delight.
This realization didn’t come naturally to me. Growing up, I was
determined to be right. In second grade I corrected my teacher for
misspelling the word
lightning as
lightening. When trading baseball cards I
would rattle off statistics from recent games as proof that the price guide
was valuing players inaccurately. My friends found this annoying and
started calling me Mr. Facts. It got so bad that one day my best friend
announced that he wouldn’t talk to me until I admitted I was wrong. It was
the beginning of my journey to become
more accepting of my own
fallibility.
In a classic paper, sociologist Murray Davis argued that when ideas
survive, it’s not because they’re true—it’s because they’re interesting. What
makes an idea interesting is that it challenges our weakly held opinions. Did
you know that the moon might originally have formed inside a vaporous
Earth out of magma rain? That a narwhal’s tusk is actually a tooth? When
an idea or assumption doesn’t matter deeply to us, we’re often excited to
question it. The natural sequence of emotions is surprise (“Really?”)
followed by curiosity (“Tell me more!”) and thrill (“Whoa!”). To
paraphrase a line attributed to Isaac Asimov, great discoveries often begin
not with “Eureka!” but with “That’s funny . . .”
When a core belief is questioned, though,
we tend to shut down rather
than open up. It’s as if there’s a miniature dictator living inside our heads,
controlling the flow of facts to
our minds, much like Kim Jong-un controls
the press in North Korea. The technical term for this in psychology is the
totalitarian ego, and its job is to keep out threatening information.
It’s easy to see how an inner dictator comes in handy when someone
attacks our character or intelligence. Those kinds of personal affronts
threaten to shatter aspects of our identities that are important to us and
might be difficult to change. The totalitarian ego steps in like a bodyguard
for our minds, protecting our self-image by feeding us comforting lies.
They’re all just jealous. You’re really, really, ridiculously good-looking.
You’re on the verge of inventing the next Pet Rock. As physicist Richard
Feynman quipped, “You must not fool yourself—and you are the easiest
person to fool.”
Our inner dictator also likes to take charge when our deeply held
opinions are threatened. In the Harvard study of attacking students’
worldviews, the participant who had the strongest negative reaction was
code-named Lawful. He came from a blue-collar background and was
unusually precocious, having started college at sixteen and joined the study
at seventeen. One of his beliefs was that technology was harming
civilization, and he became hostile when his views were questioned.
Lawful
went on to become an academic, and when he penned his magnum opus, it
was clear that he hadn’t changed his mind. His concerns about technology
had only intensified:
The Industrial Revolution and its consequences have been a
disaster for the human race. They have greatly increased the life-
expectancy of those of us who live in “advanced” countries, but
they have destabilized society, have made life unfulfilling, have
subjected human beings to indignities . . .
to physical suffering as
well . . . and have inflicted severe damage on the natural world.
That kind of conviction is a common response to threats.
Neuroscientists find that when our core beliefs are challenged, it can trigger
the amygdala, the primitive “lizard brain” that breezes right past cool
rationality and activates a hot fight-or-flight response. The anger and fear
are visceral: it feels as if we’ve been punched in the mind. The totalitarian
ego comes to the rescue with mental armor. We become preachers or
prosecutors striving to convert or condemn the unenlightened. “Presented
with someone else’s argument, we’re
quite adept at spotting the
weaknesses,” journalist Elizabeth Kolbert writes, but “the positions we’re
blind about are our own.”
I find this odd, because we weren’t born with our opinions. Unlike our
height or raw intelligence, we have full control over what we believe is true.
We choose our views, and we can choose to rethink them any time we want.
This should be a familiar task, because we have a lifetime of evidence that
we’re wrong on a regular basis.
I was sure I’d finish a draft of this chapter
by Friday. I was certain the cereal with the toucan on the box was Fruit
Loops, but I just noticed the box says Froot Loops. I was sure I put the milk
back in the fridge last night, but strangely it’s sitting on the counter this
morning.
The inner dictator manages to prevail by activating an overconfidence
cycle. First, our wrong opinions are shielded in filter bubbles, where we feel
pride when we see only information that supports our convictions. Then our
beliefs are sealed in echo chambers, where
we hear only from people who
intensify and validate them. Although the resulting fortress can appear
impenetrable, there’s a growing community of experts who are determined
to break through.
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