Disastrous Decisions

... I'm going to suggest is a road map of factors in failures of group decision making.

The failure to anticipate a problem may come from lack of experience. For example, in north western Europe and the eastern part of the United States, trees that fall down into the understory rot away. In the US west, however, they can accumulate into a huge load of fuel and lead to a much larger fire than any in the east.

A society may fail to anticipate a problem because it cannot preserve the memories of events that happened generations before. For example, the Classic Lowland Maya had writing, but did not use it to record drought. When drought came they could not draw on any earlier experience.

Finally, a society may fail to anticipate a problem because the people within it reason by way of a false analogy or misleading metaphor. Diamond uses Iceland as an example: its soil is readily blown away by the wind; but the early Viking settlers thought its soil was like the heavy clay soils of Norway. Consequently,

Within a few generations of the Vikings' arriving in Iceland, half of Iceland's top soil had eroded into the ocean.

The failure to perceive a problem that exists may arise because the problem is imperceptible. Diamond speaks of nutrient-poor soils with lush vegetation; the nutrients are in the vegetation not the soil. When plants are removed, the nutrients are removed .

A society may fail to perceive a problem that exists because of a slow trend concealed by wide up-and-down fluctuations. For example, the medieval Greenlanders had ... difficulties in recognizing that the climate was gradually becoming colder.....

Finally, distant managers, more common now than in the past, may simply not perceive a problem that is not reported to them. Diamond points out that the largest timber company in the state of Montana is based in another state and wonders whether the company executives know they have a big weed problem on their forest property.

One reason is because of clashes of interest. Some may reason accurately that they can advance their own interests by behavior that is harmful to others. Many economists refer to this as a `rational behavior' since it is rational for individuals, but not the society.

... the winners from the bad status quo are typically concentrated (few in number) and highly motivated because they receive big, certain, immediate profits, while the losers are diffuse (the losses are spread over large numbers of individuals) and are unmotivated because they receive only small, uncertain, distant profits from undoing the rational bad behavior of the minority.

A conflict between short and long term outcomes may well come from a clash between individuals or it may come from a clash within each individual.

Societies may also demonstrate `irrational behavior' that is harmful to everyone because the behavior supports individuals' deeply held values. Diamond says that much of Easter Island's deforestation resulted from such deeply held values.

Individually felt terror, anxiety, or sadness may lead to psychological denial, and if enough people share the same terror, anxiety, or sadness may lead to social denial.

The state of Montana loses hundreds of millions of dollars per year in attempting to combat introduced weed species ... the weeds are too difficult to eliminate at present.