Cite as: 522 U. S. 359 (1998)
Opinion of the Court
tion, which is the foundation of all honest and legitimate adjudication.
For the foregoing reasons, we need not determine whether the Board has consistently rejected or discounted probative evidence so as to cause "good-faith reasonable doubt" or "preponderance of the evidence" to mean something more than what the terms connote. The line of precedents relied on by the ALJ and the Court of Appeals could not render irrelevant to the Board's decision, and hence to our review, any evidence that tends to establish the existence of a good-faith reasonable doubt. It was therefore error, for example, for the ALJ to discount Ron Mohr's opinion about lack of union support because of "the Board's historical treatment of unverified assertions by an employee about another employee's sentiments." 316 N. L. R. B., at 1208. And it was error for the Court of Appeals to rely upon the fact that "[t]he Board has consistently questioned the reliability of reports by one employee of the antipathy of other employees toward their union." 83 F. 3d, at 1488, citing Westbrook Bowl, supra, at 1001, n. 11; Sofco, Inc., supra, at 160, n. 10. Assuming that those assessments of the Board's prior behavior are true, they nonetheless provide no justification for the Board's factual inferences here. Of course, the Board is entitled to be skeptical about the employer's claimed reliance on secondhand reports when the reporter has little basis for knowledge, or has some incentive to mislead. But that is a matter of logic and sound inference from all the circumstances, not an arbitrary rule of disregard to be extracted from prior Board decisions.
The same is true of the Board precedents holding that "an employee's statements of dissatisfaction with the quality of union representation may not be treated as opposition to union representation," and that "an employer may not rely on an employee's anti-union sentiments, expressed during a job interview in which the employer has indicated that there will be no union." 83 F. 3d, at 1488, citing Destileria Ser-
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