Think Again

fingers, and decide you don’t care. It doesn’t matter who’s president or what
happens to your country. The world is unjust and the expertise you spent
decades developing is obsolete! It’s a piece of cake, right? About as easy as
willing yourself to fall out of love. Somehow, Jean-Pierre Beugoms
managed to pull it off.
When Donald Trump first declared his candidacy in the spring of 2015,
Jean-Pierre gave him only a 2 percent chance of becoming the nominee. As
Trump began rising in the August polls, Jean-Pierre was motivated to
question himself. He detached his present from his past, acknowledging that
his original prediction was understandable, given the information he had at
the time.

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Detaching his opinions from his identity was harder. Jean-Pierre didn’t
want Trump to win, so it would’ve been easy to fall into the trap of
desirability bias. He overcame it by focusing on a different goal. “I wasn’t
so attached to my original forecast,” he explained, because of “the desire to
win, the desire to be the best forecaster.” He still had a stake in the outcome
he actually preferred, but he had an even bigger stake in not making a
mistake. His values put truth above tribe: “If the evidence strongly suggests
that my tribe is wrong on a particular issue, then so be it. I consider all of
my opinions tentative. When the facts change, I change my opinions.”
Research suggests that identifying even a single reason why we might
be wrong can be enough to curb overconfidence. Jean-Pierre went further;
he made a list of all the arguments that pundits were making about why
Trump couldn’t win and went looking for evidence that they (and he) were
wrong. He found that evidence within the polls: in contrast with widespread
claims that Trump was a factional candidate with narrow appeal, Jean-
Pierre saw that Trump was popular across key Republican demographic
groups. By mid-September, Jean-Pierre was an outlier, putting Trump’s
odds of becoming the nominee over 50 percent. “Accept the fact that you’re
going to be wrong,” Jean-Pierre advises. “Try to disprove yourself. When
you’re wrong, it’s not something to be depressed about. Say, ‘Hey, I
discovered something!’”

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