The McDonald's Option

Question

A group of co-workers at GeneraCorp Inc. have just finished their regular mandatory Thursday morning training session. This week featured a two-hour discussion on how to use the new printers, followed by a boring team building exercise involving staplers and glue.

It's 11:30 AM, and while everyone agrees they should get out of the office for lunch, nobody feels spirited enough to suggest where to eat. It's also cloudy, misting rain, and the local sportsball team lost again.

The group takes the elevator down, walks out the front door, and heads in a direction aimlessly following traffic lights. They bumble around as an amoeba, thinking, hoping someone will just decide and then they can go eat. Blocks go by. They've passed several possibilities but nobody speaks up.

Finally, an aggravated Andy steps up and says, "let's just go to McDonald's!"

Most of the group gives him a look of vague disgust. "Well, if we're going to do that, we might as well get sandwiches at Sandy's, it's better and cheaper", says one. "After that training, I think we should do something fun like Hibachi", says another. Finally, there is some quick discussion and everyone agrees on BBQ from the shop next to where they are standing. After all, the meat smelled delicious and secretly 5 of the 7 co-workers wanted to go there anyway.

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In a group setting where peers have not established a defacto leadership hierarchy, or where no such hierarchy has social value, folks are often hesitant to speak up. This seems to be made worse with a negative general mood. There is agreement that a decision should be made for the good of the group, but nobody wants to make that decision for fear of making a bad one. In this example story, the decision is also really inconsequential, likely to be forgotten about by the next day.

I've learned that in these situations, it's best to just announce some decision, even if it's a bad one. "The McDonald's Option", I call it. Worst case scenario, there will be food and nobody will starve. But ideally, someone will realize the bar is set pretty low, and that they should not feel ashamed to make a better suggestion.

I'm sure this concept has existed as long as civilization. Does it have a proper name? Or some formal reference?

Answer 1

So, having spent some time as a union representative in a large assembly, I can tell you for sure that the activity in question is consensus decision-making. When a group of people build consensus, there are a number of ways and strategies to do this. I'm not sure if the situation you describe is recognized as a pattern, but it certainly seems familiar enough to my own experience to possibly be. A quick survey of some materials online reveal there are certainly experts in consensus building and alternative dispute resolution (harvard.edu).

According to Collins dictionary, the interjection of this worst option is called the lowest common denominator. From the entry:

If you describe a plan or policy as the lowest common denominator, you are critical of it because it has been deliberately made too simple so that nobody will disagree.

So, perhaps by offering the "McDonald's Option", everyone can agree that it's the cheapest, fastest, simplest option, and no one can disagree with the logic; yet while it is also the most rational choice no one can disagree with, since it is about an choice that appeals to our tastes rather than our intellects, it creates an initial consensus through rejection. In food preferences, people don't prefer to eat what is cheapest, fastest, simplest, necessarily.

Once one person rejects the lowest common denominator, then people in earnest continue in the consensus building process. It would seem that introducing the lowest common denominator therefore triggers a rough consensus. This also seems related to Solomon Asch's work in conformity where people feel a hesitation to appear non-conformant. So it would seem by introducing the lowest common denominator, people feel free to speak out and quickly establish a rough consensus of what they don't want. Once consensus building begins, people then feel a desire to conform to the consensus building activity. I would call it "consensus building by rejecting the lowest common denominator".

I did find one case study that appears to describe this (jstor.org), but it's behind a paywall. The summary I could find said:

Case Study: Eastern Scheldt Storm Surge Barriers Background: The Netherlands faced significant challenges with flooding due to its low-lying geography. The Eastern Scheldt was particularly vulnerable, and a robust solution was needed to protect the region from storm surges.

Initial Approach: The initial plan was to build a simple, closed dam, which represented the lowest common denominator solution. This would have provided basic flood protection but would have severely impacted the local ecosystem and fishing industry.

Consensus Building: Instead of settling for this basic solution, stakeholders—including government officials, engineers, environmentalists, and local communities—engaged in extensive discussions to find a more innovative and sustainable solution. They rejected the lowest common denominator approach and aimed for a higher standard that balanced flood protection with environmental preservation.

Answer 2

It's not really a fallacy, sounds more like a bias or at least something from the domain of psychology and behavioral studies. Disclaimer: Not a psychologist...

What also came to mind was "Cunningham's law":

The best way to get the right answer on the Internet is not to ask a question; it's to post the wrong answer.

Which you can read as "oh people suck and are so smug and condescending that they rather correct someone than actually help each other", but which you could also read as imposter syndrome. Meaning people who actually know a lot of stuff are more likely to know how little there is actually known and when confronted with a question, especially a broad one, with many different options, tend to undervalue their own abilities, because they compare themselves to perfection, upon which they will fail and thus not even try.

While if someone else has already submitted a sub-par, wrong or incomplete answer, then the question has lost a lot of that broadness and it's no longer about giving the BEST answer, but even just a BETTER answer is GOOD. So the pressure is off, your answer is no longer the worst and the person asking the question will likely appreciate the improvement even if it might not be THE BEST.

Now whether that is best done with a wrong answer or a non-optimal (but working) answer probably depends on the situation. For example a non-optimal answer would already be appreciated by the person asking the question as it works, but isn't great and would prompt them to refine their question which could improve the quality of answers. Though a non-optimal answer, but good, answer might already deter on-lookers by presenting the question as "answered" meaning you'd have to put in work reading the other answers to avoid duplication aso and then you'd need to come up with something better. While a wrong answer makes it easy to present something better.

Also giving wrong advice is not only not appreciated, but can contribute negatively to a person's reputation so that might work better for the internet where people are often anonymous. But then again people on the internet cover the whole spectrum of intelligence and expertise so chances are a wrong answer might not even be seen as wrong and spreading misinformation can be quite dangerous.

So yeah "it's best" might be debatable, but yeah presenting a low hanging fruit that leaves room for improvement can get a discussion going. On the other hand that might also put pressure on the people to find a solution quick because otherwise the bad one is accepted so that might work for picking a place to eat, while for questions that require more consideration, forcing a decision might not be the best idea in the first place.

Sidenote: For machine learning for example you also "learn" by just picking a solution at random and then tweak your parameters and see if the results get better or worse. So having a starting point and a comparison function is crucial for this kind of iterative improvement. Otherwise there's a chance to fall into analysis paralysis where you overthink everything and never get going. So being able to act on a whim and take "irrational" reasons to at least start and action might be crucial to our survival, but which also give rise to a whole group of other biases such as: "anchoring bias"

Again not a psychologist.

Answer 3

Isn't this like the concept of an ice-breaker question? Just to get the conversation going, one of the participants has to make the first step.

I did not find a good source that defines what the concept of an ice-breaker is psychologically/sociologically speaking. The higher-level concepts are group dynamics.

I do not mean the more or less cringy and artificial questions on team-building events. I mean the situations in real-life, when there is a lot of silence and then one person breaks it, encouraging the others subconsciously to speak up as well.

This article gets close to a definition in outlining what it is and to what it leads (creating bonding in a group, asking about values and interests, establishing a group culture). The article also mentions Bruce Tuckmans' phases of team building (forming, storming, norming, performing, adjourning) and the benefits of ice-breakers during the storming phase.

Answer 4

I've learned that in these situations, it's best to just announce some decision, even if it's a bad one.

Note a different possible outcome of this is that the group accepts the bad decision. So this only works if the initial suggestions is viable, not "bad" as in "unacceptable". Else this would be a fallacy, not a strategy. There are several such team dysfunctions, like groupthink.

A different strategy would be to call up a vote between two such initial options, just as one example.

And if this initial idea is particularly bad, it might be labeled as "playing devil's advocate".

The question is not clear enough to decide if that's a suitable term, some would consider McDonald's bad enough to not be a viable choice.