an equal say in a debate,” the psychologists wrote in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. “This seemingly innocuous assumption can be damaging when we make decisions together as part of a group. . . This equality bias, whereby people behave as if they are as good or as bad as their partner, is particularly costly for a group when a competence gap separates its members.”
One reason why we are so reluctant to treat people’s opinions with the respect or disdain they merit is thought to be the fear of leaving people out. Studies have found that the feeling of being excluded “may resemble physical pain”.
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“The reasons behind equality bias are unclear, but one explanation could be that people are reluctant to take sole responsibility for group decisions,” Dr Bahrami said. He said that the findings would have implications for a wide range of events from cabinet meetings to squabbles over household finances.
“For example, when people living together are deciding the best way to select utility suppliers and divide bills, they are likely to give each other’s views equal weight,” he said. “However, if one person is far more financially competent, then the best strategy for the group might be to give their judgment more weight.”