The Underrated and Overrated Series: 1 - INTRODUCTION

Last year I wrote about why I considered Sydney Pollack to be an underrated filmmaker. That wasn’t a random thought. Trying to identify underrated and overrated things is one of my favorite sports.

As the financial world has shown us lately, markets are less efficient than we would like them to be. One reason for this is that enthusiasm, not just about stocks or mortgage-backed securities, but also about movies, artists and everything else is more contagious than a common cold in a kindergarten classroom. This is understandable. For most people it is just more fun to agree with their friends when they are passionately trashing a movie or praising a politician than having to raise a conflicting view.

Groupthink, the need exhibited by group members to minimize conflict by reaching consensus at the expense of individual analysis and critical reasoning, is a real and tangible phenomenon in every day modern live.

Consciously or not, most people often find themselves adjusting their views at least a little to agree with their spouses, bosses, piers or the market. Then they try to justify themselves for doing so: “he knows more about this and he loves it”; “this is the most expensive, so it must be good”; “maybe I missed something since everybody seems to like it…”

Of course the result of this is that every day the opinionated people and the media end up dictating what the majority like or dislike, or at least what they think they like or dislike (I swear I wasn’t thinking in Oprah’s Book Club when I wrote this sentence… but what a good example it is!). This is dangerous and foolish, particularly when applied not to movies or books, but to our priorities in life… or jury duty.

“12 Angry Men”, the Sydney Lumet classic of 1957, highlights the negative impact that group-thinking can have in the effectiveness of a jury deciding a murder trial. It’s not until juror #8 starts painstakingly challenging the “guilty” consensus of the other jury members when any kind of deliberation takes place, even though everyone knows that a guilty verdict will result in the electric chair for a black, troubled kid accused of killing his father. Some aspects of the original film may be outdated (there are at least two remakes of it, including a very good one for TV with Jack Lemon as juror #8) but the basic points about group behavior and the fairness of a judicial system based on jury trials are still –how scary this is– completely valid.

Outside of court, the consequences of this herd behaviour may also be devastating. By assuming the idea of happiness that family, friends or the media have, someone can be pushed unknowingly to pursue someone else’s dream, squashing any chance of real happiness.

An exercise to find underrated and overrated things from our very particular point of view is therefore, not just healthy but critically important. It’s a very personal game, since we are not supposed to feel the same way about everything. Market winners should be a reflection of the taste of the majority, not the preferences of the opinionated.

But this is also a worthwhile and fun game we should all play more often; definitely, an underrated game.