1. Group beliefs

This section looks at how group beliefs form – or are formed – and what is the relation of individual beliefs to that of a group. Although I will offer a stipulative account of group beliefs, the discussion is on a general level. The idea is to illustrate the issues involved to readers not already familiar with the literature on group beliefs, and to set the scene for the argument for the narrative constraint for honest group statements in the next section.

Many typical examples of group beliefs seem to comprise members deciding that the group believes that p, based on an official position that the group has arrived at through their decision-making (Lackey Reference Lackey2021: 34).Footnote ¹⁰ While a group might come to hold proposition p, its members might not share that opinion as individuals (List and Pettit Reference List and Pettit2011). Indeed, group positions that are arrived at by group decision-making mechanisms are a product of people acting and thinking within their roles. Roles in groups tend to come with different powers and not all members have the same authority to act or to be involved in forming the collective position on a given issue. Operative members of a group are those members who have the authority to make decisions in the field in question (Tuomela Reference Tuomela2007).Footnote ¹¹ The decisions and course of action that operative members vote or otherwise opt for might not be what they would choose in their private lives. Instead, it is what they believe to be in the best interests of the group (unless they are trying to sabotage the group, are indifferent towards it, and so on). Discursive dilemmas (Pettit Reference Pettit2001) can further complicate the picture (I will return to these soon). So while a group might have adopted a position that p, its members might not believe it as individuals. In any case, group positions (which sometime underpin group beliefs) are not dependent upon the opinion of any given individual. For example, a single operative member refusing to accept a reason is not sufficient for the group to lack that reason (Lackey Reference Lackey2016: 350).

Accounts of group beliefs are sometimes divided along the lines of summative and non-summative accounts. Summative accounts (e.g. Quinton Reference Quinton1976) argue that if all or nearly all of the members of a group hold a belief, then aggregately the group itself holds such a belief, while non-summative, collective accounts (e.g. Gilbert Reference Gilbert2004) deny this and demand joint acceptance of the group belief instead. These two opposites are not the only way to go. I will follow Lackey (Reference Lackey2016) in arguing that while a group's beliefs are not reducible to its members’ beliefs, they are nonetheless constrained by them. Although a group belief does not necessarily neatly map onto the beliefs of individual group members, there is still a strong linkage between what the members-in-roles believe and what the group believes. Group beliefs are not conjured out of thin air, but are based on the beliefs of individuals within their roles. They are also shaped by the ethos of the group; that is, the goals, commitments and answers it has collectively accepted to be its view (intentional horizon) regarding the matters (realm of concern) vital to the group (Tuomela Reference Tuomela2007; Laitinen Reference Laitinen, Konzelmann Ziv and Schmid2014: 218). While the ethos marks the continuation of the group together with its historical and modal properties and determines the collective identity, it is not set in stone and to some degree it is always in a state of fluctuation. In my usage, the ethos (the character of the collective if you like) also includes its norms and customs, including unwritten and informal ones. Deliberations within the group can help shape the ethos through changing the group's position on some matter, but the ethos forms also organically without deliberation through the daily interactions of its members, both inside and outside the group.

I will offer a stipulative account of group beliefs, although I do not provide a full-fledged defence of it here. Rather, the idea is that the narrative constraint for honest group statements can stand on its own and can be applied to the preferred account of group beliefs.Footnote ¹² Still, offering this stipulative account of group beliefs should make it easier for the reader to follow the discussion on groups who make lying statements in the following sections. I suggest that a group cannot have a belief that p if none of its members have such a belief or a belief close enough to accept that p.Footnote ¹³ Instead, a significant proportion of the operative members (with the ratio depending on the context) should believe – within their roles – that p (or a belief close enough to accept that p) in order for the group to have a belief that p. Footnote ¹⁴

The distinction between individual beliefs and what I call individual beliefs-as-members is the key to understanding why the account proposed does not represent either of the furthest ends of the group belief debate (i.e. the simple summative account or the plural subject account of collective belief, to use terms from Gilbert (Reference Gilbert2004), or the deflationary or inflationary accounts, to use terms from Lackey (Reference Lackey2016)). When an individual holds or forms a belief as a member of a group, the ethos of the group is already involved. Members look at the issue from the viewpoint of the collective and their individual deliberation is affected by their role and the ethos of the collective, just as it is when group deliberation is taking place.

Think of a customer services representative, working alone at the information desk of a department store, having to take on-the-spot decisions on behalf of the department store when reacting to customer enquiries (and being authorized to do so within a certain limited remit). If they are acting within their role requirements, their answers are not based on their personal individual beliefs, but will instead try to mirror the policies and the ethos of the department store. When it comes to group deliberation, which represents the more robust type of group belief formation, the group members are still thinking within their roles and adopting the point of view of the group. However, their individual beliefs-as-members have the additional possibility of shaping the individual beliefs-as-members of the other members too, thus affecting the group belief and even the group ethos.

Beliefs-as-members must fall within the ethos of the group. Even if all of the members of a group individually believe that p, even for reasons that are similar or complementary, the group should not be attributed with the belief that p if it is something that falls outside the ethos of the group. Let's say that after watching Chewing Gum and I May Destroy You, all the group members individually believe that Michaela Coel is one of the most talented young screenwriters around. Member A believes this is because Coel is such a versatile writer, mastering comedy and drama alike. Member B thinks it is because she knows how to write believable and multi-faceted characters, while member C's reason for the belief is that Coel's stories are not formulaic but break new ground and keep the audience on their toes. The group in this example is not the BBC or some television production company, however, but a small company that manufactures stationery. While questions about ethical supply chains or varieties of recycled paper fall safely within the ethos of this group, questions about excellent screenwriting do not. So even though the individual operative members all believe that p, the stationery manufacturer does not hold any group beliefs about the matter. This is because the beliefs about Michaela Coel are individual beliefs of members, not individual beliefs-as-members.Footnote ¹⁵

Note that I did not argue that the group cannot be attributed with the belief that p just because it is something that they have not deliberated as a group. This is because I think a group belief can be attributed correctly to a group even when the members have never discussed p directly. Here my account differs from the collective acceptance accounts of group beliefs, as the members of the group do not have to openly express their readiness to establish the belief that p as the group's belief (cf. Gilbert Reference Gilbert2004). Perhaps it goes without saying at the stationery supplier that the products would never feature any controversial images, and this can be established by looking at the product lines over the years. “Cute is better than political” could thus be a belief attributed to the group, even though it has never been openly discussed in meetings. Rather, it is part of the ethos that members almost unconsciously adopt as they get acquainted with the company's culture. Another example could be a misogynistic group that believes that women are less capable than men, but who have never discussed the issue openly. Despite this, I think it is correct to assign a group belief that women are less capable than men to the group if a significant proportion of the operative members think so within their roles and such a belief belongs within the remit of the group's ethos.Footnote ¹⁶ A group belief can be formed unconsciously or unintentionally through the interaction of social norms within the group and the kind of members the group has. We could call this kind of belief dispositional group belief, meaning that it is a belief that belongs within the group's ethos, but it is not actively being considered by the group (as opposed to occurrent group belief, beliefs that are actively considered by the group).Footnote ¹⁷ A group's ethos is revealed not just through what it states to be its position, but also through what it does, through its actions.

A dispositional group belief can be made visible by bringing the issue up with or within the group, by external or internal agents. This would be the case if the misogynistic group would be called to account for its misogynistic tendencies, for example. Dispositional group beliefs can be changed through group deliberation, after which it becomes an occurrent group belief, i.e. a belief that is actively considered by the group. With these latter kind of group beliefs there is a deliberately formed group position regarding p that anchors the occurrent group belief about p. I will suggest later that the genealogy of the group belief, if you like, matters for narrative intention, where it places certain rationality constraints on occurrent group beliefs, although not on dispositional ones.

While group beliefs cannot be entirely removed from what the group's members believe within their roles, this does not apply to group positions. Instead, the members might decide to adopt a group position that does not really reflect the opinion of the members due to some pragmatic consideration, like the need to reach a compromise, or the restrictions imposed by voting rules. Discursive dilemmas discussed in the literature show that even if all members of a group hold judgements that are individually consistent, the group judgement reached through aggregation of votes does not have to be consistent with these individual votes (e.g. Pettit Reference Pettit2001; List Reference List2005; List and Pettit Reference List and Pettit2011). Discursive dilemmas can also consist of some rule, resulting in the group deciding on a sub-optimal choice. For example, a group can decide to hire a candidate that no member of the hiring committee considers to be the best candidate. I find that while such a result might be the group's decision, it is not what the group believes to be for the best. It could be, if the group thinks that there is no ideal procedure for coming up with a decision and they are happy to have merely settled on a procedure. This would fall under individual beliefs-as-members that are close enough to accept p. However, it could be that the rule is externally imposed, from people higher up in the organizational hierarchy, for example, and the group members are bound by the rules, regardless of which procedure they themselves would prefer. In such circumstances, a subgroup's decision to hire candidate T does not automatically mean that the subgroup believes that T is the best candidate. The individual members might all find him to be a suboptimal choice. Rather, the belief might take the form of: “We believe that K or J is the best candidate, but due to the externally imposed rules, the group will vote to hire T instead.” While the subgroup believes that candidate T should be hired, their group belief does not need to include some further component of believing that T is the best candidate. In other words, the fact that none of the individual members think that T is the best candidate blocks the possibility that the group thinks that T is the best candidate.Footnote ¹⁸ Again, they might think that T is, for example, the most suitable candidate under the rules that are in place, but it would be misleading to describe it as the subgroup's belief that T is the best candidate for the job.Footnote ¹⁹ The group members might have different reasons for believing that p, but as long as a significant proportion of the operative members believe that p within their roles, the group can also believe that p.

As group beliefs are constrained by the beliefs of their members, changes in membership can affect the group's beliefs. Political parties with a radically new leadership are probably the clearest examples of this. However, as most members affect the ethos of a group in myriad small ways, the changes are often more gradual and less noticeable. All in all, group beliefs are never set in stone and the ethos of a group is always in a state of flux to some degree. Changes in a group's membership can also change the justificatory status of its beliefs (Lackey Reference Lackey2016: 391). Although allowing for change is required for any account of group belief to be realistic, group beliefs cannot change on a whim. For something to count as a belief, there has to be a certain level of stability to the belief. Or as Lackey (Reference Lackey2021: 42) puts it, a group belief is incompatible with judgement fragility, where the group deliberations are likely to yield different answers each time, even with the same available evidence. She likens this to an untrustworthy person, who changes their mind about a question every few minutes.Footnote ²⁰

2. Narrative coherence and narrative intention

In this section, I will elaborate on the idea of a narrative constraint for honest group statements (for highly organized groups with expertise), looking at the two components of the constraint. I begin with narrative coherence before moving on to narrative intention. I will also make some remarks about group knowledge as it is an important element of narrative coherence. The narrative constraint should help us to establish when a group is lying even in cases where some of its operative members sincerely believe in falsehoods due to ideology.

A group could also be narratively confused. Narrative confusion is not an example of a group lie. Rather, it is about a group agent who is getting pulled in different directions by their members, where the ethos of the group is weak or has not yet fully formed, or where the group goals and beliefs are inconsistent. A group like this can make statements that are not true in relation to how the world is, yet these statements are not meant to be deceptive, but are the product of haphazard group knowledge and unformed group dynamics. The group can make narratively confusing statements, not because it aims to be deceptive, but because it does not really have clear aims as a group yet. An example could be a newly formed cooperative or a political party that has not yet had time to really come together as a group. This kind of confusion is not an example of a group lie. I will set aside cases of narrative confusion as they mostly apply to new and emerging groups and not to the kind of groups that I am using as my examples.

Lying should also be distinguished from honest mistakes. This can be done by observing the severity of the incoherence or the repetition of the false claim. The severity of the incoherence concerns how wide the gap is between what the group knew and what it said. Repetition of the false claim refers to – unsurprisingly – how often something is said. A few times could indicate an honest mistake (or narrative confusion), but a repeated false message is a lie. Lying group statements purposefully do not reflect what the group knows about the issue(s), whereas misguided group statements suggest either group confusion or lack of knowledge about the issue (by the spokesperson or the group).Footnote ²¹ Naturally there will be cases where it is harder to establish if a group assertion is a mistake or a lie, especially if made by a spokesperson, but the narrative coherence introduced next should help with these.

3. Before we knew

In this section, I will discuss group lying in the climate change context to test the applicability of the idea of a narrative constraint for honest group statements. Many corporations that depend on fossil fuels have engaged in lobbying to prevent regulation at local, national and international levels (Dunlap and McCright Reference Dunlap, McCright, R.E. Dunlap and R.J. Brulle2015).Footnote ²⁴ Their own scientists understood the dangers, and produced models as early as the 1980s, which showed that immediate action should be taken. Instead, the companies chose the opposite course and invested heavily in lobbying regulators to adopt a wait and see approach, some of them at least partly for seemingly ideologically reasons (Oreskes and Conway Reference Oreskes and Conway2010).

My example is a fictional fossil fuel corporation F, who publicly denies what its own experts have told it about the gravity of the threat posed by climate change and the reliability of climate science. The narrative constraint should help us to see if the group is lying when its operative members are internally disagreeing about what to do. This is even if some members are guided by ideology over facts, meaning that they – as individuals – could sincerely believe in falsehoods. Adopting the formulation of G-LIE from Lackey (Reference Lackey2021) and applying it to F, the criteria for a group lie would be as follows:

Following from the earlier section on group beliefs, I suggest that F believes that p iff a significant proportion of the operative members of F pertaining to that matter hold individual beliefs-as-members that p (or close enough beliefs to accept that p), and such a belief belongs within the remit of F's ethos. I argued that while a group's beliefs are not reducible to its members’ beliefs, they are nonetheless constrained by them (I will return to this soon).

Let us say that F places an ad in a newspaper, stating that climate science is poorly understood and that there is no proof that the human use of fossil fuels has had an impact on the average global temperatures. This is despite F's own scientists having written an internal report, which confirms the science, acknowledges the potential serious implications for the world and urges F to consider how it should play its part. In the context of this example, the third condition seems to follow from the second one holding. After all, when you pay for advertising space, you have a message that you want to convey to the audience of that media. Moreover, if you publicly state something that you believe to be false, and do so in persuasive marketing language, it would be hard to deny that the intention is to be deceptive.

However, this is too fast. There could be two different versions of F. In the first, the intention is to be deceptive about climate science because of concerns over short-term profits. The members of the board of directors of F believe the conclusion of the internal report, but decide that F's official position is that climate science is uncertain and any climate legislation would be harmful, purely in order to protect F's short-term financial interests. Here the ad amounts to an obvious group lie. In another version of F, some of the operative members truly believe that climate science is not to be trusted. In what follows, I will discuss only the latter version of F, where its operative members are strongly ideologically influenced.

For board members of this F, climate change is just a socialist ploy to introduce regulation against free markets, so it is less clear that they intend to be deceptive when they put out the statement in the advert. Rather, F seems to be only expressing the actual ideological group belief of its board members. I will suggest that despite the genuinely held beliefs of F's operative members, F is lying when it puts out the advertisement. The statement is a group lie because it fails the narrative constraint for honest group statements.

Returning to the second condition of G-LIE (F believes that p is false), and my stipulated account of group beliefs, one might worry that reliance on the beliefs of the members provides leeway for groups to engage in “alternative facts” that best fit their existing ethos by choosing only ideologically like-minded people as members. However, even if a significant proportion of F's members believe that climate science is akin to a conspiracy theory, it does not mean that this would translate into such a belief for F because the members would have to be operative members in relation to the issue. The operative members regarding F's beliefs about the reliability of climate science are F's own scientists, the experts F has tasked with compiling the internal memo about the subject. Their report confirmed the science, acknowledged the potential serious implications for the world, and urged F to consider how it should play its part. As the company scientists are the operative members in F when it comes to assessing the reliability of climate science, F believes that climate change science is reliable. If these scientists ignored the best available evidence, they would fall foul of the narrative intention requirement for forming group beliefs. If F hired a bunch of people without the necessary skills and knowledge to act as its company scientists in relation to climate change, namely people who are not experts in sciences directly related to climate science, then F itself would not meet the narrative intention requirement.

That said, the company scientists are operative members only in relation to F's beliefs about the reliability of climate science. F's executives and board members are the operative members in relation to the belief of what F should do in light of this evidence about the impact of their products. Let us call them operative members in relation to F's response to climate science and stipulate that a significant proportion of them believe that climate science is a hoax. This is not an implausible scenario, particularly over three decades ago when decisions about misinformation campaigns were first made. There can be many ideological obstacles involved in accepting climate science and the need for environmental regulation.Footnote ²⁵ Viewed from the standpoint of a board member of a fossil fuel company, the emerging climate science must have been alarming not only because of the changes projected to occur to global average temperatures, but also because such science made it clear that time would soon be up for fossil fuels. Unless a company is willing to change its course very rapidly, such news can be almost too painful for its members to process, even when it comes from the company's own scientists (or perhaps especially then). It is therefore not hard to imagine how this could result in denials and selective framing in group decision-making. So, it seems that the group could believe that p, meaning that the second condition of a group lie (F believes that p is false) would not hold. This would be too hasty a conclusion to draw, however.

When a group has internal discussions about an emerging issue and is looking to decide what should be done about it, the group position is the product of group deliberation. If the group's position on an issue is based on biases and wishful thinking, instead of the operative member's deliberations and the best available evidence, the position amounts to a group desire, rather than a belief. After all, as Anscombe (Reference Anscombe1963) pointed out, a belief has a mind-to-world fit: we try to match our beliefs to how the world really is and correct them with the availability of new evidence. A desire has a world-to-mind fit instead: it is about how we would like the world to be, how we would like the reality to match our desire. If F's operative members in relation to its response to climate science (i.e. executives and board members) choose to ignore the evidence that their own scientists have provided them with, and let their biases guide them instead, the resulting group belief based on a group position is more akin to a group desire than a group belief.

I argued earlier that a group belief born out of conflicting beliefs of different subgroups can be the group's actual belief as long as the narrative is coherent, but that a group belief cannot sidestep the beliefs or knowledge of the operative subgroups pertaining to the matter unless a coherent narrative for such an exclusion exists. When fossil fuel company F claims that climate science is unreliable – even when its own group of experts has internally concluded in its confidential report that the science is reliable – the lie is in the discrepancy between what the company knows internally through its experts and what it says externally. As the paid advertisement states that climate science is unreliable, the statement is a group lie. The only way the statement about unreliable climate science would not fall foul of the narrative coherence condition would be if F had another, reliable source of information that concluded that climate change is a hoax, or the science unreliable at best. Such a dissenting opinion cannot come from just anyone, however. As I said earlier, if F hired people without the skills and knowledge to act as experts in relation to climate change, then F would not meet the narrative intention requirement. Hiring a consultancy that provides ideologically fitting answers would not get F off the hook either. This would also be the case if F decided to fund only the handful of climate scientists that are critical of anthropogenic climate change. Deciding to rely on such niche experts and ignore the scientific consensus falls foul of the narrative intention requirement.

After surveying the evidence, F's scientists concluded that the science is real. With regards to the advertisement, there is thus a problem with narrative coherence even if F's executives and board members have always believed that fossil fuels are good for the world. While the new group belief does not necessarily contradict earlier group beliefs about what the group should do, there is incoherence between what F knows about the science through its experts, namely the knowledge of F's operative subgroup, and what it states publicly about the science. It would be another matter if F stated in its adverts that climate science is reliable, but tried to argue that no immediate action is required due to economic concerns, for example. But this is not the case in my example. Thus F's statement in the advertisement does not meet the narrative coherence condition.

The narrative intention in this case also points to deliberate lying as opposed to accidental misleading statement. Group positions should be formed in good faith based on the best available evidence. I argued earlier that narrative intention requires a certain level of epistemic curiosity and openness from the group to engage with different views and evidence on an issue. In this case, it seems that such curiosity existed: F tasked its own competent scientists with compiling a report about climate science. However, it has not engaged with this evidence in good faith, but instead dismissed it or perhaps decided to hide it. If such willingness to engage with evidence is missing, the group belief is not formed in good faith, as deliberations should be based on the best available evidence.

The public statements made by a group can of course be inconsistent with its operating knowledge, which seems to be the case with the fossil fuel companies. It might even be that the statements are inconsistent with the group's shared knowledge, but that is beside the point. What matters for the purposes of my argument is that operating knowledge about x is enough to give rise to a group belief about x as long as that knowledge is attached to the appropriate lines of communication. In the case of F, the scientists compiled their report and shared it with the board members. The operating knowledge that F's scientists have about climate change science was thus attached to appropriate lines of communication (a report to the board members). To disregard such knowledge when making decisions about what the group should do fails the test of narrative coherence. Hence, the group is lying.