The Misleading Power of Loud Voices
The worst thing about loud voices is not just that they tend to drown everything else out but that they can determine what we believe. Shout it loud, shout it often and you go a long way to establishing perceived reality.
In ‘Thinking Fast and Slow’, Daniel Kahneman highlighted two cognitive biases that help to explain why loud voices are believed.
Firstly there is the ‘Availability Bias’ where we assess probability based on how easily something comes to mind. Studies show that people in the USA tend to think of alligators as a bigger cause of human loss of life than deer. It’s easy to imagine the savagery of an alligator attack but a deer springing in front of a car is less easily called to mind, yet deer are involved in more human deaths than alligators. We assess risk by emotional salience and ease of recall.
Deer, of course, don’t attack. Instead, they step in front of cars, causing deadly collisions.
Secondly, there is the ‘Mere Exposure Effect’, made famous by Robert Zajonc (1) who showed that frequency of exposure increases positivity. Simple and repeated exposure to an item over time makes it more familiar, more trusted and more believed without need of supporting proof points. If we hear a name frequently enough, after a while we can mistake the sense of familiarity with a vague belief that the person is actually known to us.
I want to draw our attention to the dangers of loud voices and the repetition of view points — and the critical importance of holding them to account and not accepting just what is heard. If we give undue credence to loud voices and beleive them to be both true and representative, we run the risk of being severely misled.
I recently spoke on this issue at The Asia Pacific Social Marketing Conference in Perth. We had helped the NSW Department of Planning, Housing and Infrastructure with a behavioural insights program of work (published July 2026) designed to foster greater community support for street trees in the Greater Sydney region (2).
The project itself concerned developing a behaviour change strategy to support local councils in their community engagement actitives with respect to street trees. It is an important piece of work because street trees account for 15–20% of Sydney’s urban canopy and play a significant role in mitigating the urban heat island effects where urban surfaces absorb and re-radiate heat to the surrouding area at greater rates than natural envirnments. Sydney and Western Sydney in particular is extremely prone to the urban heat island effect.
Quite aside from the fact that street trees occupy a curious kind of ‘noman’s land’ between private and public space, we learned from our many conversations with councils in the Greater Sydney area that they were hesitant to communicate too overtly about their community street tree initiatives.
The reason for this was they had experienced and retained a long anticipatory dread of community backlash. So by and large, councils went about their work with planting and maintaining street trees as a key component of canopy and did not communicate about it for fear of angry loud voices coming their way.
Since we began our project with many interviews with council staff, it is perhaps unsurprising that we absorbed this concern and took it into the research with our own anticipatory dread — which was much more to do with wondering how on earth we were going to solve this challenging puzzle!
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Yet what we went on to find was that only 4% of the population had any kind of active opposition to street trees. It was immediately clear that councils were hearing only from a tiny yet highly vocal minority. These ‘loud’ voices were taken to be representative of wider community sentiment and yet they were not even close.
We found that 84% of Sydney residents were very supportive of street trees.
However, despite most people loving street trees they actually think they are in a minority, estimating 67% of other people loved trees less or were indifferent.
It turned out that both councils and members of the community massively underestimated the extent of public support for street trees. This phenomenon is termed ‘Pluralistic Ignorance’ by behavioural scientists — This is where we think we are in the minority when we are not. When we think we are in the minority it is far more tempting to keep our views to ourselves rather than risk standing out for being different, or not wishing to make waves, or thinking that I am wrong.
Both councils and members of the community were suppressing their explicit support for street trees based on an erroneous belief — that the community either did not care or was in opposition.
Loud voices had exerted undue influence.
The strategy to change this state of affairs was anchored in overcoming the Pluralistic Ignorance by stating the true Social Norm. We developed a phrase that could be adapted by all of the councils in the Greater Sydney area — “Sydney loves its Street Trees”- a phrase that is adaptable to each council area — “Parramatta loves its Street Trees”, “Northern Beaches loves its Street Trees” and so on.
This is just one example, but the point I want to make is that sometimes it is easy to be misled by loud voices into believing what they are saying and believing that what they are saying is true for the majority of others.
So my one behavioural tip this month is this: If you’re hearing a loud voice — check how representative it is. Are they speaking for the room or just the only ones shouting?
Further reading:
- Zajonc, Robert B. (1968). “Attitudinal Effects Of Mere Exposure”. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. 9 (2, Pt.2): 1–27.
- https://www.planning.nsw.gov.au/sites/default/files/2026-07/building-advocacy-for-street-trees.pdf This is a playbook for councils development by The Behavioural Architectsz by the NSW Department of Planning, Housing and Infrastructure.
- https://www.planning.nsw.gov.au/the-planning-system/urban-greening/greener-neighbourhoods A training video for how to engender greater community support and engagement with street trees.
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