Introduction
One of the curiosities of reading many psychology papers is that very often a whole field of study is based on one idea expressed in a simple everyday saying. My particular favourite is “birds of a feather flock together” and, upon that, all Social Identity Theory was based, created by Tajfel and Turner (1979) and spread in the early 1980s, and much used in advertising and politics.
Another is cognitive dissonance. Thought up by Festinger (Festinger, 1957), it refers to the uncomfortable feeling one gets when we do something, or act in a way, that does not meet with our personal values. The stand-by explanation is with smoking. You know you shouldn’t do it, but you do it anyway. You feel shame, or guilt, and then we come to conscience: your conscience is “pricked” as we say in English. You make excuses, you ignore it, you may even justify smoking to yourself, but you know it’s wrong. Or do you? Does everyone, in fact, experience cognitive dissonance? That, perhaps is the real question with miscarriages, or more particularly what Michael Naughton (Naughton, 2013) refers to as “abortions” of justice, what in common parlance would be a “stitch-up”. They “built the case” (which comes from Behaviorism; Turvey (2008)) against someone who they could scapegoat and subsequently take the blame – or suspicion - from the actual perpetrators, e.g. potentially in the Letby case. Certainly in the Post Office scandal.
My basis for addressing this issue is the summing up by Edward Henry KC in the case of the Post Office Submasters in what has rightly been dubbed the greatest Miscarriage of Justice in English legal history. Edward Henry KC criticised senior Post Office executives for ignoring concerns raised about the flawed Horizon IT system, stating: “This heartlessness came from the top.” He alleged that Post Office managers “closed their minds and closed ranks around the system,” fostering a “culture of contempt, ridicule, even hatred towards the sub postmasters and their complaints.” (Mountford Chambers website; for the speech see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mZ2tmUToVtg )
In my words, the senior management knew perfectly well that their case against the postmasters was flawed but they said nothing. That was possibly confirmation bias in some people who were involved lower down the hierarchy, but not, if we are to believe Mr Henry, “at the top”: that was “heartlessness”. Was that a complete absence of cognitive dissonance? Or was it a failure to recognise the wrong, the immorality and dishonesty, that was being actioned? Famously now it is said they were “protecting the brand”. But is even that a fig leaf? The fact is these people at the top can show signs of sociopathy. Can that be possible?
Philosophy
Breslaus (2013) in “Moral emotions, conscience and cognitive dissonance” lays it out in basic terms: there is shame (i.e. embarrassment), guilt (knowing you have done something wrong) and then moral ideas or what we call “conscience”. Are these what we mean by “cognitive dissonance” and the answer is broadly speaking, in that none of us can experience these things quite the same: yes.
There is an obvious difference between shame and guilt: stealing a pound from your Mum’s purse is not equal to being a warder in a death camp. But the justifications can be plentiful: the thief wanted to go to the cinema and didn’t have quite enough, and the female warden who believed that the prisoners in the camp were not worth keeping alive.
That is, perhaps, where moral philosophy or ethics comes in: was taking the pound just the beginning of a slippery slope? How could a female ever think killing children (or anyone else) was a good thing, reasons or not?
In the specific Horizon case, how could a female CEO, and who was also an ordained priest, seriously think blaming innocent people was justified? Tunnel vision, indeed.
There seem to be three parts to this issue:
1. Shame, guilt, conscience and cognitive dissonance
2. Empathy and/or compassion and
3. Sociopathy or psychopathology, the first being the American term and the latter British.
So the question is: where do the agents of miscarriages (or abortions) of justice sit in this spectrum? If we accept Mr Henry’s assessment of “heartlessness” this indicates a lack of empathy or compassion and at the very least a weak sense of cognitive dissonance. Tests have been done to assess cognitive dissonance, but they are qualitative rather than quantitative. Subjects answer surveys to indicate the extent of their reaction to a conundrum. These kinds of survey are indicative but rely on the truthfulness of the subject.
On the other hand, to what extent could the CEO of the Post Office be sociopathic? Sociopathy or anti-social personality disorder is mental health condition in which a person consistently shows no regard for right and wrong and ignores the rights and feelings of others. Psychopathy is a mental disorder, especially when marked by egocentric and antisocial activity, a lack of remorse for one's actions, an absence of empathy for others, and often criminal tendencies. This seems to fit the appearance of the behaviour of the corporate agents who apparently see nothing wrong with false accusations if they fit the corporate culture and interests.
It seems hard to believe that an ordained priest would have those attitudes, but apparently not. Recent scandals in the Church of England have destroyed that myth. Mr Edwards identified the “closing of ranks”, a common reaction by corporate management and local authorities to accusations. The fact that corporate lawyers would go along with this approach puts a chill down one’s spine, not least when one has had personal experience of such attitudes. Do they have no shame? Apparently, by the public reaction in the newspapers to the 3 Nottingham murders the answer is a clear no.
In one example, postmistress Seema was prosecuted when the Post Office managers and the lawyers actually KNEW there were bugs in the Horizon system. Was this a lack of shame, cognitive dissonance, empathy and compassion or just downright sociopathy. It has been seen in some cases in what has been referred to as “organisational psychopaths” and Hofstede’s work at IBM (Hofstede 1981) showed that corporate environments create “yes men” who go along with anything the boss suggests. This, of course , is groupthink and in itself indicates confirmation bias by each individual concerned that made up the group.
We can look at the Pakistani rape gang scandal. We now know, inquiry or not, that Labour politicians and public employees sacrificed innocent girls for political reasons where Marcusian Cultural Marxism had overtaken the desire for justice.
Whistleblowing or contradicting the “boss” can be career fatal, not least at medical universities where consultants have total power in the department and can cancel your career: “sometimes the accusation is enough” said one professor to me. That, in all fairness, is real pressure if you have kids at college etc., etc., but not for me. That may be because I can afford it. I have my own business. I don’t need these bodies, corporate or institutional. Not everyone is in that position. The legal point is: if you are a public employee, so defined, and you do not act responsibly, that represents misconduct in public office and that is a serious offence. Some people seem to have forgotten about that. I assure you I hadn’t.
Social Constructionism: what you are is what you eat
So what creates this ruthlessness, this lack of cognitive dissonance: this shamelessness, this guilt-free existence? At this point, I can safely say it’s complicated. In fact, I consider social psychology the quantum physics of the Humanities. The Natural Sciences have their Quantum physics, metaphysicists – social scientists – have social psychology. To give a metaphor: Newtonian science is like a conventional billiard or pool table. The balls are laid out on the table, the player takes a shot knowing the balls will react in predictable ways and the result is due to the accuracy of the hit. In social psychology each ball is like a furry person that, far from following Newtonian principles, has a mind of its own and goes where it wants. If you are a social psychologist and know all the rules, you can estimate the way the furry ball will react. To a Newtonian scientist it will appear mad. Thus, to highly (or over) trained bureaucrats human behaviour will appear too contradictory and efforts will be made to make individuals conform.
In that way, the number of possible factors that create a personality and guide behaviour, are many. The environment they grow up in is one. Known as social constructionism, Structuralism, even Post Modernism in some cases, no-one could, and I certainly don’t, deny that where and when you are born, with whom, under what circumstances has no effect. It certainly does, Churchill himself said “we shape the buildings and then the buildings shape us”. Jean Piaget, certainly the most coherent human developmentalist, said all important facets of personality are in place by 5 years old. The Jesuits said “give me the boy and I’ll give you the man by 7”. I would say that by 5 years the personality is a wardrobe: after that the clothes that hang inside are the experiences post 5 years old.
What is the cultural environment? In England, this would start with Monarchy, Church and State. They certainly have formed my views one way or another. Post-Modernists, who are Marxian from my perspective, say we have moved beyond those ancient institutions and must create a New World. However, Marcusian cultural Marxism cannot replace Monarchy, Church and State, whatever those institutions’ particular shortcomings.
The principal world cultures are capitalist-individualism in the West and peasant-collectivist society in the “Global South”. I am here speaking of the West. At its most extreme there are Behaviorists who believe humans are robots (or animals), they learn from their environment and model it. There is a tendency for that in Peasant society where Honour plays a large part in their worldview. However, in the West we have Socratic thinking: questioning. Elenchus in Socratic terms, translated as “refutation”: in fact there may be a physiological explanation for individualism and elenchus relating to the higher functioning of the pre-frontal cortex because Westerners live in high-density cross-roads locations with broken kin structures that constitute the towns and cities we know as “civilisation” (Luther-Smith 2016).
But with Socrates, the power of the majority status quo overcame him at that time. At the Enlightenment that changed. We are free to think what we want to think. Unless you work in an institution or corporation – or Marxian political party which poses as Liberal in the United States.
Orwell’s 1984 is all about English freedom of speech. But although 1984 is principally about governments it cuts across modern corporations also read corporations. Where the Behaviorists go wrong is the Homo Sapien’s ability to say: “No”. Humans are not animals, that is why they are called humans, not animals. You do not have to conform to your environment, culture or upbringing. You can do something different. Man can choose. Man makes decisions about himself, not just the group.
Then we have the family. How do you establish your ethos, your morality?
Human Development
There is much that’s been written about the family one way or another. Sociology, anthropology, history, psychology and psychoanalysis all make a contribution to the threads that make up a family story. The individual and the group. Social constructionism or environment shapes the personality, the institutions like Church, State and Monarch in the case of England. Married, divorced, single-parent, gay parents, better-off and less well-off, born in a particular time. It all adds up.
However, I wish to draw your attention to Jean Piaget, long deceased, who, in my opinion laid out the best model of human development. Specifically, he pointed out one particular phase of child development from concrete thinking to formal thinking. In the style of the time he “classified” these phases in a very stark way, as we classify animal species, and exactly like Marx classified “working-class” people against “middle class” people. There are no such lines. Humans exist in groups and those groups intersect or are “fuzzy”. You, personally, may not have much cash-in-hand, but your grandfather is in the top 1%. You may, like a capitalist farmer (i.e. “small” not corporate or aristocratic farms), have £3 million in land, about 300 acres, bout it only generates £30,000 or 1%. There are a multiplicity of variations from the ideal-typical model, as Weber would put it, and where the lines cross. An Urbanite (i.e. the new bourgeoisie) can be reasonably well-off but rely on credit or have a lower income but have no debts. I could go on.
However, the average person will start the concrete phase around 5 years old and should enter the formal phase around about 11 or 12 years old. So by 5 you’re learning to do things like tie your shoe-laces, ride a bike, swim, write, read, write a story, play football, play a musical instrument. This is learning where you can see the thing, it’s concrete. You count on your fingers, etc.
The Formal phase should then start at about 11 or 12 which means you learn ideas like languages, history, politics, philosophy. and so on. In a perfect world you learn to compare different subjects and see the similarities and differences by comparing them, probably through discussion. This is the crucial part. Concrete operational thinking extends way into the state educational system because the state system needs bureaucrats, such as civil servants, teachers, doctors, PhDs, lawyers, and all that. They must all sing from the same hymn-sheet. They are rule takers. In the event, primary school is highly concrete, secondary school is more formal and then as one goes through the system it becomes more and more concrete as a “specialisation”.
On the other hand, formal operational thinking is what we would call “intellectual”. English intellectualism has struggled for recognition. It hides under the carapace of “Renaissance Man”, but actually simply means that while the concrete operational thinker studies one specialist subject, the intellectual or formal operational thinker specialises in several particular areas, something universities dislike (Cambridge University calls it “marginalism”).
The problem of confirmation bias is everywhere but, as current events/facts have shown, it is particularly prevalent in institutions and corporations. Corporate/institutional university graduates are not intellectuals, they are bureaucrats. They were previously known as scholars or scribes. I should know: I entered that social group. Their aim, or their parents’ highest aim for them, is to go to Oxbridge and a variety of people go there. What they all share is the school training of concrete thinking. I am what I think. I think what I am told.
The Oxbridge graduate group then goes looking for jobs, very often in banking, Whitehall aka the civil service or, for the socialist Marcusians, the Charity and NGO sector where they obtain Merit in order to get a parliamentary seat in the fullness of time. The lawyers become solicitors or barristers and I am compelled to say that becoming a barrister is truly Rumpole at the Old Bailey. One passes one’s Bar Exam (£14,000 to £19,000 at current rates) and then spend your time wining and dining the Barristers’ Chambers until someone accepts you for a “pupillage”. In-group favouritism is, indeed, ubiquitous. All this training (not education) rotates around what, in Western schools and that mean US schools and colleges, as in the UK, is known as “positivity training”, that is, students were asked to prove something rather than disprove it (e.g. Nickerson et al 1985; Klayman, J. and Ha, Young-Won. (1987); Narverson; 1980). They are trained to conform. Conformity is good.
Thus, the corporate citizen is created. They are interchangeable in different scenarios even to the global extent. They are rule-followers, which in turn inhibits creativity. They are process-driven. They are trained what to think, not how to think.
Thus, the concrete thinking mode means they accept what has already been decided and/or written down by another bureaucrat, as in so many miscarriage cases and what we may well be seeing in the Letby case and we certainly saw in the Birmingham Six case.
Then, in the Post Office case we saw a prosecution of a sub mistress when we now know for a fact that the CEO and others knew their own case was wrong. Yet, they persisted with it. There, a miscarriage became an abortion, if not an abomination.
Why did cognitive dissonance not kick in? Because they are trained not to have it, or didn’t have it to start with. They had no shame. Was that why they were selected or even why they survived in the system because they showed indications of having no shame or cognitive dissonance? I rather think so.
Mr Henry’s questions to the enquiry can be answered. Highly trained corporate organisations put what we now call the “brand” ahead of any considerations of people because people become numbers and numbers don’t matter so much. In Stalin’s alleged phrase: ”One death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic”.
Homo Bureaucraticus: The Corporate bureaucrat: life and times
And there he – or she – is. A corporate bureaucrat, global citizen, brought up in a pleasant suburb somewhere, who went through school, went on through university, preferably Oxbridge and Harvard, and then got a job in banking, the civil services or various NGOs.
He is trained, not educated, he has an excellent memory but specialises in one subject, whatever that might be. He has invested a lot in his training and the job is the reward, the return on the investment. But, he has little or no control. It’s either a government institution or a corporation. They are both hierarchies, top-down authoritarian states. Hofstede (1980) showed the nature of that state and why it was destroying a company like IBM.
Likewise in a young man’s life he has to show loyalty to the state or corporation. He wants the job. He can’t start his own business. He wants to get married. When he’s 50, the kids are at college. There are institutional pressures. He wants promotion. He actually likes the job. In fact, he has a very low level of shame anyway. Maybe he thinks he’s done well. The Dean of Faculty of the Humanities at Southampton University suggested I “play the game”. I replied: “What game is that?” He didn’t answer. I knew and know why. He was simply saying in a few words what I have had to explain in many. That is what the likes of John think like: play by our rules.
He ends up as a solicitor at a corporation, or a civil servant at Whitehall or in any local council. He ends up as a lecturer or administrator in a red-brick university. He ends up Vice-Chancellor of Oxford.
In the legal context of miscarriages of justice, as we currently see in the Letby case and the Nottingham triple murders, never mind the Post Office and Blood Scandal, the Birmingham Six - the list goes on - bureaucrats allow issues to get out of hand and don’t do anything to stop it other than say nothing or quietly cover it up: or burn the papers and delete the emails. Have they no shame?
Conclusion: mindset
We have seen the education system needs people to fill corporate and government roles. The training a student gets, theoretically fits them to that role. Concrete thinking, process-driven, conformist and top-down organisationally. When a matter comes up within the system where wrong lies with the organisation, they close ranks (which is a cliché in itself, so people have known for generations that bureaucrats act this way), delay, obfuscate, deny, gaslight, intimidate and show disdain for their opponents: they “lawyer up”, something most people can’t compete with, and it is startlingly unjust when it is the individual taxpayer up against the might of their own aggregated taxes. To act this way the individuals in the organisation must lack empathy or lack cognitive dissonance. They shamelessly deny rights, such as discovery in legal cases, collude between themselves and give the nod and the wink in an attempt to protect the “brand”. It seems from this angle that their actions must fall into the sociopathy/psychopathy ambit.
It is beyond doubt that the vast majority of those responsible are graduates and see a degree as making them somehow superior to those that don’t have such a qualification. They climb up the greasy pole and succeed, it seems likely because they have absorbed positivity training, coming from a bureaucrat family, and having been internally selected as appropriate they get to these positions. People who don’t seem to have got the memo, they don’t know how to “play the game” get sidelined or accused of sexual harassment or similar. So the bureaucrat in question is heavily supported and, in fact, expected to protect the government or corporate brand. He has achieved the right mindset.
There are three possibilities so far: the bureaucrat suffers from confirmation bias and simply believes in the proposition put forward by his masters; he has no shame either because he doesn’t have any or it’s been trained out of him; or he’s a sociopath and couldn’t care less about the defendant or victim and might even enjoy their pain.
The first instance is understandable because confirmation bias is ubiquitous and training can solve that, in the other two it’s a case of misguided recruitment and abject failure to identify a sociopath.
Perhaps experiments could be done to see if there is a correlation between confirmation bias and cognitive dissonance. The research possibilities never end.
In the meantime, the answer could be in socialisation and a greater understanding of mindset. In my personal experience, I’ve found many bureaucrats – not all – but many, to have a particular manner that is wooden and lacking in communication skills. Training should be extended into true education, but that’s just fanciful in the short term. Organisations such as the CCRC and CPS need to examine themselves closer, but so do bureaucrats, whether corporate or governmental.
By Robert Luther-Smith (Dip. Man. BA (Hons) (Psych)
References
Breslaus. G.M., (2013) Moral emotions, Conscience and Cognitive Dissonance; Psychology in Russia; State of the Art; Volume 6, Issue 4.
Festinger, L. (1957) A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Hofstede, G. (1980) Culture’s consequences: International differences in work-related values. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage.
Luther-Smith. R.A. (2016) The Origins of Capitalism; Wheeler-Smith Associates.
Naughton, M. (2013) The Innocent and the Criminal Justice System: a sociological study of miscarriages of justice; Palgrave Macmillan.
Klayman, J. and Ha, Young-Won. (1987) Confirmation, Disconfirmation, and Information in Hypothesis Testing; Center for Decision Research, Graduate School of Business, University of Chicago.
Narverson. (1980) Development and Learning: Complementary or conflicting aims in humanities education?; In Fuller et al (Eds) Piagetian programs in higher education. Lincoln, NE: ADAPT program.
Nickerson, R.S and Perkins, D.N. and Smith, E.E. (1985) The Teaching of Thinking; Psychology Press.
Piaget, J. and Barbel. I (1969) The Psychology of the Child; Basic Books.
Tajfel, H., & Turner, J. C. (1979) An integrative theory of intergroup conflict. In W. G. Austin, & S. Worchel (Eds.), The social psychology of intergroup relations (pp. 33-37). Monterey, CA: Brooks/Cole.
Turvey. B. (2008; Third ed.) Criminal Profiling: An introduction to Behavioral Evidence Analysis); Elsevier.
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