Admitting You are Wrong

Cognitive dissonance is what we feel when the self-concept — I’m smart, I’m kind, I’m convinced this belief is true — is threatened by evidence that we did something that wasn’t smart, that we did something that hurt another person, that the belief isn’t true. To reduce dissonance, we have to modify the self-concept or accept the evidence. Guess which route people prefer?

We cling to old ways of doing things, even when new ways are better and healthier and smarter. We cling to self-defeating beliefs long past their shelf life. And we make our partners, co-workers, parents and kids really, really mad at us.

 Carol Tavris quotes in the New York Times and co-author of the book Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me)

Avoiding Failure

When avoiding failure is a primary focus, the work isn’t just more stressful; it’s a lot harder to do. And over the long run, that mental strain takes a toll, resulting in less innovation and the experience of burnout. Ironically, allowing for mistakes to happen can elevate the quality of our performance. It’s true even within roles that don’t require creativity.

Ron Friedman, The Best Place to Work

The Beginner's Mind

A child does not know what is not possible and so was open to exploration, discovery, and experimentation. If you approach create tasks with the beginner's mind, you can see things more clearly as they are, unburden by your fixed views, habits, or what conventional wisdom says it is (or should be). 

One who possesses a beginner's mind is not burdened by old habits or obsessed about "the way things are done around here" or with the way things could have or should have been done. 

If you approach a task with a beginner's mind, you’re not afraid of being wrong. The fear of making a mistake, of risking an error, or of being told you’re wrong is constantly with us. And that’s a shame. Making mistakes is not the same thing as being creative, but if you’re not willing to make mistakes then it is impossible to be truly creative.  

Garr Reynolds, Presentation Zen

The side of desire

When there’s a muddled message, you don’t err on the side of safety. You err on the side of desire. -Maria Konnikova, quoted in The Atlantic

The Set Up

We set up harsh and unkind rules against ourselves. No one is born without faults. –Homer

Wrong Turns

With each step along the wrong road it becomes increasingly difficult for (travelers) to admit that they are on the wrong road, often only because they have to admit that they must go back to the first wrong turn, and must accept this fact that they have wasted energy and time.

Erich Fromm, The Heart of Man

The Importance of Dumb Mistakes

For all of the supposed liberating power of digital devices, (users) might as well be wearing ankle monitors. Technological connectedness has made it much harder for (college students) to make mistakes and learn from them.

Today’s students live their lives so publicly — through the technology we provide them without training — that much simpler errors than mine earn them the wrath of the entire internet.

I got driven downtown in handcuffs for spray-painting “Corporate Deathburgers” across a McDonald’s.

If a Williams student spray-painted “Corporate Deathburgers” on a local building today (not that they ever would), it wouldn’t be hard to imagine someone posting the security footage online. Then the outraged calls and emails and tweets would pour in, demanding that the college disavow Deathburger values. I’d be writing news releases explaining that at Williams we take Deathburgers very seriously. There would be op-eds about the Deathburger problem on American campuses today. And the video would live on: another student weighed down by the detritus of his or her online life.

Thirty years ago, college students could have tried out radical ideas (in the student newspaper). But readership would have been largely restricted to campus, and the paper would have been in circulation for only a day or two. In this climate, there is little room for students to experiment and screw up.

My worry is that we’ve become unwilling to tolerate innocent mistakes — either that or we have drastically shrunk our vision of innocence.

In my own life I made bad choices that went far beyond spray paint. I flunked out of college and at various points narrowly dodged jail time. When I think back to those mistakes, I’m horrified and chastened. I feel fortunate to have survived, to have had the privilege to make amends.

Jim Reische writing in the New York Times

Testosterone makes men less likely to realize when they're wrong

Higher levels of testosterone increase the tendency in men to rely on their intuitive judgments and reduce cognitive reflection -- a decision-making process by which a person stops to consider whether their gut reaction to something makes sense. 

Researchers found that men given doses of testosterone performed more poorly on a test designed to measure cognitive reflection than a group given a placebo. The testosterone group also "gave incorrect answers more quickly, and correct answers more slowly than the placebo group," the authors write.

Caltech's Colin Camerer, the Robert Kirby Professor of Behavioral Economics and T&C Chen Center for Social and Decision Neuroscience Leadership Chair (says) "The testosterone is either inhibiting the process of mentally checking your work or increasing the intuitive feeling that 'I'm definitely right.'"

The research will appear in an upcoming issue of the journal Psychological Science.

Read the full story in Science Daily

Going in Circles

Remember the TV show where one of the characters got lost in the woods, only to discover he was going around in circles?! Of course you do, because it’s a storyline that’s been overused on TV. You are sure to have seen it play out (probably more than once). As it turns out, that scenario is not far off the mark. When people get lost, they really do tend to walk in circles.

Here’s what German researchers discovered: Volunteers who could not see the sun or moon, often walked for hours in circles, sometimes circles as small as 20 yards across. Some of the participants were so convinced they were walking in a straight line, they didn’t believe the researchers until they were shown proof.

Errors in our internal radar accumulate until we are literally walking in circles and going no where. What made the difference were external signposts. Landmarks like the sun or moon, completely changed the result.

One of the researchers offers this advice: “Don’t trust your senses. You might think you are walking in a straight line when you’re not.”

Isn’t that how life is? We know people who trust their own senses and have no external guideposts to keep their lives on track. They believe they are marching forward but all the while they are going no where in life. Sadly, they repeat the same mistakes, not realizing they’re reacting in the same way to the same kind of situation. On the other, people who really get somewhere in life, not only carefully chose their landmarks, they are willing to listen to their life-anchors.

Stephen Goforth