Hierarchy; or “Please don’t let my grand status and magnificent gold chain overwhelm your thinking processes”

We humans like to think we’re fairly logical, rational beings, but something’s becoming increasingly clear as scientists delve into the way our minds work: we’re a messy patchwork of clashing or reinforcing shortcuts and algorithms that have often outlived their original use.

There’s been a lot said about hierarchy and how it can impact on our interaction with others, often unconsciously. The perceived pecking order in human groups has a way of changing how people speak to each other and the importance they place on things they hear from others. It also affects the very way we process that information; the deference is expressed externally in how we approach the other person, but also internally in how we think about them and the things they say.

We see these effects in animals’ behaviour very clearly, but it’s not always obvious to us just how much this primitive deference to authority still affects our own thinking patterns.

It’s not a class issue (for once)

In Western society we have camouflaged the hierarchy and even try to pretend it doesn’t exist sometimes, but it’s still there, just not as explicit or acknowledged as may be evident in, say, contemporary Japanese culture. There are unspoken perceptions about people’s relative positions in the British class system, for example, as seen in the 1966 “Class Sketch” by the Two Ronnies and John Cleese (shown on The Frost Report).

But hierarchy isn’t necessarily about class or wealth, but rather mainly about power imbalances (and class or wealth are neither necessary nor sufficient for a power imbalance to exist). The imbalance can occur in the workplace, in members’ clubs, PTA committees, the Chinese Communist Party, secondary school classrooms, in the doctor’s consulting room, or any other place where groups of humans mingle for a shared purpose.

Why is hierarchy dangerous?

The effect of hierarchy on our brains allows us to fall prey to various cognitive biases, such as:

• The Halo Effect — because Calvin Harris is a well-regarded music producer, people automatically assign more weight to his pronouncements on, say, vaccines when there is no particular reason to think expertise on one thing (music production) would confer expertise on the other (vaccine safety).
• Authority bias — putting weight on what someone says just because they are perceived as an authority figure. Think here of the classic Milgram experiment where subjects delivered painful and dangerous electric shocks (they believed) to sobbing victims simply because an authority figure in a white coat instructed them firmly to do so. People defer to authority, simply put.

Hierarchy affects your ability to dispassionately, objectively and unbiasedly consider the information or question you are presented with. It colours how you see the question, and adds a layer of social inference which can sometimes mask the true meaning even from yourself.

Importantly, it makes you discard your own mental model of what’s happening or amend it to match the model you think your boss has in mind.

It can also lead you to hide your true answer for the boss behind screens of deference born of hierarchy, to the point where the person asking you the question may not actually clearly receive your true answer, but only a version filtered by deference.

Hierarchy also makes it difficult to admit to a mistake or a worry, because of embarrassment. This goes both ways; a senior doctor, for example, might be embarrassed to admit an error in front of her juniors because she is “supposed to be” super-competent and all-knowing and it diminishes her relative standing, whereas her juniors would be embarrassed to admit their own error in front of her because they would fear disapproval and retribution from her for their mistake.

With a flatter hierarchy, anyone can admit ignorance or an error with less concern about hierarchy-based consequences, and that means the problems get picked up before they cause harm to the patient.

Flatter Hierarchy, Better Thinking?

In any situation where someone is the leader, there is a power imbalance and thus a hierarchy, although this varies by degree depending on the situation and relative power of each.

Both Tony Blair and “Call me Dave” Cameron were mocked in some quarters for their informal style of “sofa government”, which discouraged formality and hierarchical behaviours. But there was a strong benefit of this: it discouraged people around them from becoming Yes-men only able to agree with the boss, because of his tremendous power (compared to them). It meant they got useful critical feedback to ideas rather than craven agreement, which led to better governance (although you may not approve of the goal they were aiming for).

Airline pilots recognise the importance of a flat hierarchy in the cockpit. In a big airline pilots almost never fly with the same co-pilot twice, and there isn’t a lot of time for a working relationship of mutual respect to develop through long exposure to each other’s working methods, etc. So therefore at their first pre-flight briefing the captain will emphasise the fact that she welcomes questions and polite challenges to things she says or does. That way she can be more confident that the co-pilot won’t hesitate to highlight something he thinks might be going awry out of deference.

Anaesthetists in theatre are also embracing this way of thinking, particularly following the tragic Bromiley case. We encourage everyone in theatre to speak up if they see something that worries them, regardless of where they or others might perceive them to be in the hierarchy (and whether we accept it or not, there is a hierarchy in play, awkward and uncomfortable as it may be for some people to acknowledge).

Who’s in charge here?

As a side note, I should point out that having a flat(ter) hierarchy doesn’t therefore mean there is no leader, just that the power imbalance — although still present — is less palpable and impinges less on the participants’ cognition.

A leader still needs to take a co-ordinating role and drive things forward, taking responsibility and making the final decision. However, they need to do it based on information that is as minimally corrupted by hierarchy and status concerns as possible. The hierarchy will still exist, but you can try to flatten the feel of that hierarchy and the deference it causes, and minimise the hierarchy’s impact on cognition taking place in our primate brains.

Smash the system

A few practical ways for leaders or those further up the hierarchy to try flattening the hierarchy in your own workplace:

• Introduce yourself to the team by your first name, and discourage use of formal titles which put up social barriers. “Claire” is much easier to speak to than “Prof”, mentally speaking. This applies to patient interaction, too.
• Explicitly say that you want to have a flat hierachy in this team. “If you think you see me make a mistake or there’s something you’re not sure of, I want you to say something. Either you’ll learn from the explanation, or I will!”
• When discussing options, avoid putting your own option forward first or sharing your mental model too early. Let others put their options, which will then not be biased by trying to fit with your mental model that they will scramble to mimic (perhaps unconsciously). You will sometimes find that their mental model better fits reality than yours, and has insights you will miss if you go first and they switch their model to match yours.
• “Give me a reason this is a bad idea” — when you do finally present your own suggestion and imply that this is what you think should be done, actively encourage contradiction and contrary views with an invitation like this. It encourages critical thinking and may help you see a flaw you missed.

And some ways you can try to flatten the hierarchy from below, if you’re not the leader:

• Socratic questioning, e.g. “Can I ask for my own understanding: is X supposed to do that? What is the thinking behind doing X?” — hopefully allows the leader to realise through the Socratic method that their approach is not the right one.
• Indirect challenge, e.g. “At my last job they had a different way of doing this thing. Can you explain what the difference is here?” — It can feel less challenging (for both parties!) because it’s not your idea that you’re pushing forward in contradiction to the boss’s idea, it’s an idea from someone else not present, perhaps of similar seniority to your new boss, but in any case someone hopefully not perceived as a direct threat by them.
• This is well beyond the scope of this post, but assertiveness training can empower you to politely put your view forward despite anxiety or feeling the weight of the hierarchy pressing down on your question or concern.

Your primitive past haunts you

So hierarchy is ever-present, sometimes insidiously working on us without our knowledge. It affects how we think and how we process information, usually in ways that diminish the usefulness of giving the matter any thought in the first place. However, there are ways to try to minimise its effect on what you fondly believe to be the rational cognition of your nonetheless unavoidably primitive brain!