Think Again

ENTERING A PARALLEL UNIVERSE
Outside the lab, dismantling stereotypes and decreasing prejudice rarely
happen overnight. Even if people aren’t on guard from the start, they’re

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quick to put their defenses up when their attitudes are challenged. Getting
through to them requires more than just telling them that their views are
arbitrary. A key step is getting them to do some counterfactual thinking:
helping them consider what they’d believe if they were living in an
alternative reality.
In psychology, counterfactual thinking involves imagining how the
circumstances of our lives could have unfolded differently. When we realize
how easily we could have held different stereotypes, we might be more
willing to update our views.
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 To activate counterfactual thinking, you might
ask people questions like: How would your stereotypes be different if you’d
been born Black, Hispanic, Asian, or Native American? What opinions
would you hold if you’d been raised on a farm versus in a city, or in a
culture on the other side of the world? What beliefs would you cling to if
you lived in the 1700s?
You’ve already learned from debate champions and expert negotiators
that asking people questions can motivate them to rethink their conclusions.
What’s different about these kinds of counterfactual questions is that they
invite people to explore the origins of their own beliefs—and reconsider
their stances toward other groups.
People gain humility when they reflect on how different circumstances
could have led them to different beliefs. They might conclude that some of
their past convictions had been too simplistic and begin to question some of
their negative views. That doubt could leave them more curious about
groups they’ve stereotyped, and they might end up discovering some
unexpected commonalities.
Recently, I stumbled onto an opportunity to encourage some
counterfactual thinking. A startup founder asked me to join an all-hands
meeting to share insights on how to better understand other people’s
personalities and our own. During our virtual fireside chat, she mentioned
that she was an astrology fan and the company was full of them. I wondered
if I could get some of them to see that they held inaccurate stereotypes
about people based on the month in which they happened to be born. Here’s
an excerpt of what happened:
Me: You know we have no evidence whatsoever that horoscopes
influence personality, right?

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