Changing Our Minds
What I read: “Your Ideas Are Not Your Identity”: Adam Grant on How to Get Better at Changing Your Mind by Evan Nesterak. Published in Behavioral Scientist on February 8, 2021.
We all change our minds. Or at least we should. But can we do better? Can we consciously improve our ability to change our minds when facts or situations clearly call for altering our beliefs?
I’ve certainly had a lot of things I believed in the past that I now do not.
In my early 20s I studied astrology intensely. I even belonged to one of the world’s top professional astrology organizations and briefly served on their board. I did astrological charts professionally. Then I had a crisis of faith and now believe astrology to have no basis in fact.
In my early teens I parroted the views of my family and surroundings and actively leafleted my town for Richard Nixon’s campaign. Over time I exposed myself to facts and views that resulted in me now being an extremely liberal Democrat.
I could list countless things I formerly believed in that I now do not. Those beliefs all served to help form my identity. One need only look to the contrasting political camps today in the United States to see clear examples of what one believes forming the foundation of an individual and collective identity.
I aligned my identity with my beliefs in the past and still do today. But I’m learning to second-guess doing so. Perhaps such rigidity is counterproductive. I now hesitate to label myself, as is culturally popular to do these days, because attaching a label is immediately defining and constrictive. It places you neatly into a certain categorical box constructed with high walls making it difficult to peer over the side at other ideas and ways of thinking.
I’m a white, liberal, gay, polyamorous, ambivert, atheist, older man. But is that all I am? Do those labels keep me from exploring and improving my life through avenues not clearly encompassed by those words, by those belief systems? I think they can and that’s why I’m trying to eschew too much self-labeling. That means I need to change my mind, often. I need to stop viewing life as a series of binary viewpoints. I also need to accept that sometimes I’m simply just plain wrong.
Changing your mind, more often than not, requires you to grapple with your own identity. Admitting that you were wrong feels personal. We have to face the fact that we’ve been walking around the world all this time believing in something that isn’t true. Even worse, we have to admit that we’re the type of person who walks around being wrong. We know what we think of other people who do that—ugh, how embarrassing!
And yet, how freeing it is to admit we were wrong or that we don’t know something. A weight suddenly lifted from our minds, like telling the truth after holding in a lie. But not only freeing, valuable too. No longer burdened by the need to be right, we have the chance to learn something new, and to better understand the world.
For the article, Nesterak interviewed psychologist Adam Grant. Grant wrote the book Think Again: The Power of Knowing What You Don’t Know in which he investigates why changing our minds is so challenging and what we can do to make it easier.
Grant writes that his book “is an invitation to let go of knowledge and opinions that are no longer serving you well, and to anchor your sense of self in flexibility, rather than consistency.”
The concept of thinking more flexibly and less rigidly syncs with how I’ve been trying to view my beliefs as more malleable than I have historically. I can recall digging my heels in about something only to learn a few years later that the underlying assumptions I made were false or different than I had assumed.
Nesterak asked Grant about some past missed opportunities. True to form, Grant acknowledged that he made incorrect assumptions at the time. Grant realized that he needed to become better at “identifying my assumptions as a first step, and then being willing to rethink them.”
For me, this is the main point of the article. We make assumptions, or default to assumptions made for us by external forces, but often do not allow ourselves to entertain the notion that we might need to rethink those assumptions.
What I learned from that is if somebody sees an idea, or an opportunity, or forms an opinion that is different from mine, I shouldn’t default to the assumption that I’m right and they’re wrong. I should say, This is an interesting opportunity to learn something from someone who sees things differently from me, and I wonder if they know something I don’t. I guess it’s been a lesson in intellectual humility, hasn’t it?
My favorite sentence and one I will hold onto as a key message from the article is this.
No one enjoys being wrong, but I do enjoy having been wrong, because it means I am now less wrong than I was before.
Isn’t that a great sentence? How can one learn or improve if one is never wrong, if one does not make mistakes. This reminded me of a quote from Leo Babauta, a blogger at Zen Habits.
Because if you don’t do the things that you’re afraid of, you never learn anything. The best learning comes when you try something you don’t know how to do, and make mistakes, and then learn how to fix those mistakes. And then repeat. If you want safe, you give up on learning.
Changing one’s mind also means allowing yourself to make mistakes. We can’t learn if we’re afraid to be wrong or make mistakes.
Grant mentions his colleague, Danny Kahneman, an esteemed social scientist. Kahneman told Grant “something to the effect of, No one enjoys being wrong, but I do enjoy having been wrong, because it means I am now less wrong than I was before.” I love that! I sure hope I can embody that attitude as I move through life. Humility empowers us to look beyond our certainty to become a little less wrong, a little more right, while acknowledging our ideas and beliefs should change the moment we encounter something that should reasonably sway our opinion.
But what’s different about Danny is he seems to do that even when his core beliefs are attacked or threatened. He seems to take joy in having been wrong, even on things that he believes deeply. And so I asked him about that—why, and how? On the why question, he said, Finding out that I was wrong is the only way I’m sure that I’ve learned anything. Otherwise, I’m just going around and living in a world that’s dominated by confirmation bias, or desirability bias. And I’m just affirming the things I already think I know.
On the how part, he said for him it’s about attachment. He thinks there are good ideas everywhere, and his attachment to his ideas is very provisional. He doesn’t fall in love with them, they don’t become part of his identity.
That ability to detach and say, look, your ideas are not your identity. They’re just hypotheses. Sometimes they’re accurate. More often, they’re wrong or incomplete. And that’s part of what being not only a social scientist, but just a good thinker is all about.
No article about changing our minds would be relevant to the contemporary landscape in the United States if the stark political divide wasn’t mentioned. Grant echoes something I’ve said for a while, that the “both sides” argument to getting people to come to some sort of agreement is folly.
The both sides construct signals two opposing positions. But what if the best position doesn’t reside at the opposite ends of the spectrum and instead somewhere in between? Life is complex. How we form and change opinions is complex. To oversimplify that the correct mindset is but one of two options is to ignore so many other possibilities.
I’ve completely rethought that. I now think that the both-sides perspective is not part of the solution, it actually exacerbates the polarization problem. That’s largely because it’s so easy for us to fall victim to binary bias, where you take a very complex spectrum of opinions and attitudes, you oversimplify it into two categories, and when you do that you know which tribe you belong to; the other side is clearly wrong and maybe bad too. It just locks people into preaching about why they’re right and prosecuting everyone on the other side for being wrong.
Grant uses people’s stance on gun control as an example of how we can nuance, refine, and change our opinions if our minds are open to looking beyond one of two opposing viewpoints.
So the arguments are basically mixed up and you’re told there are a lot of nuances on this topic. Some people who are very pro gun rights are strongly in favor of universal background checks. Some people who are pro gun control, they’re believers in the Second Amendment. Seeing that complexity, seeing the nuance and saying I don’t have to just belong to one camp seemed to make people a little bit more open minded and flexible in thinking for themselves.
That’s something I’ve rethought. I do not want to have both-sides conversations anymore. Whenever somebody says, here’s the other side, my first question is, Can you tell me what the third angle and the fourth look like?
I reflect on how many things I believe in steadfastly. I hope I have the humility to change my mind in the future when presented with new information or perspectives.
I think when we encounter people who disagree with us on charged issues, it is worth thinking about no matter how passionately I feel about a given issue, I could imagine having grown up in a family or in a country, or in an era, where, because of my experiences and the people that I knew, I might believe different things. That allows me to be open to rethinking my animosity toward people who believe those things. It allows me to recognize that their beliefs have the capacity to change, just like mine could have.
I’ll leave you with something Malcolm Gladwell said that wraps up this topic quite nicely.
I feel I change my mind all the time. And I sort of feel that's your responsibility as a person, as a human being – to constantly be updating your positions on as many things as possible. And if you don't contradict yourself on a regular basis, then you're not thinking.
I agree. It’s my responsibility to update my positions, ongoing, forever. Even if I come to the same conclusion after reexamining my position, it’s my responsibility to be my own debate opponent. I hope more people start feeling the same because it’s only with such flexibility in our thinking will we be able to avoid the complete polarization of our society.
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