Public emotions and collective responsibilities

A committee must select the best candidate for a post. There are six committee members. Three, undecided, abstain. One votes against. Only two vote in favour of the candidate Mario Rossi. The procedure established previously, however, considers the majority of the votes cast to be decisive: two to one. At the end of the meeting, therefore, the committee’s official position is that Rossi is the best candidate. The conclusion strikes us as perfectly natural and, at the same time, subtly paradoxical. The committee ‘believes’ that Rossi is the best, but only two of its six members personally believe this. No one is lying or concealing their judgement. Those who were undecided abstained, one committee member voted against, and those in favour voted in favour. Yet what the committee ‘thinks’ does not coincide with what the majority of committee members think. What, then, does it mean to attribute a belief to a committee? What is the subject of that belief? Who is the subject of that belief? Is there perhaps, alongside the minds of the committee members, a seventh, invisible mind hovering over the meeting room? It is questions such as these that Margaret Gilbert seeks to answer in her *i* *Life in Groups*. (Oxford University Press, 2023). Families make plans, governments take decisions, political parties draw up programmes, businesses assign value, teams get excited, and peoples feel pride, fear and shame. Our language is filled with plural entities to which we attribute intentions, beliefs, emotions and values. And we do so without perceiving anything out of the ordinary. We habitually say ‘we have decided’, ‘we believe it is right’, ‘we are outraged’ with the same naturalness with which we say ‘I have decided’, ‘I believe’, ‘I am outraged’. Gilbert calls these statements collective psychological statements. Her initial thesis is that there are “good reasons to believe that these are not simply summaries of the intentions, beliefs and so on of the individual members of the group. Nor (…) that the individuals in question have, in themselves, corresponding intentions’ (p. 1). These ‘collective psychological statements’ do not, in other words, summarise what goes on within individual minds. Nor, however, do they postulate a supra-individual consciousness. The collective mind exists without mystery because it is not a substance distinct from the people who make up the group. It is a structure of normative relations. A way in which several individuals commit themselves to speaking, judging and acting as parts of a single subject.

The first interpretation to be rejected is the ‘aggregative’ one. According to this interpretation, to say that a group believes that p would simply mean to say that all, or at least the majority of its members, personally believe that p. But this condition, Gilbert observes, is neither necessary nor sufficient. It is not necessary, as the case of the committee shows. A recognised procedure can produce a collective position that differs from the individual opinions of the majority. But it is not sufficient either. Suppose that all the members of a reading group consider a poem to be excellent, without ever having discussed it amongst themselves. Each one appreciates it, but the group, as such, has not yet expressed any judgement. There is a convergence of individual beliefs, but not yet a collective belief. The difference emerges when someone says, ‘It is an extraordinary poem’, and the others express their agreement. From that moment on, the assessment can become the group’s position. It is not necessary for each member to have privately reached the same conviction. What is required is for the members to have adopted that statement as a shared belief, committing themselves to behaving, in appropriate circumstances, as representatives of a single entity that holds it to be true.

Gilbert’s technical formulation is that a group believes that p when its “members jointly commit themselves to believing, as a group, that p” (p. 78). The expression ‘as a group’ does not imply a merging of consciousnesses. Members do not have to merge, lose their own consciousness or experience the same inner states. Rather, they must be prepared to publicly present a particular position as the group’s position. A committee member may therefore say: “The committee considers Mario Rossi to be the best candidate, even though I personally remain doubtful”. There is no contradiction. In the first part of the sentence, he speaks as a committee member, whilst in the second he speaks in his own name. The adverb ‘personally’ signals the transition between two different levels of attribution. This distinction also allows us to separate ‘belief’ from ‘collective acceptance’. A committee may accept, for the sole purpose of discussion, the hypothesis that the town’s only pub will close within a year, without believing it to be true. In this case, the group does not believe the pub will close, but provisionally adopts the proposition to explore its consequences. Communities can both believe and accept, and there is no reason to reduce every collective belief to an operational convention. Collective beliefs, too, can be evaluated in relation to evidence, coherence and truth.

This perspective helps us understand why collective beliefs are so persistent. A personal belief can be abandoned when the evidence changes or when the individual changes their mind. Group beliefs, on the other hand, are embedded in a network of roles, expectations and linguistic practices. Those who challenge them do not simply put forward an alternative proposition. They disrupt the way in which the group has learnt to describe itself. This is why dissent often requires a necessary preamble to make the perspective clear, such as, for example, ‘I speak in a personal capacity’, ‘this is not the association’s position’ or ‘what I am about to say does not represent the party’. This clarification protects the dissenter from the accusation of having spoken inappropriately on behalf of the group. But it also highlights the cost of distancing oneself. Anyone who insists on drawing a distinction between their own opinion and the collective one may be perceived as unreliable, disloyal and no longer fully ‘one of us’.

Gilbert also uses this framework to interpret the stability of scientific paradigms. A research community is not merely a group of scholars who, individually, regard the same theory as true. It is a network that has collectively adopted certain hypotheses, criteria for testing, relevant problems and legitimate methods. This stability fulfils an essential epistemic function. It allows, in fact, for a theory to be explored in depth, its consequences examined and knowledge accumulated. But it can become a barrier to the generation and impartial evaluation of alternatives. The problem is not necessarily the closed-mindedness of individual scientists. Even researchers who are personally open-minded may find themselves within a belief system that determines in advance which questions make sense, which evidence is relevant and which objections can be taken seriously. The strength of a paradigm does not depend solely on the number of its supporters, but on its having become the viewpoint from which the community observes, names and judges phenomena. This applies, with even more evident consequences, to political self-representations: ‘Ours is an inclusive society’, ‘everyone starts on an equal footing here’, ‘we do not discriminate’. These propositions can function as collective beliefs even when many citizens, individually, doubt them and when a vast amount of data contradicts them. Their power does not lie merely in being believed. It lies in organising the language through which society interprets its own outcomes. Anyone who, with data in hand, refutes such claims is not merely adding new information, but is contradicting the story the community tells about itself. This is why social criticism encounters resistance that is not merely cognitive. To say that our society is unwelcoming or that it discriminates can be perceived as an attack on our shared identity. Acknowledging an injustice can be perceived as an act of disloyalty, as if correcting the group’s image were tantamount to betraying it.