The Illusion Of Collective Agreement

Social trajectories and the Abilene paradox

There’s a concept in social psychology called the Abilene paradox.

It describes what happens when a group of people follow a course of action despite each individual in the group disagreeing with that course of action.

It was coined in the early 70s by a US professor, Jeffrey Harvey, who, when visiting his in-laws in Texas saw a curious social dynamic play out.

It was a baking hot day and Harvey’s father-in-law suggested they all drive to a town 50 miles away called Abilene, for dinner.

The car wasn’t air conditioned, the drive was dusty and sweltering, the food at the restaurant was bad. At the end of the meal, when Harvey’s father-in-law asked how everyone was feeling, his wife said she’d have preferred to stay at home. Harvey and his wife agreed. Harvey’s father-in-law confessed he hadn’t wanted to go and only suggested it because he thought his visiting son-in-law and daughter were bored.

It got me thinking about these dynamics at the social level.

Are we all collectively stumbling in a direction that individually we don’t agree on?

When asked, most people around the world now say capitalism does more harm than good.

When asked, most people want the system to stop burning fossil fuels and trashing nature.

When asked, most people would prefer masks were still required on public transport, in hospitals and healthcare facilities.

When asked, most people want the US-Israeli aggression against the Palestinians to stop.

Yet we still live in capitalism, fossil fuels are being burnt at record levels, pandemic protections are gone and there is no ceasefire.

Of course it’s not quite as simple as all this. Society isn’t four people going to dinner. Structures of class, capital and power wield huge influence over our collective direction.

I can’t help but feel, however, that this paradox provides some answers for how we ended up here.

Few of us ever explicitly agreed to any of this.

Yes there are vocal anti-maskers and people who believe in mass fossil fuel extraction and the imperial war machine.

Yes there are free market and capitalist absolutists who believe in the dominion of money over the world.

But they are the minority.

In class, capital and power terms, the 1% are literally the 1%.

When asked, a majority don’t agree with the policies that underpin the direction of our societies.

People do want a safe climate, healthcare and transport facilities free from viruses, a different economics, an end to wars of aggression.

But when these things don’t happen, the continuation of the status quo can be viewed, wrongly, as a general agreement on the direction we’re heading.

This isn’t to give people a free pass for bad choices, but to acknowledge how important social context is.

Too often the assumption is held that what the majority wants the majority gets. And so the world must, in large part, however bad it is, be sculpted in the image of the majority.

I think this is wrong. Maybe even dangerous as it can lead to lumpen designations about ‘humanity’ being the cause of everything that is going wrong. This is an often appealing misanthropy (trust me, I’ve been there) but one that is antithetical to change.

And is also unlikely to be true.

To blame a non-specific humanity for our ills denies those structures of class, power and capital, and also fails to account for the role of social-psychological dynamics, like the Abilene paradox, that can push the collective in a direction few would agree on as individuals.

It also condemns ancient human societies, especially indigenous societies, that had no role in where we’ve ended up. It denies their history, in many cases a history of resistance.

We live in a world created by the minority. It can, however, look like everyone agrees that this is the best way to do things because no one is particularly objecting.

The people who are objecting, like the climate and disability activists, are labelled freaks and weirdos, successfully ostracized by a similar but distinct social psychology that successfully ‘others’ dissenting voices.

Adherence to the group is, once again, the dominant social-psychological force holding back change.

Study after study has found that identification and conformity with the group, and fear of exclusion, supersedes political affiliations, ideologies and even common sense as the driver of individual behaviour.

We are group animals.

This is very often a good thing. We cooperate and work together for change.

Yet this affinity with the group is regularly weaponised by those who have interests contrary to our collective wellbeing.

Dark money fuels the removal of pandemic restrictions and the continued digging up of fossil fuels. These ideas are sold by minority interests as being in the broad interests of the group, of society.

So we stumble forwards on a course we haven’t agreed to, a course set by others that few of us choose when individually asked.

The collision of the material and the social-psychological mainstreaming a direction the collective doesn’t want to travel in.

Whether we can break from these insidious group dynamics, recognise our commonality and reorientate our path for the collective good will be a defining feature of the coming decades.

Right now we are being driven along on a road set by the one percenters.

A road that ends with us all eating at a restaurant we never chose, before getting back in that boiling car and riding over the cliff.