We picture a change in beliefs in other people as a switch. Someone was fine, and then one day they were not, and somewhere in between there was a video with some misinformation. It is a comforting picture, because it implies a fix. Find the bad video, replace it with a better one and all is well.
The problem is that this view is wrong.
Nobody falls into misbelief. People slide, slowly, pulled by four psychological forces. Every one of those forces is part of the standard human equipment. You are running all four right now. So am I.
Why do I use the term funnel
A funnel is wide at the top and narrow at the bottom. Many people enter it, fewer continue down, and the further down you go the harder it becomes to climb back out. Not because the arguments get better. Because near the bottom, the walls are no longer made of arguments at all. They are made of relationships, identity, and the price of admitting that the last two years were a mistake.
The four forces
Emotional. This is the force at the top, and it starts with stress, particularly the unpredictable kind you cannot plan around. Stress makes us want a villain. Run that backwards and the appeal of a conspiracy becomes obvious. A story with a villain in it is a story where somebody is at the wheel. That is easier to live with than random harm that can attack again at any point.
Cognitive. This is what happens to the search once you are motivated to find something specific. You do not weigh evidence, you go looking for it, and the internet always has the answers you were looking for. And the cognitive elements do not end there. They include a few other components, including our tendency for little knowledge but overconfidence.
Personality. This is about who slides faster, and it is the uncomfortable section. Higher patternicity, which means seeing signal in noise, the sense of control, intellectual humility and narcissism, are all elements that fit the personality part of the funnel.
Social. This is what makes the whole thing permanent, and it is the force almost everyone underestimates. It is the main event. Once you are inside, leaving costs you every relationship you have left. Extremity stops being about the belief and starts being a way of belonging.
So I built a set of questions that walks you through it
You can use it to diagnose someone else, or yourself.
Each answer visibly moves one of four thermometers, with a short explanation of why it moved
https://decisionaids.danariely.com/funnel/
One more, for the force you most likely think does not apply to you
The cognitive force is the one nearly everybody exempts themselves from. Rather than argue with you about that, here is something additional that you can do to yourself in five minutes.
Rate how well you understand something you deeply believe in. Then explain how it actually works, step by step. Then rate yourself again. One belief, no score at the end. It asks what you can explain, not what you can defend, and the gap between the first rating and the second one is the entire point.
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Like Four conditions that make me more comfortable with paternalism
Let’s talk about paternalism. Paternalism and behavioral economics are deeply intertwined, and here is why. If you believe that people are perfectly rational, the conclusion is simple: let them make whatever decisions they want. After all, every one of their decisions is rational, so who are we to interfere? But the moment you start saying that we are irrational — that we are not designed to think long-term, that we are easily tempted, that computing compound interest is not something our brains do well — you have opened a different door. If people are predictably irrational, then maybe we also need to help improve their decisions. Maybe, sometimes, we need to limit their options.
And of course, in many areas of life we already accept paternalism without blinking. We accept traffic laws; you can’t just drive wherever you want, at whatever speed you want. You want to use heroin? No, you can’t do that either. And yet you can invest your money almost anywhere you want, in almost anything, with almost no one standing in your way. So the interesting question is not whether paternalism is good or bad in general. The interesting question is: when do we feel more comfortable being paternalistic, and when should we insist on leaving people alone?
After thinking about this question for a while, here are the conditions that, for me, make paternalism more acceptable.
Condition one: the decision is big and consequential. Think about retirement savings. A mistake there is not a bad lunch; it’s a mistake that shapes decades of your life.
Condition two: the decision is hard to reverse. This is connected to size, but it’s not the same thing. If you get your retirement wrong, you discover it at age 65, and there is no version of “oops, let’s start over.” Some mistakes come with an undo button, and some don’t. The ones that don’t deserve more protection.
Condition three: it is hard to learn from experience. If you ask me whether I prefer broccoli to cabbage, I don’t need anyone’s help — I can try both, and over time I’ll figure it out. Trial and error works beautifully for vegetables. But there are domains where we simply don’t get a good learning process. Much of medicine is like this: as individuals, we don’t get enough tries, the feedback is slow and noisy, and by the time we’ve “learned,” the lesson may have cost us dearly. Where learning is impossible, the case for letting everyone learn on their own collapses.
Condition four: there is a large information gap. I’m buying a house; the person selling it knows a great deal about it, and I know very little. I walk into a doctor’s office; my doctor knows a lot, and I know almost nothing. When one side of a decision holds most of the cards, “let the individual decide freely” is a nicer-sounding arrangement than it is a fair one.
Put these four together — a big decision, hard to reverse, resistant to learning, with deep information asymmetry — and under those conditions I feel much more comfortable saying: let’s not make everyone figure this out alone. Let’s do the work collectively, figure out what is good for most people, and make that the standard. Not a prison, a standard.
What is the right path for retirement savings? Should every person work it out for themselves, or should we say: big decision, impossible to learn from experience — let’s set sensible defaults? What should we do with people who got injured and are trying to make their way back to work? Should each of them navigate that maze alone, or are there some things we should do together?
Notice that the same four conditions also tell us when to keep our hands off. Small decision? Reversible? Easy to learn from? Both sides equally informed? Then leave people alone — that is exactly the territory where freedom to make our own mistakes is how we learn, and where paternalism has no business.
Now it’s your turn. If you have other conditions that you think should be on this list, I want to hear them. And if you think there are behaviors where I’m wrong — where we should be less paternalistic even though they rank high on all four conditions — let me know.
After I finish a lecture there is usually a line, and most of the people standing in it want a book signed. But someone always waits until the line is gone. They stand off to the side while the room empties out, and then they ask me the question I have now been asked in something like a dozen countries.
It is never “why do people believe this stuff.”
It is almost always “my brother.” Or “my mother.” Or “my closest friend since we were nine.” And then, more quietly: what do I do.
They are not asking for an explanation. They want instructions for what they could do next with people that they love.
What I say about this in Misbelief?
Misbelief is not stupidity. That is the first thing to say and the hardest thing for people to accept. Stupidity is a very comfortable explanation that allows us to ignore the person and the problem. It is also very incorrect. What I found instead was a funnel that takes people and changes them over time. It starts with stress that pushes people to look for anything that would explain to them what is going on. It is not any kind of stress that pushes us to find an answer, it is, especially the unpredictable kind of stress. The kind of stress that makes us wonder about what is really going on. After stress, our cognitive gets to work and after that personality joins in. Finally, the social forces of acceptance and belonging, echoing beliefs and becoming more extreme, cement the misbelief, and it makes leaving the group of misbelievers very expensive
I did not choose this subject. It chose me in 2020, when I started appearing in other people’s videos as an Illuminati henchman, complete with a speech I never gave.
The chapter I could not write
When I started working on Misbelief, I assumed I knew how the book would end. There would be a final chapter, and that chapter would tell you how to get your brother back.
I planned for it. I read for it. I spent two years interviewing for it.
I did not find it.
The trouble is that once people enter the funnel the forces to maintain them there are just too powerful. It also became clear that the standard responses of simply giving people more information or giving them some facts is not going to do much to change anyone’s opinion.
So, instead of one solutions chapter, the book grew small boxes scattered through it,wherever the research actually supported doing something. I called them “Hopefully Helpful.”
That name is not modesty. It is an accurate description of my confidence. Some of them will help some people some of the time, and I cannot tell you in advance which ones. There are 25, spread across chapters 3 through 11.
One is called “How to Have a Nondebate,” which is about removing the scoreboard from a conversation so that neither of you is playing to win. Another is “The Three Razors,” which hands you Occam’s razor, Hitchens’ razor, and a gentler version of Hanlon’s, offered as hygiene for your own thinking rather than as weapons for somebody else’s.
All 25, in one place
Enough people wrote asking me for specific pieces of advice that I finally pulled all 25 out of the book and put them into a single document. It is here for you to read.
https://misbeliefbook.com/pdfs/Hopefully-Helpful-Boxes.pdf
I also realized that 25 pieces of advice might be too much to go through. Maybe it is Thursday. You are about to have a conversation on Sunday. You are already upset, and you are not going to read a booklet and work out which four paragraphs apply to you.
So the boxes became a tool. It asks up to three questions about the conversation you are actually about to have, and then hands you three of the 25. Not all of them. Three.
https://decisionaids.danariely.com/conversations/
I did not stop there and I created a second tool. This is not a tool to plan a conversation, it is a tool that was created to try and fix something about a conversation that maybe did not go the way you planned for it to go. It is a post-mortem you run the same evening, while it is still fresh. Thirteen questions, about three minutes.
The design of this tool, and what I think makes it worth while is that it asks what you did, not what you meant. From the inside, those two feel like the same thing. They are not, and the distance between them is where most of these conversations quietly go wrong.
https://decisionaids.danariely.com/went-badly/
What I had to give up
Writing this book cost me a belief of my own. It was the belief that there is an answer that could make a person take a U-turn and come back. There isn’t such simple answer. What is left is smaller, and it is about aiming for small steps over time.
And here again are all the links. Hopefully, you will make good use of them.
The 25 boxes, free: https://misbeliefbook.com/pdfs/Hopefully-Helpful-Boxes.pdf
Before the conversation: https://decisionaids.danariely.com/conversations/
After the conversation: https://decisionaids.danariely.com/went-badly/
Before we argue for the perspective of a particular political party, it’s worth pausing for a question an American philosopher posed more than fifty years ago. When I asked thousands of people to answer it honestly, I discovered something surprising: our disagreements are far smaller than we think.
Imagine the following exercise: tomorrow morning, you are born again. You don’t know which family you’ll arrive into. Maybe a wealthy home, maybe a poor one. Maybe a big city in the center of the country, maybe a remote town. Maybe you’ll be born healthy, maybe with a serious illness. You know nothing about the particular situation you’ll be born into. Now ask yourself: what would you want that country to look like? How would you want it to treat its citizens?
This exercise was proposed in 1971 by the American philosopher John Rawls, in a book — “A Theory of Justice” — that is considered to this day one of the cornerstones of thinking about justice. Rawls called the idea “the veil of ignorance,” and his claim was simple and profound: a just society is one you would be willing to enter it in a random position.
A just society is a society we would be willing to enter first and only then learn that we have been born into a particular economic setting, a medical condition, a gender, and ethnicity.
Under normal circumstances, when we are asked whether our country is a just one, we answer partly from the perspective of justice — but we can’t help but to also answer from the perspective of our own narrow, particular interests. The rich tend to think high taxes are a bad idea; the poor tend to think the opposite. And these narrow interests shape our sense of justice in every domain of life.
But behind the veil of ignorance, when we don’t know whether we will end up at the top or at the bottom, only the question of justice itself remains. What, really, is a just country?
For years, the veil of ignorance served as an important exercise in philosophy seminars. Then my colleagues and I decided to see what happens when you hand it to real people. We asked them to design a country that would be, in their eyes, just — from behind the veil of ignorance. We surveyed a representative sample of more than five thousand Americans: rich and poor, Republicans and Democrats.
What we learned from the results was that Americans thought a just country would be even more equal than Sweden. And, of course, they thought that the actual distribution of wealth in the United States is very far from just.
What was even more interesting: the agreement. Rich and poor, Republicans and Democrat voters (in the 2004 election), men and women — all of them drew remarkably similar ideal distributions. In the noisy political debate, they seem like they are serious enemies. Behind the veil of ignorance, the distance between them nearly disappears.
As our own elections approach, it’s worth running this exercise on our own political beliefs. Ask yourself honestly: would you be willing to enter today’s United States of America in a random position? And if the answer is no — what USA would you design from behind the veil of ignorance?
My guess, based on what we saw in the study, is that if we think in veil-of-ignorance terms, we will discover that we want a very different country from the one we have — and also, mainly, that we agree on much more than we think.
If you find this topic interesting, I’m attaching below two links, one for a very wonderful YouTube video that somebody did about our research, and another one for a short TED lecture I gave on the same topic.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QPKKQnijnsM
https://www.ted.com/talks/dan_ariely_how_equal_do_we_want_the_world_to_be_you_d_be_surprised
Before we argue for the perspective of a particular political party, it’s worth pausing for a question an American philosopher posed more than fifty years ago. When I asked thousands of people to answer it honestly, I discovered something surprising: our disagreements are far smaller than we think.
Imagine the following exercise: tomorrow morning, you are born again. You don’t know which family you’ll arrive into. Maybe a wealthy home, maybe a poor one. Maybe a big city in the center of the country, maybe a remote town. Maybe you’ll be born healthy, maybe with a serious illness. You know nothing about the particular situation you’ll be born into. Now ask yourself: what would you want that country to look like? How would you want it to treat its citizens?
This exercise was proposed in 1971 by the American philosopher John Rawls, in a book — “A Theory of Justice” — that is considered to this day one of the cornerstones of thinking about justice. Rawls called the idea “the veil of ignorance,” and his claim was simple and profound: a just society is one you would be willing to enter it in a random position.
A just society is a society we would be willing to enter first and only then learn that we have been born into a particular economic setting, a medical condition, a gender, and ethnicity.
Under normal circumstances, when we are asked whether our country is a just one, we answer partly from the perspective of justice — but we can’t help but to also answer from the perspective of our own narrow, particular interests. The rich tend to think high taxes are a bad idea; the poor tend to think the opposite. And these narrow interests shape our sense of justice in every domain of life.
But behind the veil of ignorance, when we don’t know whether we will end up at the top or at the bottom, only the question of justice itself remains. What, really, is a just country?
For years, the veil of ignorance served as an important exercise in philosophy seminars. Then my colleagues and I decided to see what happens when you hand it to real people. We asked them to design a country that would be, in their eyes, just — from behind the veil of ignorance. We surveyed a representative sample of more than five thousand Americans: rich and poor, Republicans and Democrats.
What we learned from the results was that Americans thought a just country would be even more equal than Sweden. And, of course, they thought that the actual distribution of wealth in the United States is very far from just.
What was even more interesting: the agreement. Rich and poor, Republicans and Democrat voters (in the 2004 election), men and women — all of them drew remarkably similar ideal distributions. In the noisy political debate, they seem like they are serious enemies. Behind the veil of ignorance, the distance between them nearly disappears.
As our own elections approach, it’s worth running this exercise on our own political beliefs. Ask yourself honestly: would you be willing to enter today’s United States of America in a random position? And if the answer is no — what USA would you design from behind the veil of ignorance?
My guess, based on what we saw in the study, is that if we think in veil-of-ignorance terms, we will discover that we want a very different country from the one we have — and also, mainly, that we agree on much more than we think.
If you find this topic interesting, I’m attaching below two links, one for a very wonderful YouTube video that somebody did about our research, and another one for a short TED lecture I gave on the same topic.
The good life is behind the more difficult door.
Imagine that you have two apartments in the same building, on the same floor, two doors right next to each other. In one apartment lives your human spouse. In the other apartment lives a robotic version of that spouse. And imagine that we are a few years into the future, so the technology is not today’s clumsy technology. The AI is better, the robotics are better, the whole thing is convincing.
Now, imagine that you come home at night from a difficult day at work. You are stressed, you are worried, you are depleted. And as you walk down the hallway toward the two doors, you start thinking: which door am I going to open tonight?
Behind one door, the robotic spouse is waiting. The robotic spouse always compliments you. Always supports you. It knows your needs, it anticipates them before you say a word, and it makes you feel good right now, at this moment. Behind the other door is your human spouse, who is basically the same as your human spouse right now. Maybe they also had a difficult day. Maybe they want to talk about the thing you forgot to do.
So which door do you pick to open?
Now imagine that it is a year later. Over the past year, some nights you opened the door to your human spouse, and some nights you opened the door to your robotic spouse. A year into this arrangement, how is your relationship with your human spouse? Most likely, it is worse than when you started. Relationships are not frozen in place. They grow when we invest in them and they shrink when we don’t, and every night behind the robotic door was a night of not investing. Or more correctly, it was a night with the opposite of investing.
And here is the important part: the decline does not stop, and it does not even stay at the same speed. In year two, your human spouse is not hurt the way they were in year one. They are more hurt. They have had another year of watching you choose the other door, another year of feeling compared to a machine that never has a bad day. So they become a little angrier, a little more distant, a little less pleasant to come home to. Which means that in year three the human door is even less inviting than it was in year two, so you open it even less often, so they become even more hurt, and even more hurtful. The relationship is not just worse. It is getting worse faster.
What about five years later? I am willing to guess that five years in, your relationship with your human spouse would be so much worse that on most nights you would not want to see them, and they would not want to see you. And so, one comfortable evening at a time, you would end up with the robotic spouse almost every night. Not because the robot won. Because the human relationship, starved night after night, slowly lost.
Here is the part that worries me. Nobody would ever sit down, look at their life as a whole, and choose a robotic spouse as their picture of a good life. If we made the choice once, seeing the whole road ahead, almost all of us would choose the human. But that is not how we will face the choice. We will face it one night at a time, tired and stressed, standing in front of two doors, and on each individual night the easy door will win. The choices will be small and local, and the outcome will be large and permanent.
Of course, I am not really talking about robotic spouses. I am talking about how we use AI in general.
Every day, many times a day, we stand in front of our own version of the two doors. We can struggle with writing something, get stuck, fight with the words, and eventually produce something we are proud of. Or we can hand it off to an AI model and produce it with much more efficiency and none of the struggle. We can think through a hard decision ourselves or ask for the answer. We can practice a skill, or delegate it. Each easy choice makes perfect sense on its own. And each easy choice also takes a small bite out of the person we were hoping to become.
Why is this so worrisome? Because we are not static either. The same decay that happens to the neglected relationship happens to the neglected skill. Take my own case, writing. If I hand my writing to AI today, tomorrow I will be a slightly worse writer. Not dramatically worse, just a little. But if I handed writing fully to AI every day for a year, my ability to write to reason through an argument, to come up with something genuinely creative, will have undoubtedly go down. Exactly the way the relationship behind the human door went down. And the spiral has the same cruel shape. The spouse who is chosen less becomes angrier and harder to choose; the skill that is used less becomes weaker and harder to use. In year two I am a worse writer than in year one, so the gap between what I can produce and what the AI can produce is bigger, so the easy door is even more tempting, so in year three the gap is bigger still. The person behind the human door became more hurtful every year. The writer behind my own door became weaker every year.
So what do we do? I would like to propose a simple principle: a good life is a life where we take the core things we care most about and keep them for ourselves. Not everything. There is plenty that AI should do for us, and I am happy to hand over the scheduling, the paperwork, the tasks that were never going to make us grow. But the core things, the relationships we want to be in and the skills that define us, those we protect. A good life is a life where we keep developing. Where we invest in our relationships and don’t run from them and we choose deliberately to invest in our most important skills and don’t hand them off.
The technology will keep getting better. The robotic door will keep getting more attractive. The big question, and I mean this as a real question and not a rhetorical one, is whether we will have the wisdom to make the right choices when we face our two doors.
Originally published at THE HILL.COM on 07/13/2024
When Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry (R) signed a law in June requiring the display of the Ten Commandments in every public school classroom in the state, it reignited the longstanding debate over the separation of church and state.
Opponents are pleading with federal judges to block the mandate before the school year begins in August. The American Civil Liberties Union and the Freedom From Religion Foundation are actively seeking to challenge the law in court, arguing it is “blatantly unconstitutional.”
From my perspective as a social scientist, a law requiring the Ten Commandments to be hung over every classroom across the state is flawed for reasons that go beyond its constitutionality. I see it as a fundamentally ineffective mandate, because heaps of research say so. And did I mention it would be a waste of tax dollars?
In the extensive research on human dishonesty, one clear finding emerges: Passive reminders of ethical conduct, like displaying the Ten Commandments, do not significantly influence behavior. To instill moral values and ethical behavior, active engagement and a sense of relevance are crucial. Simply hanging up a poster of the Ten Commandments on a classroom wall would not foster the active, lived experience of ethical principles.
Consider the Hippocratic Oath taken by physicians. Properly invoked, the Hippocratic Oath inspires students of medicine and practitioners alike to actively engage with its ethical calling and think about its principles at important moments, not just because it has been deeply ingrained in the fabric of the medical community. Unlike passive displays, active engagement creates a sense of commitment to ethical principles, which opens the door to more ethical behavior.
Louisiana’s new law exemplifies bureaucracy at its worst — it imposes a mandate based on a principle that extensive research has shown to be ineffective. It’s not just controversial; it will make schools feel as if they have dealt with the problem of ethics, when in fact they will not have.
Moreover, the assumption that the Ten Commandments can serve as a universal moral code is increasingly out of touch with contemporary American society. Over the past few decades, the relationship of the average American with religion has become more diffuse, and the influence of traditional religious codes has decreased.
Research conducted over the past decades on moral reminders concludes that active engagement with the moral reminder — such as the Ten Commandments — can decrease dishonesty. But, given Americans’ waning religiosity, that effect is diminished.
For the Ten Commandments to have an impact on thought or behavior, people have to first buy into the idea that the Ten Commandments are a meaningful set of moral rules. Displaying a moral code that doesn’t carry meaning is the equivalent of hanging a poster written in a foreign language.
Together, these two points mean that if someone wants to increase the ethics of our schools and the ethical behavior of our students, the first thing they need to ensure is that the set of moral principles has very deep and broad buy-in.
Next, the engagement with this set of ethical reminders has to be active and intentional. Of course, such programs are much more complex to carry out than simply hanging the Ten Commandments in different corners of schools — but they have the advantage that they might also work to have an impact.
Finally, the trend of setting up rules that are designed to make a political splash and maybe get some headlines but are not thoughtfully designed for efficacy further erodes our trust in politicians and institutions at large — government, corporations and even academia.
As these institutions lose their authority, there is a collective rejection of standard norms of behavior, which I believe are at play in our so-called “culture wars” and other societal trends that have upended American society in recent years.
The breakdown of trust in government and moral codes that historically guided Americans poses a critical question for our democracy: Can we still function effectively without a shared belief system? As we head into another election year, this question becomes even more pressing. Yet its implications extend far beyond politics.
Without a sense of mutual agreement on our ethical principles and without trust that the people leading us are truly interested in our long-term well-being, any efforts to improve behavior — whether through passive or active means — are doomed to fail.
Link to original publication: https://thehill.com/opinion/education/4768231-louisiana-ten-commandments-law/
I’m not sure about you, but in the last few years, I have felt the creep of increased bureaucracy. In general, I think about bureaucracy as having two components. The first is positive, where we’re trying to make things structured, procedural, easier, and less time-consuming. The second is the negative one. This part is about the development of a bureaucratic sub-organization that often has different goals than the overall organization. This bureaucratic sub-organization often ends up serving itself rather than the organization as a whole. This is the kind of bureaucracy that I’m noticing more and more of, and it is deeply troubling me.
One of the challenges is that it is natural for the bureaucratic sub-organization to try and influence the organization as a whole to do less, take less risks, innovate less, and in doing so make the life of the people at the bureaucratic sub-organization easier. It is also tempting for the bureaucratic sub-organization to try and grow by making up new functions, new jobs, and hire more and more people that are part of the bureaucratic sub-organization. And finally, there are the impacts of bureaucracy on the way employees are being treated.
To examine this more carefully, I recently opened a website called the Center for Advanced Bureaucracy (https://centerforbureaucracy.com). Here, I detailed my reflections this way of thinking and share some warning. Check my video on “The Bureaucracy of a Red Sofa.”
Please follow the link (https://centerforbureaucracy.com), have a look, and let me know what you think.
In a world that is hyper-brutal and punishing of mistakes, offenses, and missteps – small or large – on both social media and in real life, it might seem odd for me to promote making more mistakes. Yet, I want to make the case for making more and better mistakes.
I am an expert on mistakes. Not just in the purely theoretical or academic sense, but in the real-life sense. When I was nearly 18, an accident disfigured over 70% of my body with burns, removing nearly all functionality from my hands. I spent the next three years in a hospital missing out on many of the normal experiences of young adulthood. It could have filled me with rage, depression, or regret. Instead, it inspired my life’s work studying human behavior and trying to figure out what we can do to make our lives better. (It also inspired my signature half-beard.)
In my professional life, I have conducted countless studies that just didn’t work out the way I assumed they would. I have left positions under complicated circumstances. I had startups that failed. I’ve had interactions with colleagues that I wish had gone differently. Each of these experiences, while very painful at the time, were opportunities for observing myself and human nature. They became experiences of personal and professional growth.
I have also spent the better part of the past three years reliving a set of decisions I made and actions I took over a decade ago, around a now-infamous study of human behavior using car insurance data. Working in partnership with trusted colleagues, I did what was expected and right at the time. When the findings of the original study were called into question years later, we re-tested our assumptions, publishing results that put doubt on the original findings. When issues with the original data set were uncovered, we retracted the paper. Later we re-examined and replicated the findings, and in early 2024 published two papers that show that the effects of signing first matter (links to the papers are at the bottom of this post), but also that they matter in a more nuanced and complex way. Such is the scientific process. (See link to my official statement about this event).
As I was trying to understand what went wrong with the 2012 paper, people were very quick to criticize and question my professional judgment, casting a shadow over my life’s work. “Where did it all go wrong?” I have asked myself many times a day for the last few years. I have looked long and hard, but given that so much time has passed, I have come up empty-handed, and I simply don’t know for sure what went wrong. “Should I have done things differently?” Evidently. But as I examine all my decisions, I feel that I did the best I could at the time. And I’m okay with that.
Do I wish I did not make these mistakes? Of course. And, not at all. I obviously wish I did not make these specific mistakes, but in general, I accept these circumstances and continue to believe wholeheartedly that mistakes are essential to growth and evolution. Which brings me to my argument: We should all be making more and better mistakes.
What do I mean by that? To start, there is no reward without risk. Think about venture capitalists or investors in the stock market. As they approach their portfolios, they know that getting higher returns necessarily means taking greater risk. Risk, in the context of investing, is about investing in both sure things and in long shots.
Sometimes we also take risks to invest in ourselves or try something new – moments in our lives where we take a leap of faith and hope that things will work out. There is an expectation and understanding that some things will work out and some won’t, but overall, we know that we will be better off for having tried. Succeed or fail, the secret to success is charging forward boldly in new directions.
As a professor, I teach students about the logic, or lack thereof, in taking risks. We do case studies on Amazon’s fail-fast approach. We openly analyze past mistakes to learn from them. We talk about fostering cultures that will help us avoid another O-ring disaster.
There are mountains of self-help books and countless life coaches in the world, each telling us in their own ways that it is imperative to live in service of our desires, free of judgments of others and with more forgiveness for our shortcomings. “It’s okay to fall down. You just have to get back up.”
But the case for mistakes does not end here. It is not just about trying more and accepting more mistakes as the price of learning and success.
I am also advocating for better mistakes. What do I mean by better mistakes? We need to do the wrong thing the right way in order to maximize our learning. Specifically, we should aim to make more mistakes from bold action and fewer mistakes from inaction.
Popular wisdom says that when we look at our life in general, we will feel the most regret over the things we didn’t do. And yet, asymmetrical fear of regret leads us to fear mistakes from bold action more than mistakes from inaction, making us less likely to try new things – and more likely to do nothing.
When it comes to making the case for better mistakes, it means that we should be bolder and a little more fearless, by making a particular effort to make more mistakes from action. Taking calculated risks with a clear objective and having the courage to dust ourselves off if these risks don’t pan out. And try again.
Take, for example, the recent testimony of the three university presidents in front of Congress and the rest of the world. There is no question that this was a tragic performance that set academia back years, at a cost of public opinion that will take decades to rebuild. My sense is that these three university presidents should have dusted themselves off and worked even harder to tackle head-on the violence and hatred on their campus. This of course is a tall ask, and some of their efforts, particularly the more novel and creative ones, might have backfired. Yet, they should have taken more risks and tried different and novel approaches that might have contributed to their universities and to our understanding of how to help people to live in peace and civility with each other.
Sadly, the reactions to their testimonies prompted universities to do the exact opposite. Instead, universities now seem to be working hard to do as little as possible in order to fly under the radar. They seem to be largely motivated by a hope that students, faculty, trustees, and donors will soon forget about this particular war, and maybe even stop paying attention to anything that happens in the world altogether.
If we did more of the opposite of doing nothing and instead took bolder risks, would we more frequently experience the pain of erring, hit ourselves over the head, and say, “Why did I do this?” Sure, we would. But by accepting the downsides of bold action, we also increase the chance that we will learn something useful about how to move forward. If universities took bolder risks, maybe they would have lived up to their social mission and helped all of us better understand how to reduce hate, improve dialogue, and more.
At the end of the day, the progress of society and the success of any individual is made based on the totality of actions. And the biggest enemy of progress is fearing mistakes so much that we end up doing nothing.
To be sure, society can’t function without rules, boundaries, and consequences, but they should be proportionate. We must change the way we judge one another, to allow room for rehabilitation, reconciliation, or recompense. We must promote safer environments for failure, growth, and learning. Otherwise, we will motivate subterfuge among those who try and fail, and instill fear among those who might’ve tried but couldn’t stomach the potential aftermath.
For my part, I am planning on many more years of mistakes. I don’t intend to let fear and regret drive my decisions. I want to keep learning and growing. I intend to continue to make my own mistakes, and I even hope to normalize making more of them. I am optimistic enough to believe that as a culture, we can find a way forward that encourages people to take risks, fall down, and then get back up.
In the words of the famous philosopher, Yoda: “Pass on what you have learned. Strength. Mastery. But weakness, folly, failure also. Yes, failure most of all. The greatest teacher, failure is.”
LIVE AND LEARN.
Irrationally yours,
Dan
Links to the papers
Link to the paper “How Pledges Reduce Dishonesty: The Role of Involvement and Identification“: https://tinyurl.com/ycpumrtk
Link to the paper “I Solemnly Swear I’m Up To Good: A Megastudy Investigating the Effectiveness of Honesty Oaths on Curbing Dishonesty“: https://tinyurl.com/53mbn5ws and see also a link to a discussion about this paper: https://youtu.be/AjQ58irCZGg
I’m very happy that my book MISBELIEF will soon be published in Russia. Here is the Russian translation of the title:
TIME OF MISBELIEFS: Why Smart People Are Liable to Falsifications, Spread Rumors and Believe in Conspiracy Theories.
I wonder what the reaction will be in Russia, and how much the Russian readers will think about this book in terms of what’s happening in Russia, and how much they will think of it in terms of what’s happening outside of Russia.
You can learn more about the book MISBELIEF here.