
The 1934 rally of the Nazi Party in Germany, one of an annual series conducted from 1923 to 1938. The rallies were enormous, multi-day affairs, reaching nearly a million people by 1938. Speeches delivered at these rallies were intended to bond the people and the party. They featured military parades, martial music, speeches by political and military leaders, and multiple opportunities for attendees to salute the leadership and express agreement with the presented content. From the perspective of the phenomenon of belief perseverance, these events exploited the technique of using belief packages. By arranging for attendees to express support for some portions of the events, they arranged for them to affiliate with other portions of the events. And by distributing film of the events to the nonattending population in theaters afterwards, they created affiliation opportunities for what we would now call remote attendees.
Something analogous happens in all political rallies, though most modern rallies are free of militarism and doctrines of racial animus. Photo credit: Bundesarchiv, Bild 102-04062A / CC-BY-SA 3.0, courtesy Wikipedia.
Belief perseverance is the tendency to adhere to a belief despite receiving information that contradicts or disconfirms it. Numerous studies have demonstrated the phenomenon. [Baumeister 2007] It's real. Puzzling, but real. It's especially puzzling when we encounter it in knowledge workers, who tend to be skilled critical thinkers.
Still, with regard to beliefs about oneself — one's own talents, strengths, and positive attributes — we might expect a certain lack of objectivity. We might expect that same lack of objectivity with respect to to beliefs about specific people, especially those about whom we have strong opinions, favorable or not. But for beliefs about the subject matter of knowledge work, we expect more clarity of thought.
We might expect more, but we would be disappointed from time to time. To understand why, let's explore just one mechanism that can lead to belief perseverance.
Our culture values consistency. People want to see themselves, and want to be seen, as consistent. Changing one's views is something we want to believe we do sparingly, and only with good cause, in part, because we want to be seen as credible. Perhaps unjustifiably, we regard people who change their views easily or frequently as easily influenced, indecisive, impulsive, unfocused, or less than credible. When we receive information that threatens the validity of beliefs we've expressed publicly, we devote our energies to defending those beliefs, because our personal brand is at stake.
This line of reasoning suggests several tactics for influencing others. I regard the examples below as manipulative and unethical. I offer them only to enable readers to recognize them when others use them.
- Preventing change
- If you anticipate a change you want to prevent, arrange to have people make public statements in support of beliefs that make that anticipated change seem unwise. This tactic is most effective if people don't yet know about the change you anticipate.
- Suppressing contrary evidence
- Suppressing Changing one's views is
something we want to
believe we do sparingly,
and only with good causeevidence that supports a change you anticipate, but which you want to prevent, can be ineffective unless you first arrange to have people express positions opposing the change. Then, when the evidence comes to light, they'll be motivated to reject it. - Using belief packages
- To bind someone to a belief B1, arrange to have him or her express how belief B2, to which they are already committed, implies B1. After they express belief in the connection between B1 and B2, B1 becomes part of a package with B2, and the individual becomes committed to the package.
Although public statements of belief do tend to bind people to that belief, so does silence, because failing to object to another's expression of belief can seem to be agreement. If you cannot arrange for people to publically express their own views, having them silently listen, without objection, to someone else expressing their own views might be just as effective in triggering belief perseverance. Top
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Related articles
More articles on Workplace Politics:
The Costs of Threats
- Threatening as a way of influencing others might work in the short term. But a pattern of using threats
to gain compliance has long-term effects that can undermine your own efforts, corrode your relationships,
and create an atmosphere of fear.
Before You Blow the Whistle: I
- When organizations know that they've done something they shouldn't have, or they haven't done something
they should have, they often try to conceal the bad news. When dealing with whistleblowers, they can
be especially ruthless.
Exploiting Functional Fixedness: II
- A cognitive bias called functional fixedness causes difficulty in recognizing new uses for
familiar things. It also makes for difficulty in recognizing devious uses of everyday behaviors. Here's
Part II of a catalog of deviousness based on functional fixedness.
Three Levels of Deception at Work
- Deception in workplace politics is probably less common than many believe. Still, being ensnared in
a deception can be a costly and upsetting experience. A valuable skill is recognizing the three types
of deceptions: strategic, operational, and tactical.
Surviving Incompetence: I
- When your organization decides to undertake an effort that will certainly fail, you have options. Continuing
to oppose the decision probably isn't one of them. How can you respond to this incompetence and emerge
with your career intact?
See also Workplace Politics and Ethics at Work for more related articles.
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- In meetings of 5-30 participants, managing the queue of contributors can be challenging. A strict first-in-first-out order can cause confusion and waste of time if important contributions are delayed. Some meetings need more flexible queue management. Available here and by RSS on June 8.
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