This weekend, I decided to binge-watch the web series Panchayat while simultaneously diving...

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This weekend, I decided to binge-watch the web series Panchayat while simultaneously diving into the works of Nobel Laureate Daniel Kahneman. Oddly enough, this unexpected pairing sparked memories of my LBSNAA village visit and unveiled a vital leadership lesson I had foolishly overlooked then.

As part of the LBSNAA FC, I visited a remote village in Gujarat. Similar to Phulera of Panchayat, this village was divided into East and West. Our group split into two, with one half visiting the East first and the other the West. Upon reconvening, we discovered a significant divergence in the views of the subgroups. Interestingly, each subgroup ranked the area they visited first as more innocent and victimized, despite having explored the same village.

While reading Kahneman, I came across a similar experiment by the famous psychologist Asch. He conducted an experiment where he presented the personalities of two people to a group

A: Intelligent - Industrious - Impulsive - Critical - Stubborn - Envious
B: Envious - Stubborn - Critical - Impulsive - Industrious - Intelligent

Similar to the village above, the majority ranked A much better than B despite having the exact same qualities.

What psychological phenomena explain this?

[1] Halo Effect: Qualities presented first had more weight in deciding the overall perception of the person, and the later qualities were viewed in a manner that supported the first impression formed.

[2] The brain's tendency to subconsciously fills in missing information to form a coherent story.

[3] Instead of storing raw data points, the brain packages them into a coherent story and labels that make them easy to store and retrieve.

Often, this process is harmless and efficient - saves time and brain processing.

However, a leadership position like IAS often comes with a lot of discretion and responsibility. The decisions you take as a Magistrate can be matters of life and death for others. Being fooled by your brain is not an option.

Here is how one can escape this trap:

[1] Consciously train your brain to seek more information. While it's tempting to jump to conclusions with whatever information you have, take a pause and look for the missing pieces. Don't let the first impression be the last impression.

[2] Learn to be comfortable with abstract raw data points without feeling the need to reduce them to any sort of story, labels, or tags.

[3] It helps to not have an ego. Don't commit to any single idea. Recognize that with new information, you might be wrong. It might not be cognitively pleasing to reprocess information from a new point of view, but it is less painful than being wrong and causing injustice.

[4] Negative Test Strategy: Test any hypothesis by trying to negate it. Accept a hypothesis only if it can withstand the test.

Let this post serve as a reminder to my future self. In the words of physicist Feynman:

The first principle is that you must not fool yourself—and you are the easiest person to fool!