(For a background behind this series and references/sources used, please view the first article of this series at: https://nitnblogs.blogspot.com/2019/01/series-of-posts-on-psychology-of-human.html)
The rare life that is wisely lived has in it many good habits maintained and many bad habits avoided or cured. And the great rule that helps here is again from Franklin's Poor Richard's Almanac: "An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure." What Franklin is here indicating, in part, is that Inconsistency-Avoidance Tendency makes it much easier to prevent a habit than to change it.
Tending to be maintained in place by the anti-change tendency of the brain are one's previous conclusions, human loyalties, reputational identity, commitments.
It is not entirely clear why evolution would program into man's brain an anti-change mode alongside his tendency to quickly remove doubt. My guess is the anti-change mode was significantly caused by a combination of the following factors:
Before making decisions, judges and juries are required to hear long and skillful presentations of evidence and argument from the side they will not naturally favor, given their ideas in place. And this helps prevent considerable bad thinking from "first conclusion bias." Similarly, other modern decision makers will often force groups to consider skillful counter arguments before making decisions.
And thus civilization has invented many tough and solemn initiation ceremonies, often public in nature, that intensify new commitments made.
Moreover, the tendency will often make man a "patsy" of manipulative "compliance-practitioners," who gain advantage from triggering his subconscious Inconsistency-Avoidance Tendency. Few people demonstrated this process better than Ben Franklin. As he was rising from obscurity in Philadelphia and wanted the approval of some important man, Franklin would often maneuver that man into doing Franklin some unimportant favor like lending Franklin a book. Thereafter the man would admire and trust Franklin more because a non-admired and non-trusted Franklin would be inconsistent with the appraisal implicit in lending Franklin the book. When one is maneuvered into deliberately hurting some other person, one will tend to disapprove or even hate that person.
So strong is Inconsistency-Avoidance Tendency that it will often prevail after one has merely pretended to have some identity, habit, or conclusion. Thus, for a while, many an actor sort of believes he is Hamlet, Prince of Denmark. And many a hypocrite is improved by his pretensions of virtue. And many a judge and juror, while pretending objectivity is gaining objectivity. And many a trial lawyer or other advocate comes to believe what he formerly only pretended to believe.
My Notes:
This is also one of Cialdini's points: “People do not like to back out of deals. We’re more likely to do something after we’ve agreed to it verbally or in writing. People strive for consistency in their commitments. They also prefer to follow pre-existing attitudes, values and actions.”
Charles Darwin is an oft quoted example of a person who systematically avoided confirmation bias. Charlie says that “He trained himself, early, to intensively consider any evidence tending to disconfirm any hypothesis of his, more so if he thought his hypothesis was a particularly good one. The opposite of what Darwin did is now called confirmation bias, a term of opprobrium. Darwin's practice came from his acute recognition of man's natural cognitive faults arising from Inconsistency-Avoidance Tendency. He provides a great example of psychological insight correctly used to advance some of the finest mental work ever done.”
People who undergo a lot of pain and effort to gain something will value it more than a person getting the same thing with lesser effort. If a commitment requires large effort, it is more difficult to change your thinking or ideas underpinning that commitment. Consistency makes thinking easy, because there's little thinking needed. Make up your mind about something once, and you never have to think about it ever again. In addition to simplifying our thinking, Consistency also helps us avoid unpleasant emotions. Moreover, people are not only driven to "be" consistent, but are also driven to "appear to be" consistent.
Heavy ideologies like terrorism, communism, fascism and even capitalism are “disorders of human cognition.” (Charlie)
In terms of physics, this tendency can be thought of as inertia or momentum. Just to illustrate, Newton’s laws of motion talk about change in inertia or momentum of a body resulting only due to application of an “external” force, implying a stimulus is needed to change inertia or momentum. We can only apply “internal” forces to our thoughts and beliefs to act as the stimulus in light of “external” data.
We tend not to look for evidence against things we believe in, and even if we find such evidence our first impulse is to ignore it. The amount of information required to invalidate an existing hypothesis is greater than that required to form an initial interpretation. The other challenge with this is that new information as received will be assimilated to existing beliefs and ideas rather than judged objectively. One of the reasons why social media is such an echo chamber is that people tend to expose themselves to only information they believe in and supports their existing beliefs. Thus people supporting a particular political party like BJP invariably end up receiving and forwarding all kinds of news favoring BJP, and so on.
Changing our mind is generally seen as a sign of weakness. In addition the experts are supposed to be people who know the answers and do not consider counter-evidences or alternatives. Thus it is, by definition, very difficult for an expert to change his/her mind.
Holding two ideas that are psychologically inconsistent (ex. I need to lose weight as I am fat vs. I ate dessert) leads to tension or cognitive dissonance. This dissonance can be reduced by:
Systematically removing bad ideas or beliefs in light of new data or learning and replacing them with better ideas or beliefs is one of the hardest things to do in life, but really important. See this transcript of an answer Charlie gave in Feb 2017 in the annual meeting of DJICO:
Q: You’ve said, “Any year in which you don’t destroy one of your best loved ideas is a wasted year.” …. I was wondering if you could speak of the hardest idea that you’ve ever destroyed.
Charlie: Well I’ve done so many dumb things. That I’m very busy destroying bad ideas because I keep having them. So it’s hard for me to just single out from such a multitude. But I actually like it when I destroy a bad idea because I think I’m on the…I think it’s my duty to destroy old ideas. I know so many people whose main problem of life, is that the old ideas displace the entry of new ideas that are better. That is the absolute standard outcome in life. There’s an old German folk saying, “We’re too soon old and too late smart.” That’s everybody’s problem. And the reason we’re too late smart is that the stupid ideas we already have, we can’t get rid of! Now it’s a good thing that we have that problem, in marriage that may be good for the stability of marriage that we stick with our old ideas. But in most fields you want to get rid of your old ideas. It’s a good habit and it gives you a big advantage in the competitive game of life…other people are so very bad at it. What happens is, as you spout ideas out, what you’re doing is you’re pounding them in. So you get these ideas and then you start agitating them and saying them and so forth. And of course, the person you’re really convincing is you who already had the ideas. You’re just pounding them in harder and harder. One of the reasons I don’t spend much time telling the world what I think about how the Federal Reserve System should behave and so forth. Because I know that I’m just pounding the ideas into my own head when I think I’m telling the other people how to run things. So I think you have to have mental habits…I don’t like it when young people get violently convinced on every damn cause or something. They think they know everything. Some 17 year old who wants to tell the whole world what ought to be done about abortion or foreign policy in the Middle East or something. All he’s doing when he or she spouts about what he deeply believes is pounding the ideas he already has in, which is a very dumb idea when you’re just starting and have a lot to learn.
So it’s very important that habit of getting rid of the dumb ideas. One of things I do is pat myself on the back every time I get rid of the dumb idea. You could say, ‘could you really reinforce your own good behavior?’ Yeah, you can. When other people won’t praise you, you can praise yourself. I have a big system of patting myself on the back. Every time I get rid of a much beloved idea I pat myself on the back. Sometime several times. And I recommend the same mental habit to all of you. The price we pay for being able to accept a new idea is just awesomely large. Indeed a lot of people die because they can’t get new ideas through their head.
So what can we do to guard against this tendency? We can try the following:
The rare life that is wisely lived has in it many good habits maintained and many bad habits avoided or cured. And the great rule that helps here is again from Franklin's Poor Richard's Almanac: "An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure." What Franklin is here indicating, in part, is that Inconsistency-Avoidance Tendency makes it much easier to prevent a habit than to change it.
Tending to be maintained in place by the anti-change tendency of the brain are one's previous conclusions, human loyalties, reputational identity, commitments.
It is not entirely clear why evolution would program into man's brain an anti-change mode alongside his tendency to quickly remove doubt. My guess is the anti-change mode was significantly caused by a combination of the following factors:
- It facilitated faster decisions when speed of decision was an important contribution to the survival of nonhuman ancestors that were prey.
- It facilitated the survival advantage that our ancestors gained by cooperating in groups, which would have been more difficult to do if everyone was always changing responses.
- It was the best form of solution that evolution could get to in the limited number of generations between the start of literacy and today's complex modern life.
Before making decisions, judges and juries are required to hear long and skillful presentations of evidence and argument from the side they will not naturally favor, given their ideas in place. And this helps prevent considerable bad thinking from "first conclusion bias." Similarly, other modern decision makers will often force groups to consider skillful counter arguments before making decisions.
And thus civilization has invented many tough and solemn initiation ceremonies, often public in nature, that intensify new commitments made.
Moreover, the tendency will often make man a "patsy" of manipulative "compliance-practitioners," who gain advantage from triggering his subconscious Inconsistency-Avoidance Tendency. Few people demonstrated this process better than Ben Franklin. As he was rising from obscurity in Philadelphia and wanted the approval of some important man, Franklin would often maneuver that man into doing Franklin some unimportant favor like lending Franklin a book. Thereafter the man would admire and trust Franklin more because a non-admired and non-trusted Franklin would be inconsistent with the appraisal implicit in lending Franklin the book. When one is maneuvered into deliberately hurting some other person, one will tend to disapprove or even hate that person.
So strong is Inconsistency-Avoidance Tendency that it will often prevail after one has merely pretended to have some identity, habit, or conclusion. Thus, for a while, many an actor sort of believes he is Hamlet, Prince of Denmark. And many a hypocrite is improved by his pretensions of virtue. And many a judge and juror, while pretending objectivity is gaining objectivity. And many a trial lawyer or other advocate comes to believe what he formerly only pretended to believe.
My Notes:
This is also one of Cialdini's points: “People do not like to back out of deals. We’re more likely to do something after we’ve agreed to it verbally or in writing. People strive for consistency in their commitments. They also prefer to follow pre-existing attitudes, values and actions.”
Charles Darwin is an oft quoted example of a person who systematically avoided confirmation bias. Charlie says that “He trained himself, early, to intensively consider any evidence tending to disconfirm any hypothesis of his, more so if he thought his hypothesis was a particularly good one. The opposite of what Darwin did is now called confirmation bias, a term of opprobrium. Darwin's practice came from his acute recognition of man's natural cognitive faults arising from Inconsistency-Avoidance Tendency. He provides a great example of psychological insight correctly used to advance some of the finest mental work ever done.”
People who undergo a lot of pain and effort to gain something will value it more than a person getting the same thing with lesser effort. If a commitment requires large effort, it is more difficult to change your thinking or ideas underpinning that commitment. Consistency makes thinking easy, because there's little thinking needed. Make up your mind about something once, and you never have to think about it ever again. In addition to simplifying our thinking, Consistency also helps us avoid unpleasant emotions. Moreover, people are not only driven to "be" consistent, but are also driven to "appear to be" consistent.
Heavy ideologies like terrorism, communism, fascism and even capitalism are “disorders of human cognition.” (Charlie)
In terms of physics, this tendency can be thought of as inertia or momentum. Just to illustrate, Newton’s laws of motion talk about change in inertia or momentum of a body resulting only due to application of an “external” force, implying a stimulus is needed to change inertia or momentum. We can only apply “internal” forces to our thoughts and beliefs to act as the stimulus in light of “external” data.
We tend not to look for evidence against things we believe in, and even if we find such evidence our first impulse is to ignore it. The amount of information required to invalidate an existing hypothesis is greater than that required to form an initial interpretation. The other challenge with this is that new information as received will be assimilated to existing beliefs and ideas rather than judged objectively. One of the reasons why social media is such an echo chamber is that people tend to expose themselves to only information they believe in and supports their existing beliefs. Thus people supporting a particular political party like BJP invariably end up receiving and forwarding all kinds of news favoring BJP, and so on.
Changing our mind is generally seen as a sign of weakness. In addition the experts are supposed to be people who know the answers and do not consider counter-evidences or alternatives. Thus it is, by definition, very difficult for an expert to change his/her mind.
Holding two ideas that are psychologically inconsistent (ex. I need to lose weight as I am fat vs. I ate dessert) leads to tension or cognitive dissonance. This dissonance can be reduced by:
- Change of attitude (I don’t need to diet)
- Change is perception of behaviour (I hardly ate a small piece of dessert)
- Adding consonant cognitions (I exercise so much that this does not matter)
- Minimize the conflict’s importance (Life is too short to worry about being overweight)
- Reduce perceived choices (I had no choice – it would be rude to refuse the host)
Systematically removing bad ideas or beliefs in light of new data or learning and replacing them with better ideas or beliefs is one of the hardest things to do in life, but really important. See this transcript of an answer Charlie gave in Feb 2017 in the annual meeting of DJICO:
Q: You’ve said, “Any year in which you don’t destroy one of your best loved ideas is a wasted year.” …. I was wondering if you could speak of the hardest idea that you’ve ever destroyed.
Charlie: Well I’ve done so many dumb things. That I’m very busy destroying bad ideas because I keep having them. So it’s hard for me to just single out from such a multitude. But I actually like it when I destroy a bad idea because I think I’m on the…I think it’s my duty to destroy old ideas. I know so many people whose main problem of life, is that the old ideas displace the entry of new ideas that are better. That is the absolute standard outcome in life. There’s an old German folk saying, “We’re too soon old and too late smart.” That’s everybody’s problem. And the reason we’re too late smart is that the stupid ideas we already have, we can’t get rid of! Now it’s a good thing that we have that problem, in marriage that may be good for the stability of marriage that we stick with our old ideas. But in most fields you want to get rid of your old ideas. It’s a good habit and it gives you a big advantage in the competitive game of life…other people are so very bad at it. What happens is, as you spout ideas out, what you’re doing is you’re pounding them in. So you get these ideas and then you start agitating them and saying them and so forth. And of course, the person you’re really convincing is you who already had the ideas. You’re just pounding them in harder and harder. One of the reasons I don’t spend much time telling the world what I think about how the Federal Reserve System should behave and so forth. Because I know that I’m just pounding the ideas into my own head when I think I’m telling the other people how to run things. So I think you have to have mental habits…I don’t like it when young people get violently convinced on every damn cause or something. They think they know everything. Some 17 year old who wants to tell the whole world what ought to be done about abortion or foreign policy in the Middle East or something. All he’s doing when he or she spouts about what he deeply believes is pounding the ideas he already has in, which is a very dumb idea when you’re just starting and have a lot to learn.
So it’s very important that habit of getting rid of the dumb ideas. One of things I do is pat myself on the back every time I get rid of the dumb idea. You could say, ‘could you really reinforce your own good behavior?’ Yeah, you can. When other people won’t praise you, you can praise yourself. I have a big system of patting myself on the back. Every time I get rid of a much beloved idea I pat myself on the back. Sometime several times. And I recommend the same mental habit to all of you. The price we pay for being able to accept a new idea is just awesomely large. Indeed a lot of people die because they can’t get new ideas through their head.
So what can we do to guard against this tendency? We can try the following:
- Be very open to suggestions that contradict your best loved beliefs and examine them more closely even more so if you feel your beliefs are really good. (Darwin’s prescription)
- We need to learn from surprises, rather than downplay the discomfort they create.
- Playing the devil’s advocate is also helpful. This may mean talking to people who hold contrarian views and understanding their viewpoints rather than dismissing them as jerks.
- Avoid spelling out your beliefs on things you really are not sure about, as if you take a stand on half-baked knowledge and speak about it regularly, you are pounding that idea into your head.
- Avoid experts and be ready to change your mind. There is no shame in changing your mind on things on a regular basis, and experts (by definition) are not supposed to change their mind on things they are experts on.
- Having milestones for future observations that indicate events that are taking a different course than expected, and thus refining your view in light of these.
- Generating a lot of ideas, even useless ones, and deferring judgements is a useful thing to do.
- Making written commitments to yourself (like plans and schedules) help you stick to them. At the same time plans and ideas need to be junked if they are no longer in conformance with new realities.
- Praise and pat yourself on the back whenever you let go of a beloved idea. Charlie seems to do it multiple times.
- Remember that having old ideas and holding on to them is always blocking the entry of new and fresh ideas into our brains.
- Balance your perception of truth with best assessment of what others believe.
- You can start with a trivial request and if accepted, move to a larger request. Ex. “Would you sign a petition supporting our cause?”, if accepted can lead to “Would you donate for this cause?” This will have a higher success rate than asking the second question first.
- Testimonial contests (like complete the sentence X is the best candy because…) leads to a person, once participating, believe in whatever attributes they praised, leading to loyal, committed customers for the future.
- Public commitments tend to last, making it harder for career politicians to change their position on any issue. Flexible (“Open minded”) politicians who frequently change their minds in view of new data or information (ex. Trump) are generally ridiculed.
- We need to be careful before agreeing to write down or agree to a proposal, even if it is trivial. If already done, it’s better to say I have changed my mind than to prod along.
- Getting customers or co-workers to publicly commit to something makes them more likely to follow through with an action or a purchase. Getting people to answer ‘yes’ makes them more powerfully committed to an action. For instance, don’t tell people: “Please call if you have to cancel.” Asking “Will you please call if you have to cancel?” gets customers to say yes, and measurably increases their response rates. (Cialdini)
- The older we get, the more we value consistency. And that makes it harder for older people to make a change. (Cialdini, Munger)
- This goes hand-in-hand with doubt-avoidance, and again is usually a plus for a startup, since it leads to greater commitment on the part of the entrepreneur and the team. (Marc – what he means is that once you have signed up to work for a startup after overcoming your inertia, by definition you are now committed to it and give your best to it. Marc also recommends a blood-oath for startups)
- This leads to the odd dynamic you often see where a startup will field a new product, nobody wants it, and the startup goes belly up. Then three or four or five years later, another startup launches with a very similar product, and this time the market says, hell yes! (Marc)
- My favorite way around this problem is the one identified by Clayton Christensen in The Innovator's Dilemma: don't go after existing customers in a category and try to get them to buy something new; instead, go find the new customers who weren't able to afford or adopt the incarnation of the status quo. For example, when the personal computer was invented, the desirable market was not the universe of people who were already buying computers -- a.k.a. mainframe and minicomputer buyers -- but rather the universe of the people who couldn't afford a mainframe or minicomputer and therefore had never had a computer before. Similarly, the desirable market for Hotmail in the early days was not existing email aficionados who were already using sophisticated email desktop software, but rather the universe of people who were coming on the Internet for the first time who didn't even have email yet and for whom web-based email was by far the easiest way to start. (Marc)
- One of the reasons that today's consumer Internet companies have the wind at our backs versus our peers 10 years ago is that a whole new generation of consumers has come of age in the last 10 years for whom the Internet is their primary medium -- time and demographics are on our side now. (Marc)
- “You can get in way more trouble with a good idea than a bad idea, because you forget that the good idea has limits” - Ben Franklin. Munger also said once something similar “You are better off with a guy who thinks his IQ is 120 when it is actually 150 versus another whose IQ is 180 and thinks it is 200. The second guy will kill you.” Also Benjamin Graham used to say, "It's not the bad investment ideas that fail; it's the good ideas that get pushed into excess."
- Andy Grove in his book “Only the Paranoid Survive” has given a great example of how difficult it was for Intel to ‘change’ from making memory chips to microprocessors. He says the company was focused more on making memory chips more profitable rather than realizing the fact that it was all over for them in the chips market due to Japanese manufacturing chips at a fraction of Intel’s price and flooding the market.
- Most people are asked to disclose a conflict of interest first up - example in a meeting where they are an impacted party, or in an article recommending a stock. Just the discipline of mentioning the fact that there is an interest involved makes the proposer become more objective in his/her recommendations (And many a judge and juror, while pretending objectivity is gaining objectivity. - Munger). This is why N. Taleb always asks people recommending stocks to disclose their portfolios - “Don’t tell me what you “think” show me your portfolio” from the book Skin in the Game.
- A very good mental discipline to have - ask at the end of every year - “Which is one idea that was my long held and cherished belief that I let go of, or destroyed, this year? This is inspired by Munger’s: “Any year that passes in which you don’t destroy one of your best loved ideas is a wasted year.”
- The human mind is more like a human egg - once a sperm reaches the egg, it is absorbed and the egg shuts down the entry of any other sperms. The human mind works the same way for ideas.
Many thanks to Anshul Khare, Vikas Kasturi and Prashanth Jnanendra for reading drafts of this and valuable suggestions.
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