The David Mistake
The little guy could be the bad guy.
There is a decision-making fallacy embedded deeply into our culture which I call the David mistake— we believe that the little guy is the good guy. This belief is widely held and acted upon, but rarely examined. Let’s examine it now.
In the biblical story, David defeats the much larger Goliath in battle with a slingshot. We are on David’s side because he is both little and good. He needs to be both; if one of those qualities is removed, we withdraw our support.
David happens to be both little and good at the same time; it is a correlation. The fallacy is in imagining causation — i.e.that David is good because he is little. But this does simplify our decision making as we now only need one piece of information — that David is little (the good part just follows).
(Also note the corollary: Goliath is bad because he is big — no need to know his backstory).
We make the David mistake because it saves us effort. Determining if people are good means knowing them, which is work. Determining if someone is little is easy. It is tempting to map the second to the first as a shortcut.
This kind of heuristic (rule-of-thumb) might be occasionally useful when making very fast decisions e.g. acting in an emergency situation. But mostly we make the David mistake because we want to make decisions about other people without knowing them.
Look at this photo. We know nothing about the people except their appearance. We assume things about them — we still don’t know them. But it’s very, very tempting to immediately take sides.
[Note that we don’t make this mistake for a local situation — we are likely to (somewhat) know the people through our networks and we don’t apply the shortcut. The more distant/unfamiliar the context, the likelier the mistake.]
The news media loves the David mistake. They frame stories to show an obvious (apparent) disparity in power, then cherry-pick evidence that supports the little guy — knowing that we’re already on their side. It’s a simple/lazy way to connect to us, the readers — and the less we know about the real people involved, the better it works.
In fact the David mistake is critical to all identity politics; narratives of oppression and redress for any group start (and often end) with proving that they are the little guys — which automatically gives them the moral high ground.
[Let’s respond here to one objection — that big is bad because power corrupts. Perhaps it does, sometimes (so does victimhood). Recognizing a correlation between power and morality is not the mistake — it is in the automatic mapping from one to the other.]
It is not rational or ethical to map power to morality for decision making.
And it also leads to a dilemma down the track — what to do if/when we find out that the little guy (our little guy) was the bad guy after all?
Every revolution begins with the little guys. Of course they believe they are good, but the David mistake also automatically brings them ‘sympathizers’ who don’t know them. And when the revolutionaries get power, they often do awful things, shocking their sympathizers (by then it’s too late).
How to avoid the David mistake? There is no shortcut to knowing other people. We resist the pressure to take sides with/against those we don’t know and we refuse to weigh in on distant and unfamiliar disputes (this angers our friends who like to read the news).
This is the first article in Turtle Side Up, a series in which writers examine and challenge our hidden assumptions.
