“The Easiest Person to Fool” from Hidden Brain
“The absence of conflict is not harmony; it’s apathy.” - Adam Grant
Stubbornness and the inability to meet conflict affect our personal lives and countless other things on a large scale. The need to feel empowered also makes it hard to admit we’re wrong.
“Physicist Richard Feynman once said, ‘The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool.’ We fool ourselves by imagining we know more than we do; we think we are experts. This week on Hidden Brain, psychologist Adam Grant describes the magic that unfolds when we challenge our own deeply-held beliefs.”
For real growth (personally and professionally), a better world (in every way), and healthier relationships, we will need to strengthen our awareness around task and relational conflict while keeping our totalitarian ego in check.
Here, Shankar Vedantam and Adam Grant “examine the psychological origins and the unforeseen consequences of certainty, and explore the magic that happens when we replace certitude with curiosity.” They discuss the role of identity and stereotypes and how our loyalties to various groups—our membership in different tribes—can keep us from challenging dearly held beliefs and rethinking our views. The problem becomes about trying to prove our allegiance to a tribe and not to get closer to the truth.
For strategies to rethink your own views and help others reconsider their own, tune in. The research is influential.
“We think it’s the message that matters, but so often, whether somebody’s willing to hear a message depends on who’s saying it, why it’s being said, and how it’s being delivered.” - Adam Grant
(18:55) Adam: “The mistake that a lot of people make is they assume that less conflict is better. That if you want to build a successful collaboration or a great team, you want to minimize the amount of tension you have. But as some researchers have argued based on a lot of evidence, the absence of conflict is not harmony; it’s apathy. If you’re in a group where people never disagree, the only way that could really happen is if people don’t care enough to speak their minds. And so, in order to get to wise decisions, creative solutions, we need to hear a variety of perspectives; we need diversity of thought. And task conflict is one of the ways that we get there.”
(21:45) Adam: “When a disagreement becomes personal, everything that gets raised by the other person is interpreted in the most negative light possible. And then I think the other problem is people sometimes don’t even hear the substance of the idea because they’re so invested in defending their ego or in proving the other person wrong.”
(24:18) Shankar: “To disagree without being disagreeable. I think many of us forget this lesson, Adam. We think that if someone else is wrong, our job is just to correct them. How we correct them is unimportant.”
(24:28) Adam: “Yeah, I think that’s such a common mistake in communication. We think it’s the message that matters, but so often, whether somebody’s willing to hear a message depends on who’s saying it, why it’s being said, and how it’s being delivered. I cannot tell you, Shankar, the number of times that I have rejected useful criticism because I didn’t trust the person who was giving it to me, or they delivered it in a way that I found disrespectful or offensive. And that was a missed opportunity for both of us.”
(25:08) Shankar: “Not all of us listen to useful feedback, even when it’s presented clearly and without ranker. That’s because we confuse challenges to our views with threats to our ego… Researcher Tyler Okimoto said, “when you refuse to apologize, it actually makes you feel more empowered. That power and control seem to translate into greater feelings of self-worth.”
(27:00) Adam: “Sadly, staying attached to our wrong convictions makes us feel strong. And psychologists have also found for decades that the act of resisting influence only further fortifies our convictions because we basically get inoculated against future attacks. We have all of our defenses ready, and we end up sealing our beliefs in an ever more impenetrable fortress.”
LISTEN TO THE FULL PODCAST, HERE. (55 min)
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