Why stupid is normal – when smart people make dumb choices
Ashton Bishop and Gary Wilkinson argue how the actions of former BP chief Tony Hayward during the Gulf of Mexico oil crisis should be a wake up call to stressed marketers and those that work with them.
In 2010 after over 455 million litres of oil had already poured into the Gulf off the Louisiana coast and millions of litres more continued to escape every day, Tony Hayward, the CEO of oil giant BP, and the public face of the environmental disaster, decided to take part in an exclusive yacht race off the Isle of Wight. There was outrage. Social media, already heavily critical of BP’s poor response to the catastrophe, got worse.
Hayward’s behaviour was seen as arrogant, stupid and insulting. This is a man with a PhD who had risen to be CEO of one of the world’s largest corporations. But maybe he was also normal. By this we mean he was doing what the vast majority of people do when under extreme stress – reverting to a “normalcy bias”.
Under extreme stress our brain has a tendency to slow down information processing. The suggestion is that this is linked to tonic immobility – a survival instinct of freezing to fool a predator into believing its prey isdead. For the majority of humans in extremely stressful situations this can lead to an abnormal calmness and a pretence that nothing is wrong – even a search for normality rather than appropriate protective behaviour.
The highest number of fatalities due to a plane crash (prior to 9/11) occurred when two Boeing 747s collided on the runway at Tenerife Airport in1977. As fire and smoke engulfed one of the planes, passengers who were physically capable of leaving just sat there. They were ‘milling’ – instead of taking action they were looking for reassurance that everything was OK. It cost them their lives. In contrast, one of the passengers, Paul Heck, grabbed his wife’s hand and headed for the exit. He was one of 70 survivors – 328 died on the plane. And don’t think you’re immune. Statistics across multiple crashes suggest the general behavior in a plane crash is 70% suffer normalcy bias, 15% get hysterical and 15% react, like Heck, and survive.
And it’s the self-serving bias that makes us think that this won’t happen to us. Over the last 30 years, research has shown that we all think we are more competent than our co-workers, more ethical than our friends, friendlier than the general public, more intelligent than our peers, more attractive than the average person, younger looking than people our same age, better drivers than most people we know, better children than our siblings, and that we’ll live longer than the average lifespan.
And if as you read that you went, ‘No! I don’t think I’m better than everyone’ then you can add, ‘I’m more honest with myself than the average person’.
The point is that we are likely to have clients and colleagues who for whatever reason will experience extreme stress in their role during a potentially disastrous situation – perhaps due to a Black Swan event (a rare event that is unforeseen and not planned for) or a cumulative buildup of pressure. So what will a CEO or CMO with a potential disaster looming do? There is a good chance they’ll seek reassurance that all is OK when the truth is it clearly isn’t. As paid advisors or trusted colleagues what can we do to ensure the right action is taken?
Being prepared for disasters is one thing – having a plan of action will on occasion lead to the required action. But not always – those on the Tenerife plane who stayed seated had seen the same safety demonstration as Paul Heck. Hayward himself had previously noted after a BP Texas City refinery blast that killed 15 – “We have a leadership style that is too directive and doesn’t listen sufficiently well. The top of the organisation doesn’t listen sufficiently to what the bottom is saying.” He was on his way to become CEO.
So information and planning is not always enough to overcome the search for normality. Telling a stressed CEO/CMO that all is not OK may well lead to them seeking reassurance elsewhere and you being cut out of future decisions or the whole relationship. If you say or do nothing then you may simply invoke the ‘bystander effect’. Social psychologists Bibb Latane and John Darley showed in 1970 that people are less likely to help others in distress the more witnesses or bystanders there are.
So you need to say and do at the same time. But what to do? We believe the answer may well lie in the findings by David Dunning and Justin Kruger of Cornell University. In a series of experiments they showed that people who do not have the skill set to solve a problem consistently overestimate their ability to do so. They also underestimate the skills of others to solve theproblem. In contrast, those who are skilled tend to underestimate their ownability.
The point is, if your client or a colleague is in trouble and you haven’t been through a similar experience or been trained in the area (Dunning and Kruger also found that training led to a more accurate self-assessment of skill level) you probably can’t directly help. Find someone within the organisation or a specialist advisor with experience in handling the issue. Engage them early (‘milling’ delays action) as you don’t want to get to the ‘nothing we can do’ point. Follow their advice and let them be the guide to action – don’t underestimate their skills. If you have been through a similar situation don’t underestimate your own ability to determine the right thing to do.
And if you’re the one in trouble quickly find your own version of Paul Heck to take you by the hand and lead you to safety – every second counts.
Ashton Bishop is the head of strategy at Step Change Marketing and Gary Wilkinson is a behavioural psychologist and founder of Bliss Point Research.
Great article guys, isn’t this typical of some in PR though – the whole “no oxygen” protocol. Doesn’t make sense in this connected age
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This is Australia, where all the swans are black, and the biggest black swan problem is too many blokes with big egos who run the show because they’re mates with other blokes with big egos. Like our water fowl, it’s an always-on black swan problem.
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I shudder to think how much corporate tragedy and ruination has involved the normalcy bias. Boiled frog with your GFC anyone? And as for the cognitive dissonance that leads to such ‘visitations’ – fuhgeddaboudit! Of course, I’m smarter and more insightful than my colleagues so I would say that….
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