In the fall of 1936, The Literary Digest mailed ten million ballots to American voters and announced that it would settle the presidential election before Election Day.
The magazine had correctly predicted the previous five elections. This time, it promised to be accurate within a fraction of one percent.
About 2.4 million people mailed back their ballots. It was, by far, the largest poll anyone had ever conducted. The result seemed impossible to dismiss: Alf Landon would win 370 electoral votes and 57 percent of the popular vote.
On November 3, Franklin Roosevelt won every state except Maine and Vermont: 523 electoral votes to Alf Landon’s 8, in contrast to the prediction about Landon’s overwhelming win.
The Literary Digest had indeed asked ten million Americans, but the people it polled were not randomly chosen. Their names came from telephone directories and automobile registration rolls. This was right in the middle of the Great Depression, when few people could still afford to own a telephone and a car. The bottom line was that the magazine’s survey sample, despite being large, was not a representative group of voters.
After the election, the magazine had to explain why its predictions were so off. But instead, the editors found reasons to justify their polling methods. In the magazine’s November 14 issue, they wondered why only one in five voters in Chicago had bothered to respond, insisting their ballots “did reach these so-called ‘have-nots’ strata.” They had completely misread the election but still tried to justify their process.
Most of us have our own Literary Digest lists. We collect friends who agree with us, colleagues who are reluctant to challenge us, family members who know to choose their battles, and online feeds that have learned exactly what we like to read. Soon we find ourselves in an echo chamber of our own making.
I’ve written before about the emperor having no clothes. As we get older and develop more expertise in our fields, it’s hard to find people willing to tell us what they really think. The very respect we earn starts to insulate us from hearing the truth we need most.
In meetings, when nobody pushes back on an idea, it’s easy to take the agreement (and silence) as evidence to mean we’re right. It makes us more confident we made the right decisions, wen everyone simply nods. But now I realize we need to consider another possibility: maybe no one wanted to be the person who disagrees with us.
Adam Galinsky and his colleagues studied one small part of this in 2006. They asked fifty-seven students to draw a capital E on their own foreheads. Students primed to feel powerful were almost three times as likely to draw the E facing inward, so it looked correct to them but backward to everyone else.
The exercise sounds almost silly, but the result is hard to ignore. Power made people less likely to take another person’s perspective, even when that person was standing right in front of them.
This isn’t applicable just to world leaders and corporate head honchos. A little authority, experience, or reputation, or even just being known as the person in the room who knows what she’s doing, is enough to skew behavior.
Speaking truth to power is hard. In many families and cultures, challenging authority, even elders, is simply not done. People don’t want to be punished for honesty, but more than anything, criticizing isn’t pleasant. Nobody likes being told they did a crappy job.
It’s also not easy to acknowledge our biases and faults. Researchers call this the bias blind spot: we notice bias in other people more easily than we notice it in ourselves. In one study, participants kept insisting that their self-assessments were accurate even after researchers explained the relevant bias.
Feedback is tricky too. The person offering the feedback may be right about the problem and still wrong about how to deliver it. This is probably why the whole couple’s therapist profession exists.
Telling a partner, “You don’t really listen to me anymore” is just a way to agitate them and get an equally curt “What do you mean? I listened to you for an hour on Tuesday” response.
Instead, as therapists point out, aiming feedback at the problem rather than the person is probably more helpful.
While therapy-speak— “When I was telling you about my day last night, you kept looking at your phone and didn’t respond. I felt like you weren’t really with me”—may not come naturally to many of us, there’s a reason it works. It’s feedback that gives a person something they can actually recognize and change. Nobody grows from being told they are disappointing.
I’ve written about the value of not being the smartest person in the room. I am trying to spend more time around people who know things I don’t. When someone tells me I’m wrong, my first instinct may still be to defend myself. But I’m learning to let that criticism sink (maybe sleep on it, or go for a walk) and ponder it later when it stings less. It’s not easy. But as Elbert Hubbard very eloquently said:
To avoid criticism, say nothing, do nothing, be nothing.
PS: The Literary Digest folded within eighteen months of that election polling.