Understanding Politics (Office and Otherwise)

“Politics, n.  A strife of interests masquerading as a contest of principles.”

-Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary, 1906 -

Take this test to see if you have office politics in your organization.

        1) Count the employees.

        2)  Does the number exceed 3?

        3)  If the answer to #2 is “Yes,” you definitely have office politics.

Within this concept of politics you can play many different ways for many different goals.  Some tactics are unethical, others ethical.  Some goals are unethical, others ethical.  You must still use office politics as the vehicle to achieve your goals, because it’s the ultimate arena in which the necessary decisions and consensus will be made.


Most definitions of politics (or of any controversial topic, for that matter) reflect the moral outlook of the definer.  The American Heritage Dictionary, for example, describes a politician as “one who is interested in personal or partisan gain and other selfish interests” and politics as “partisan or factional intrigue within a given group.”  But the root word “politic, ” from Chambers Concise 20th Century Dictionary, means “in accordance with good policy:  acting or proceeding from motives of policy:  prudent: discreet.”

Motives


Consider these truisms about people and organizations:

• People have principled disagreements about policy and direction of the organization.

• People have different visions and goals.

• People have different personal and selfish interests.

• People have egos and like them recognized and stroked.

• People have different personalities that others react to in different ways.

• People remember past actions and behaviors.

There’s nothing very radical, nor inherently unprincipled or evil, in these statements; most people will easily acknowledge their truth:  that people don’t check their humanity at the door when they punch in on the time clock.

Scarcity

The second truism to consider is the concept of scarcity.  From the days of the pyramids to the present, every organization, company, or government has lived with the reality that there are far more desirable projects and activities than there are resources to manage them.  In other words, work is infinite but resources are finite.

Every time senior management gives you a dollar, or a person, or a week, it becomes a dollar, a person, or a week they can’t give to someone else for something that also has value.  (In financial terms, this is known as “opportunity cost.”)  That sets up an unavoidable competition, as we each strive to get the resources we need to accomplish our objectives, and the playing out of the informal competition is what we know as office politics.  And if our organization is under stress or financial challenge, the struggle gets that much worse.

It also gets worse when what’s at stake is competition for access to status, which is also a kind of limited resource.  For most people, when their personal status is at stake, the kid gloves come off.


Office Politics Defined  

This leads us to the following operational definition of politics:

Politics (\ˈpä-lə-ˌtiks\):  The informal and sometimes emotion-driven process of allocating limited resources and working out goals, decisions, and actions in an environment of people with different and competing interests and personalities.

This definition is intentionally neutral, as simply descriptive as we can make it.  It helps us understand what we’re about.  Here are the key points of this definition amplified:

• informal and sometimes emotion-driven.  Office politics is separate from the formal organizational structure and involves human dynamics and emotions in addition to facts and reason.

• allocating limited resources.  The ultimate outcome of office politics—and how success and failure are measured—is how the organization’s resources—time, money, people—are allocated.

• working out goals, decisions, and actions.  The purpose of office politics is to work out goals, decisions, and actions that can turn into reality.  This often involves negotiation, compromise, and application of power.

• different and competing interests and personalities.  People have different ideas and desires about what should be done, some based on reason and analysis, some based on emotion or personal agenda.  Personal likes and dislikes inevitably affect decisions.

There's no point in getting too wrapped up about the negative side of politics; it's inevitable wherever human beings gather together. Instead, it's better to learn how to play in a principled, positive, and above all effective manner.

Adapted from Enlightened Office Politics by Michael and Deborah Singer Dobson (AMACOM, 2001).

Career Proofing

Today's SideWise Insight is a reminder that in uncertain times, it's always wise to "career-proof" your job environment. This piece is focused on Federal employees, but there's good advice here no matter what field you're in.

In the career services field, it’s not uncommon to meet people who haven’t looked for a job in literally decades. They are long out of practice, their skills are rusty, and it’s often a desperate job situation that has driven them to this extreme.  Such people often have a difficult time in career transitions, even though they often have tremendous skills and experience to offer.

A job isn’t a marriage, so continuing to date a little on the side isn’t cheating.  The job, let us note, has not made a marriage commitment to you.  It is a professional relationship that may be very pleasant and very successful, but it is situational and capable of being set aside by either party in the event circumstances change.

Job hunting is not just the narrow activity of sending out résumés in response to vacancy announcements and going on interviews when asked.  After all, at certain points in your career, you may not actually want another job.  Should you still job-hunt?  Absolutely yes, although the job-hunting activities a career-proofing strategist uses in such a case may be different.  You don’t want to be caught unprepared in case of an emergency, and you don’t want to miss that perfect opportunity when it reveals itself.

Keep up with the market.  Whether you are actively seeking a new position or not, you should always stay up to date with what’s actually going on in your field, in your agency, in your market, in your private sector equivalent, and in other agencies that employ similar specialists.  What newspapers or newsletters cover your areas?  What websites or professional organizations or other resources can you follow that will give you the news?

Read postings in your field; track job offerings in various agencies and programs to see what kinds of skills are in demand, and what kinds of skills are on the wane.  That’s often a good leading indicator of the kinds of skills you should work at acquiring.

Check whether Federal publications are released covering agencies and programs that concern you.  Monitor Congressional committees whose work impacts your agencies or programs.  Which lobbying groups or public interest groups focus on issues that have an impact on your field?  (Don’t only study the side with which you may sympathize; learn about the other side(s) as well.)

Remember that “lunch is a verb,” and use some of your lunch hours as networking opportunities.  Try to expand the number of people with whom you lunch at least occasionally just to trade general gossip about what’s going on.  While you don’t share confidential information, of course, there’s a great deal of general information that can be shared quite appropriately.

As you develop your sources and your network, you’ll find yourself increasingly in demand as someone “in the know,” and knowledge is an important ingredient in practical political power.  What is most interesting is how it makes you more effective at your job and in your organization as well.  In-the-know people understand the bigger picture.  They tend to have influence.  They can get things done.  They often panic less when bad news (or bad rumors) happen.  And valuable news sources are valuable to their bosses and others in the organizational hierarchy.


Adapted from “Federal Career Development: A Strategy Guide,” by Michael and Deborah Singer Dobson, from The Federal Résumé Guidebook: Second Edition, by Kathryn Kraemer Troutman (JISTWorks, 1999; article copyright © 1999 Michael Dobson). Current editions are available from The Résumé Place at http://www.resume-place.com/books/.

Why We Work With Jerks

BRITANNUS (shocked). “Caesar, this is not proper.”

THEODOTUS (outraged). “How!”

CAESAR (recovering his self-possession). “Pardon him, Theodotus: he is a barbarian, and thinks the customs of his tribe and island are the laws of nature.”

— George Bernard Shaw, Caesar and Cleopatra, Act II, (1900)

If you're surrounded by difficult people, you may wonder why the organization doesn't take more of a lead in dealing with difficult people in its midst?

Surely the costs of inappropriate behavior should compel the organization to action—and yet it’s seldom the case that the organization acts except in the most egregious of situations.

Sometimes it’s because the organization itself is part of the problem.

You may have noticed that a lot of people describe their office environment as if it’s a war zone. We take flak, someone gets shot down, the boss is out for blood, someone’s getting the ax—it’s a pretty violent place. And, of course, some people work in offices that are all too reminiscent of a war zone.

There’s the official corporate culture and the real culture. The official culture is usually embodied in a vision or mission statement: “We value honesty, diversity, and hard work.” If in fact people are praised and rewarded for honesty, diversity, and hard work, then the match between the official culture and the real culture is close.

But sometimes there’s a mismatch. If honesty is punished, diversity nonexistent, and nepotism is rampant, then the official culture isn’t real. You often still need to give lip service to the official version, but the real culture is reflected in the behavior you actually witness day in and day out.

Look at the very top of the organization. Does verbal abuse start there and go down through the ranks? If so, it’s hardly surprising to see the same behavior reflected in middle managers.

If you are part of an organization whose culture rewards difficult behavior, your attempts to modify the behavior will be less effective, and may not work at all.

If that’s the case, your options are limited. Depending on your organizational rank and power, you may be able to force a change in the corporate culture.

If the difficult behavior violates laws against harassment and discrimination, you may be able to force change even if you’re in a lower-ranking position. Be extremely careful with the threat of legal pressure. Even if you succeed in forcing the organizational change, you may suffer negative career consequences. It’s all too common for other people—not you—to reap the benefit for such a sacrifice.

If you can’t change the culture, or the cost of forcing change is unacceptable, the two remaining choices are (a) learn to live with it and (b) get out. If your decision is to leave, prepare your exit carefully. If you’re going to stay, make sure the consequences to your mental health and happiness are within an acceptable range.

One word of caution: If you’ve generally had good working relationships and this job is poisonous, it’s probably them.

If, on the other hand, you encounter the same difficult behavior over and over again, it’s probably you.

From: Work Smart: Dealing With Difficult People (2nd ed.), William Lundin, Ph.D., Kathleen Lundin, and Michael S. Dobson (AMACOM, 2009)

Highly Motivated

Ever met an unmotivated person?

Think again. If someone spends more time and energy each day scheming to get out of work, they're motivated, all right. Just not in the direction you would prefer.

If someone isn’t helping you to achieve your goals, there are three possible reasons.

a) Ignorance: They don’t know what you want.

b) Inability: They can’t do what you want.

c) Choice: They won’t do what you want.

Ignorance. If people don’t know what you want, the problem isn’t with them; it’s with you. Even if you know you’ve told them, don’t assume the message has really gotten across. You may not have been as clear as you could have been, and they may not have been listening as well as they might have. It's always a good idea to check to make sure people really do know what you want. If that's the only thing standing in the way of their action, you're done.

Inability. When we say “can’t do,” it’s a literal “can’t do”: if we offered a million dollar bounty, nothing would change. “Can’t do” situations can sometimes be fixed by training, by access to necessary resources, by going to a different person, or by altering your request. There’s nothing personal here, but merely a problem. You can fix it or you can’t.

Choice. If someone knows what you want and can do it, then they get to make a choice about whether to do it. Why would they choose not to do it? Again, three reasons:

a) Performance is punished
b) Failure is rewarded
c) Performance doesn’t matter

Watch out for “perverse incentives,” ways in which we inadvertently push people in the direction of the very behavior we want them to avoid. If you get rewarded for doing a great job with even more work, perhaps that great job isn’t completely in your own interest. If failure to exceed your quota for the month gets you better liked by your colleagues, and there’s not much consequence from management, failure may give you the greatest personal reward. If you think no one reads or cares about that weekly report, it doesn’t seem to matter much if you do it well or poorly.

When you’re in a leadership role or simply need help and cooperation from your colleagues, try to find out why they’re behaving as they do. If you know whether their behavior is a choice or not, you can pick the best strategy for getting results.

From Work Smart: Goal Setting (2nd edition), by Susan B. Wilson and Michael Dobson.

Not Invented Here! (Part 12 of Cognitive Biases)

A cognitive bias is a pattern of deviation in judgment that occurs in particular situations, and boy howdy, are there a lot of them! In this week’s installment, brought to you by the letter “N,” we discuss the need for closure, the neglect of probability, the “Not Invented Here” (NIH) Syndrome, and notational bias.

Need for Closure

On a scale of 1 (strongly disagree) to 6 (strongly agree), how would you rate yourself on the following statements?

1. I don't like to go into a situation without knowing what I can expect from it.
2. I think that having clear rules and order at work is essential for success.
3. I'd rather know bad news that stay in a state of uncertainty.
4. I usually make important decisions quickly and confidently.
5. I do not usually consult many different opinions before forming my own view.

These questions are part of the 42-item Need for Closure Scale (NFCS), a way to measure the extent of your need for cognitive closure, your desire for an answer to settle the matter, even if the answer isn’t the correct one or the best one.

There are five different types of the closure bias. The first statement above tests your desire for predictability. In order, the others test your preference for order and structure, your degree of discomfort with ambiguity, your decisiveness, and your close-mindedness.

If you have a high need for closure, you tend to rely more on information received earlier, and prefer the first workable answer you come across. You tend to search for information more narrowly, and apply rules and shortcuts to aid quick decision-making. A low need for closure is, unsurprisingly, associated with creativity, especially the process of coming up with a large number of potential solutions.

Need for closure is affected by outside circumstances as well as by basic temperament. Time pressure, in particular, plays a significant role. The need for closure is attributed not only to individuals, but also to cultures as a whole, illustrated by the argument that the “need for national closure” warranted stopping the process of recounting votes in the Florida 2000 presidential election.

Neglect of probability

Several of our cognitive biases involve misapplication or misunderstanding of probability in a given situation. So far, we’ve covered the base rate effect, the gambler’s fallacy, the hindsight bias, and the ludic fallacy.

Neglect of probability is something different. It’s the complete disregard of probability rather than its incorrect use. Children are particularly subject to this bias. In a 1993 study, children were asked the following question:

Susan and Jennifer are arguing about whether they should wear seat belts when they ride in a car. Susan says that you should. Jennifer says you shouldn’t. . . . Jennifer says that she heard of an accident where a car fell into a lake and a woman was kept from getting out in time because of wearing her seat belt, and another accident where a seat belt kept someone from getting out of the car in time when there was a fire. What do you think about this?

Here’s how one subject responded:

A: Well, in that case I don’t think you should wear a seat belt.

Q (interviewer): How do you know when that’s gonna happen?
A: Like, just hope it doesn’t!
Q: So, should you or shouldn’t you wear seat belts?
A: Well, tell-you-the-truth we should wear seat belts.
Q: How come?
A: Just in case of an accident. You won’t get hurt as much as you will if you didn’t wear a seat belt.
Q: OK, well what about these kinds of things, when people get trapped?
A: I don’t think you should, in that case.

Another subject replied, “If you have a long trip, you wear seat belts half way.” Notice that the comparative probability of the two events doesn’t come into the discussion at all.

For adults, a 2001 study found that a typical subject was willing to pay $7 to avoid a 1% chance of a painful electric shock, but only $10 to avoid a 99% chance of the same shock, suggesting that probability is more likely to be neglected when the outcomes produce anxiety.

“Not Invented Here” (NIH) Syndrome

It doesn’t take a lot of experience in the world of work before you begin to encounter the “Not Invented Here” syndrome. Although mostly intended as a somewhat cynical joke, the behavior is quite real and has a significant effect on organizations. Interestingly, it’s not always negative, and not always antithetical to creativity and innovation. Like many cognitive biases, the trick is to be conscious of how it works in your life and in your organization.

Numerous factors can trigger an NIH response. Personal and organizational egotism plays a large role: we are inherently superior or unique, therefore what may work elsewhere is inferior or inapplicable. Loyalty matters. In the early days of personal computing, the British-made Timex Sinclair was hugely popular in Britain but hardly known in the United States, and the Japanese/Dutch MSX computer was successful in Japan and much of Europe, but not in either Britain or the United States.

There can be economic advantages to NIH behavior. Television networks more commonly buy programs from suppliers in which they have a financial interest. Such shows are more profitable to the network than a show from a non-affiliated supplier that drew higher ratings. Economic advantages can also accrue to individuals at the same time they penalize organizations. In one case, a department refused to help another group in the same company because doing so would perversely lowered bonuses to those doing the helping.

NIH can also form the basis of corporate strategy, and as such can be a vehicle to promote innovation rather than retard it. Apple, for example, commonly ignores or actively denigrates trends in the computer industry and invents its own. “Netbooks aren’t better than anything,” argued Steve Jobs. “They’re just cheap laptops.” Accordingly, Apple ignored the netbook model and invented its own: the iPad.

Notational bias

BRITANNUS (shocked).

Caesar: this is not proper.

THEODOTUS (outraged).

How!

CAESAR (recovering his self-possession).

Pardon him. Theodotus: he is a barbarian, and thinks that the customs of his tribe and island are the laws of nature.

This famous moment from George Bernard Shaw’s Caesar and Cleopatra illustrates notational bias, the assumption that conventions of one’s own society are equivalent to laws of logic or of nature. Examples abound. If you read most European languages, you read from left to right. It’s “natural.” But if you read Hebrew, it’s the other way around. It’s “natural” for Americans to drive on the right. But of course these are ultimately arbitrary choices that become the norm for a particular culture.

When you fall into notational bias, it’s not about whether you prefer your culture’s choice, or even whether your culture’s choice is arguably better. Instead, notational bias blinds you to the idea that there’s even a choice to be made.

Previous Installments

Part 1 — Bias blind spot, confirmation bias, déformation professionnelle, denomination effect, moral credential effect.

Part 2 — Base rate fallacy, congruence bias, experimenter’s bias

Part 3 — Ambiguity aversion effect (Ellsberg paradox), choice-supportive bias, distinction bias, contrast effect

Part 4 — Actor-observer bias, anchoring effect, attentional bias, availability cascade, belief bias

Part 5 — Clustering illusion, conjunction fallacy, cryptomnesia

Part 6 — Disposition effect, egocentric bias, endowment effect, extraordinarity bias

Part 7 — False consensus effect, false memory, Forer effect, framing, fundamental attribution error

Part 8 — Gambler’s fallacy, halo effect

Part 9 — Hawthorne effect, herd instinct, hindsight bias, hyperbolic discounting

Part 10 — Illusion of asymmetric insight, illusion of control, illusory superiority, impact bias, information bias, ingroup bias, irrational escalation

Part 11 — Just-world phenomenon, loss aversion, ludic fallacy, mere exposure effect, money illusion

He Must Have Deserved It (Part 11 of Cognitive Biases)

Do people always get what they deserve? Would you sooner get a $5 discount or avoid a $5 surcharge? If you get 99 heads in a row, are the odds of another head 50/50? Do you like the familiar? Is everything more expensive these days?

In this installment of Cognitive Biases, we'll cover the just-world phenomenon, loss aversion, the ludic fallacy, the mere exposure effect, and the money illusion.

The illustration is by Gustav Doré from the Book of Job.

Just-world phenomenon

“He must be wicked to deserve such pain,” wrote Robert Browning in “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came,” and indeed the idea that people get what they deserve, both for good and evil goes back through history. When Job was suffering, his friends Bildad, Zophar, and Eliphaz each argued that Job must have done something wrong, because God would not visit such terrible punishments on an innocent.

The cognitive bias known as the just-world phenomenon refers to the tendency of people witnessing an otherwise inexplicable injustice to look for reasons the victim might have deserved it. In theology, the problem of evil falling on the apparently innocent is known by the all-too-apt name of theodicy.

It’s been demonstrated scientifically as well. In one study, researchers gave women what appeared to be painful electric shocks while working on a difficult memory problem. Other women of broadly the same age and social group who observed the experiment appeared to blame the victim for her fate, praised the experiment, and rated her as being less physically attractive than did those who had seen her but not the experiment.

In another study, female and male subjects were told two versions of a story about an interaction between a woman and a man. Both variations were exactly the same, except at the very end the man raped the woman in one and in the other he proposed marriage. In both conditions, both female and male subjects viewed the woman's (identical) actions as inevitably leading to the (very different) results.

The rain, it is said, falls on the just and unjust alike. Don’t make negative assumptions about people you don’t even know.

Loss aversion

Would you sooner get a $5 discount, or avoid a $5 surcharge? It’s the same $5 either way, but depending on the frame, there’s a dramatic difference in consumer behavior. Some studies suggest that the value of avoiding a loss is psychologically twice as powerful as the value of a gain. In one study of consumer reaction to price changes to an insurance policy, a price increase had twice the effect on customer switching as did a price decrease.

Loss aversion also plays into “sunk cost” bias. If you’ve been gambling and you’re in the hole, it’s the tendency to keep playing in hopes of recovering the lost money. The refusal to admit mistakes is part of loss aversion. The more time and energy you’ve committed to a particular course of action, the harder it is to walk away from it, regardless of the evidence.

Ludic fallacy

If you’ve flipped a coin 99 times and gotten heads each time, what are the odds of getting heads on the next flip of the coin? We’ve already learned about the gambler’s fallacy, so we know the odds of the next flip coming up heads are still 50/50.

But wait a minute. If you’ve flipped a coin 99 times and gotten heads each time, wouldn’t you start to suspect there was something wrong with the coin? The ludic fallacy (a term coined by Nassim Nicholas Taleb in his 2007 book The Black Swan) is the assumption that messy situations in the real world fall neatly into the models of games and dice.

There’s a lot of value in simplifying a complex problem to identify core principles, but there’s a strong risk of believing the simple model is identical to the messy real world, and that’s wrong. Theory and models are subordinate to reality, not superior to it.

Mere exposure effect

People tend to develop a preference for things merely because they are familiar with them. In studies of interpersonal attraction, the more often a person is seen by someone, the more pleasing and likeable that person appears to be.

When subjects were exposed to an unfamiliar stimulus in laboratory experiments, they reacted to it more positively than other, similar stimuli which had not been presented. In one variation, subjects were shown an image on a tachistoscope for a very brief duration that could not be perceived consciously. This subliminal exposure produced the same effect, though it is important to note that subliminal effects are generally weak and unlikely to occur without controlled laboratory conditions.

The effect is strongest when unfamiliar stimuli are presented briefly. Mere exposure typically reaches its maximum effect within 10-20 presentations, and some studies even show that liking may decline after a longer series of exposures. For example, people generally like a song more after they have heard it a few times, but many repetitions can reduce this preference. A delay between exposure and the measurement of liking actually tends to increase the strength of the effect. Curiously, the effect is weaker on children, and for drawings and paintings as compared to other types of stimuli. One social psychology experiment showed that exposure to people we initially dislike makes us dislike them even more.

Money illusion

“I asked for a three-penny loaf,” wrote Benjamin Franklin about his first day in Philadelphia in 1723, “and was told they had none such. So not considering or knowing the difference of money, and the greater cheapness nor the names of his bread, I made him give me three-penny worth of any sort. He gave me, accordingly, three great puffy rolls. I was surpriz’d at the quanity, but took it, and, having no room in my pockets, walk’d off with a roll under each arm, and eating the other.”

When this story was first presented to me in school, the teacher and students discussed how cheap bread must have been in those days. A loaf for a penny! But, of course, that’s not true. The average weekly wage was about a dollar, meaning a penny represented about half an hour’s worth of work. Today, the median personal income for a 25 year old with a bachelor’s degree is about $50,000, and (I just checked) you can buy a loaf of white bread for $1.00 at the local store. That means bread costs about 3 minutes worth of work, or a tenth as much as Benjamin Franklin paid.

Has gas gotten more expensive? In 1958, gas cost 24¢ a gallon, but that’s $2.24 in current terms. How about postage? In real terms, a first class stamp today costs less than it did in the 1940s, when it hit an inflation-adjusted spike of 51¢ (4¢).

The face value of money isn’t as important as its purchasing power, but psychologically, people don’t believe it. If you get a 2% pay cut, it’s unfair and hugely damaging to morale. But if inflation is 4% and you get a 2% raise, you’re in exactly the same position, but you’re more likely to think you’re being treated well.

Previous Installments

Part 1 — Bias blind spot, confirmation bias, déformation professionnelle, denomination effect, moral credential effect.

Part 2 — Base rate fallacy, congruence bias, experimenter’s bias

Part 3 — Ambiguity aversion effect (Ellsberg paradox), choice-supportive bias, distinction bias, contrast effect

Part 4 — Actor-observer bias, anchoring effect, attentional bias, availability cascade, belief bias

Part 5 — Clustering illusion, conjunction fallacy, cryptomnesia

Part 6 — Disposition effect, egocentric bias, endowment effect, extraordinarity bias

Part 7 — False consensus effect, false memory, Forer effect, framing, fundamental attribution error

Part 8 — Gambler’s fallacy, halo effect

Part 9 — Hawthorne effect, herd instinct, hindsight bias, hyperbolic discounting

Part 10 — Illusion of asymmetric insight, illusion of control, illusory superiority, impact bias, information bias, ingroup bias, irrational escalation,

Eyewitness to Murder

Today, Tuesday, April 13, 2010, is the 35th anniversary of a killing spree in Wheaton, Maryland. My girlfriend and I were on our way home from Young Frankenstein when we drove right through the middle of it.

Michael Edward Pearch shot seven people, all African-American, killing two and wounding the rest. There were indications, police said, that the shooting were racially motivated. All the victims were black and the gunman was white. He passed up at least one car with whites, said police, as he walked down a highway looking for another target.

There were at least two such cars. One of them was mine.

Here’s the story.

Pearch, an unemployed carpenter living with his mother in Silver Spring, Maryland, left home about 7:30p on Sunday, April 13, 1975, and drove to the nearby Wheaton Plaza shopping mall. He was wearing his Army fatigues, a knapsack with 250 rounds of ammunition, and a machete strapped to his chest. He carried a .45 caliber automatic pistol.

He walked to the traffic light at the entrance ot the mall, where he shot and killed John L. Sligh, 43, of Rockville, Maryland, and wounded his wife, Laureen D. Sligh, 40, in both legs. He walked to the next car and fired at Dr. Ralph C. Gomes, also of Rockville, but missed. Gomes swerved, crashing his car into another. He suffered minor injuries.

The panic started at once. “Some witnesses ducked for cover. Others just stood there and watched in disbelieving shock,” said police captain Miles Daniels. One particularly brave man (I don’t know his name) called the police and began following the gunman.

We were on our way home from the movies. It was a warm spring evening. The car windows were open. As I neared the intersection of Georgia Avenue and University Boulevard (a major intersection), I heard what I thought at first were gunshots.

But gunshots on a lazy Sunday evening on a busy suburban street? Surely, I must be imagining things. Then I saw the man who had followed the gunman. He was ducking behind cars. Well, if there wasn’t any gunfire, then surely the man was just playing some sort of game.

The light turned green. I pulled forward. As I reached the intersection, I saw two men in the left turn lane on the other side of the street. One man was standing. He was white. One man was face down. He was black. In his right hand, he was carrying a brown paper bag.

If there wasn’t any gunfire, and the man ducking behind cars was playing some sort of game, then I figured I was looking at some drunks, with one of them (clutching his booze in a brown paper bag) passed out in the street.

As I drove through the intersection, I passed within five feet of Michael Edward Pearch, the shooter, and his most recent victim, Harold S. Navy, Jr., 17 years old and a freshman at the University of Maryland. Navy was working as a busboy at the Anchor Inn, right on the corner of Georgia and University. He had been sent across the street to a supermarket to buy a jar of applesauce, the contents of that brown paper bag. He was wounded in the abdomen, but survived.

There was a police station about a mile north of the intersection, right on our way home, so I pulled in. “There’s a drunk passed out in the left turn lane at Georgia and University,” I told the officer at the desk.

“Wait here,” the officer said.

Moments later three plainclothes officers came out of the back room. “Are those the eyewitnesses to the murders?” one of the officers asked.

It was not until that moment that I had any idea what I had seen.

We spent the rest of the evening in a room with an increasing number of witnesses. It wasn't until afterward that I learned the rest of the story.

Walking up Georgia Avenue, the gunman shot and killed Connie L. Stanley, 42, of Washington, DC, and then shot and wounded Rosalyn Stanley, 26, of Annapolis, who was in the next car.

Two policemen spotted the shooting and ordered Pearch to halt. He turned, looked at the officers, then walked to the next car with African-Americans and fired again, wounding Bryant Lamont Williams, 20, of Rockville. The two officers opened fire with a shotgun and a pistol, and killed Pearch.

“He was smiling. I thought he had been shooting blanks,” said William Painter, one of the 40-50 witnesses.

* * *

Some of my interest in cognitive biases and perceptual distortions stems from this incident. Eyewitness testimony, experts know, is not particularly reliable, especially from people not trained in the art. I was within five feet of the murderer, but couldn’t have picked him out of a lineup on a bet. I had no idea what was going on. I am still ashamed.

Selective perception underlies a lot of cognitive biases. We adjust and filter the world around us according to our sense of what the world should be, and therefore miss a lot about what the world really is.

I’ve been trying to get the details of this story for a long time, but even in a Google world, it’s hard to find. Perhaps it’s the small number of victims, but this particular incident doesn’t show up on any list of racial violence I can find. There’s a United Press article that appeared in various papers, ranging from the Fort Scott (Kansas) Tribune to the St. Petersburg (Florida) Evening Independent.

Michael Edward Pearch is mentioned as a potential suspect in the Wheaton abduction of the Lyon sisters, but there’s no evidence other than his killing spree to link him to the murders, and the Lyons were white. He’s also mentioned on at least one white supremicist site, where he’s a hero.

On the anniversary of this terrible event, I remember the victims, and remember also the lessons of my own failure to perceive what was going on all around me.