When you express yourself with certainty, you shut down your motivation for being information hungry to hunt for new information that updates your views. By contrast, when you say you are 45% on a situation, you will look for new information to upgrade your probability forecast or downgrade it.
Truth-Seeking Groups: Keeping Yourself Honest
One of Duke’s suggestions for how to optimize a learning process is to identify a truth-seeking group to help sort through decision quality and keep you honest in an “exploratory style” when evaluating decisions. Groups can act like a “mega-individual” if there is an echo chamber, but if a group helps you keep biases in check, this can help improve biased world views because it’s easier to see bias in others than in yourself.
“Yes…and” Instead of “But”
One of Duke’s suggestions is to eliminate the use of the word “but” in conversations and pivot to a model of saying “yes…and.” When you use the word “but” in conversations, it invalidates everything said previously and puts people in a defensive frame of mind. However, if you can agree with a person’s world view and then ask him or her to think about a future that might lead to a different internalization of a given situation, it often leads to better evaluations.
While Duke counsels it would be impossible to completely get rid of the word “but” from your vocabulary, using it less and substituting the words “yes…and” instead will lead to more open-minded conversation. Duke says that if you want people to change their beliefs, you have to put them in an open-minded state, and the word “but” just shuts down this type of open-mindedness.
How Betting Markets Improve Decisions
Duke talked about how there was a study of peer-reviewed scientific research papers and whether scientists could predict which papers’ conclusions could be replicated in a fresh evaluation of the research. When the same scientists were given money and offered a chance to bet on which studies they would replicate, the scientists’ accuracy on predicting the outcome was increased by putting money on the line and making explicit rewards compared with implicit reputation motivation. Companies such as Google are using betting markets to help their predictions in different business ventures.
An Uncertainty Evangelist
One of Duke’s life missions is to be an evangelist for uncertainty—to celebrate and embrace it. She sees a lot of benefits from this, including being more open-minded, less judgmental and more compassionate and information hungry. She also suggests embracing dissent without being overly disagreeable.
This was a great conversation on a great new book. You can listen to the full conversation below.
This article was republished with permission from WisdomTree.