People could be useful pillars or functionaries in a community, and losing those pillars would come at great cost to the community or group. Isn’t it reasonable for the group to weigh the cost to remove vs the cost to look the other way/ privately censure/ or warn with more leniency than someone less important (Positive and negative costs of looking the other way/ private censure/ lenient warnings all considered)?
My guess is this kind of calculus is happening at a half-conscious level, but it comes with feelings like “we can’t lose <person x>.”
And I think groups really can schism or collapse over stuff like this, either via the argument about what to do, the visibly and costly holding to the same standards (and thus maybe losing a core leader), or the letting them get away with it. There may be no clean heuristic answer here.
As one tangential example, I still like MIT Opencourseware Physics by Dr Lewin, for example, and as of a few years ago still found his classes hard to replace. Yet he was found to have done online sexual harassment. What would we do if say Feynman was found guilty of that or worse? Could we really replace his lectures? Would we be able to recommend them to a niece in good conscience?
As I said, I doubt there are many easy answers down this road.
My understanding of ”Analysis Paralysis” is it originally meant inability to resolve a decision with equifinal outcomes. A manager actually does all the correct multi-factor optimizations, correctly applies values and there’s just no tie breaker.
My guess when this happens is that it sticks out in the brain as “that can’t be right. It just can’t not matter at all if we make play dough or oven mitts.” It’s pretty counterintuitive (at least to many) that such situations could really exist. So the stuckness probably comes from assuming one’s analysis is wrong and looking for the missed decision factor.
An empathetic and hopefully useful set of steps might be try to help the person spot deciding facts they haven’t identified. But if neither you nor they can come up with anything, suggest “Maybe it’s as likely to be a great decision either way. How about a coin flip?”