General McChrystal: Exposed

David Brooks has a column today on the debacle created by the Rolling Stones report on General Stanley McChrystal. Ignoring the politics (why did the Rolling Stones reporter adopt that specific narrative, which he knew would result in political controversy?), there are a couple of points Mr. Brooks raises which I think are worth addressing.

The Psychology of Groups

First, he points out that it’s natural for people in small groups to complain about people on other groups as a way to relieve stress and build a sense of community. He is quite right about this; contemporary research in social psychology has demonstrated, time and again, that people (i) believe that their group is better, and (ii) have less awareness of people in other groups as people.

Possibly the best book on the subject, The Psychology of Stereotyping by David Schneider, goes into this in depth (I highly recommend the book). To summarize,

the “Tajfel effect” occurs when people have ingroup bias for no reason. The most obvious example in the real world is the attachment people develop to sports team from the cities they live in. Why do people associate so strongly with a certain team just because they live nearby? The most striking psychological example is the “minimal group” situation. If you take a set of people and divide them into two groups in a completely arbitrary fashion – say, flipping a coin – then even if you tell them ahead of time how the groups were divided, people show ingroup bias. That is, if you survey people they believe that their group is on average smarter, more attractive, etc. (This effect is robust, i.e. it holds true if you measure it in a different way – say, eliminating surveys).

The second effect is that people in the group will try to maximize ingroup differentiation (and minimize outgroup differentiation – e.g. “Those Muslims are all the same”). It’s a way, in essence, of “dehumanizing” people who are different from you. Why? Well, the easy answer is that everyone has limited cognitive power. You take shortcuts and, in general, while it’s very important to know how people in your own groups are different from each other, it’s essentially irrelevant to know the same information for people you don’t identify with. All you really need to know are attributes (or stereotypes) like “snakes tend to be dangerous” or “maggots are bad.” Applied to people, it can be “jocks tend to be dumb” or “politicians tend to lie.” Limited interactions mean you don’t need to know any more…. you just need to know enough to deal with them if you encounter them.

Thus, it’s not surprising that Genera McChrystal’s group exhibited (as Rolling Stones reported) “arrogance” about their own capabilities and denigrated people who (i) they didn’t deal with much, and (ii) whom they had nothing in common with. If you have something in common with someone, then you are by definition part of some group – and even if it’s a weak tie, the same ingroup/outgroup bias comes into play (just weaker, obviously).

In fact, it’s important to note that the fact that General McChrystal’s team exhibited such behavior. It demonstrates that he had a unified group. The Rolling Stones report really shows a healthy team. Why? Because the General was taking people from ostensibly different groups (computer geeks from MIT, special ops, soldiers, etc) and fusing them into a unified team. It’s very important to note that they complained about other people outside of the group. It would be very easy, in contrast, for the special ops guys to whinge about the computer geeks, or soldiers, etc. They didn’t: they complained about people outside the group.

That is, in fact, an indication of General McChrystal’s “greatness,” and is something – as Rolling Stones noted – which has given him such a reputation: the ability to pull people from multiple different backgrounds and construct a highly functional team.

The Cult of Personality

The second point David Brooks makes is encapsulated by this paragraph:

Then, after Vietnam, an ethos of exposure swept the culture. The assumption among many journalists was that the establishment may seem upstanding, but there is a secret corruption deep down. It became the task of journalism to expose the underbelly of public life, to hunt for impurity, assuming that the dark hidden lives of public officials were more important than the official performances.

I can’t really disagree with him: reading politics or watching the news is no longer about policies is about the personal lives of the politicians. “Would we like this guy if we met him in a bar?” or “Do we want to imitate this guy?” when, really, such concerns are patently irrelevant to the quality of the job they do.

Popular success is not determined on results; it is determined by personality.

Politicians have become celebrities. They establish a personal brand, and suck people into believe that they are a certain “type of person.”

It’s an interesting extension of the representative democracy model. We elect politicians who make political judgments for us – that is, they represent our collective interests, ideally. With the cult of personality, we elect people who seem like “our kind of people” and trust them to make the kind of decisions we’d like them to make. Thus, instead of judging a politician on how well they represented our interests, we judge them on whether or not we still feel like we have something in common with them.

Politicians as a proxy for people; personality as a proxy for ideology.

Of course, the sad thing is that personality is a terribly proxy for either ideology or effectiveness.

It’s also a classic lesson in Peter Drucker’s wisdom that “You can’t manage what you don’t measure” and “what’s measured improved.”

And as politicians learn how important their personality “brand” is, they become obsessed on maintaining that brand. But they found – particularly with the rise of TV – that managing their personality brand has very little to do with passing legislation. On the other hand, it has a great deal to do with (i) sound-bytes, and (ii) relationships with other politicians, and (iii) endorsements by famous people (and other politicians).

As such, the “personality brand” of politicians improves. But everything extraneous to that – e.g. actually reading the laws they’re voting on – deteriorates, because it has no impact on what’s being measured.

In fact, personality has become so important that people think the results (which personality is acting as a proxy for) is irrelevant.

Such is the fate of General McChrystal. He is – according to many on both sides of the political divide – highly capable, has proven success in multiple arenas, and is showing success in Afghanistan. Yet his personality has been judged lacking, due to the highly filtered view of it (and his team) provided by the Rolling Stones reporter.

Mr. Brooks is correct when he calls the “exposure ethos” damaging. But he misdiagnosis the problem – it’s not exposure, per say, it’s exposure of the wrong things. Actions are something we should care about – such as Nixon’s ethical abuses. Not “kvetching” as Mr. Brooks calls it; healthy team dynamics (that should be kept within the team).