Changing Our Minds: Why we should admit when we're wrong

0:00This message comes from AT &T. Staying connected matters. That's why AT &T has connectivity you can depend on or they'll proactively make it right. That's the AT &T Guarantee. Terms and conditions apply. Visit att.com slash guarantee for details. Hey, it's Manoush. You are about to hear an episode on the value of changing your mind. I've been thinking a lot about this lately because in it, we talk about the great thinker and behavioral economist Daniel Kahneman. He recently passed away, and along with winning a Nobel Prize, writing more than a dozen books, he was known for his utter joy at being proven wrong.

0:48He loved it when someone changed his mind. So, in honor of the late, Nobel Prize-winning Daniel Kahneman, I hope you enjoy this episode. This is the TED Radio Hour. Each week, groundbreaking TED Talks Our job now is to dream big. Delivered at TED conferences To bring about the future we want to see. Around the world. To understand who we are. From those talks, we bring you speakers and ideas that will surprise you. You just don't know what you're going to find. Challenge you. We truly have to ask ourselves, like, why is it noteworthy? And even change you. I literally feel like I'm a different person.

1:28Yes. Do you feel that way? Ideas worth spreading. From TED and NPR.

1:39I'm Manoush Zomorodi. And back in the early 2000s, politician Bob Inglis felt very sure of his beliefs. I was pure as a driven snow, you know, that's how I thought of myself. I mean, really, I thought that I was perfect and everybody else in the political process was a bunch of swine. Really, it was very sanctimonious, to tell you the truth. For 12 years, Bob was the congressional representative for Greenville, Spartanburg, South Carolina. The reddest district and the reddest state of the nation. And Bob saw himself as a true conservative. Somebody who believes in freedom, individual responsibility, and accountability.

2:19And he had the stats to back that up. 93 American Conservative Union lifetime rating, 100 % Christian coalition, 100 % national right to life, A with the NRA, zero with the Americans for Democratic Action, the liberal group, and 23 by some mistake with the AFL, CIO, the labor union. I was really hoping for a zero. And on the environment? I said that climate change was nonsense. I didn't know anything about it, except that Al Gore was for it. And since I represented a very conservative district in South Carolina, that was the end of the inquiry. Why do you think that was? Al Gore had been very involved in learning about climate change, and so he really did become the first name that comes to mind when you say climate change.

3:09And, you know, I've seen that there's been this contest between faith and science within the evangelical church that probably dates back to the whole question of evolution. There's also some disrespecting, of course, that's going on where scientists basically say to biblical believers, oh, you're a bunch of Bible-something ignoramuses. I mean, that really is sort of the feel that many believers have gotten from scientists. But then something happened just as Bob was gearing up for election in 2004. That's the year that our son, the eldest of our five kids, had just turned 18. So he came to me and said, Dad, I'll vote for you, but you're going to clean up your act on the environment.

4:05So his four sisters agreed. That's where I started thinking, well, gee, I really do need to pay attention to this. I need to find out what the story is here. But, you know, you're a congressman. You could have just said, like, well, we can agree to disagree. I'm sticking to what's on my platform and tough luck. But you didn't say that. Why not? Well, you know, some sons are trying to grow up to be like their father. I'm trying to grow up to be like my son, you know. He's good looking. He's smart. He's fun. He's funny. He's all the things I'd like to be. So nice. And he's got four wonderful sisters who are also people I'm trying to grow up to be like.

4:48And so, you know, I knew that my son loved me and he was going to vote for me no matter what. But I think he's really saying, Dad, I love you. And you can be better than you were before.

5:03That's what made it possible for me to listen to them. And, of course, I'm also aware that societies that can't listen to their young people are the ones that get stuck. And then the world passes them by. That was step one for me in this metamorphosis on climate. Bob Inglis continues his story from the TED stage. The second step for me was getting on science committee. I got the opportunity to go to Antarctica and saw in the ice core drillings at the South Pole, the evidence, this is pretty clear. Long stability followed by an uptick in CO2 that coincides with the Industrial Revolution. We have warming.

5:49So I saw that evidence in Antarctica. Third step in my change. We had the opportunity to go to the Great Barrier Reef and see coral bleaching. And I was inspired by an Aussie climate scientist. I figured out that he was worshiping God in the creation. Not worshiping the creation, but worshiping the God behind the creation. And subsequently, I had plenty of time to talk with him. And he talked to me about changing his life to love God and love people, people that he would never know, could never know, because they'll come long after us. So you have this major transformation. I mean, but that's not easy, right?

6:37Like when a politician changes their stance or does a 180 on a topic or an issue, that's not usually seen as coming to a new understanding. That is called flip-flopping in politics. Yeah. Yeah. And that's – it's a real problem, isn't it? I mean if we can't do 180s on things, then that means we're just stuck. You know, I'm of the opinion when the facts overtake you, it's better to be overtaken than to double down disputing the facts because facts are stubborn things. It's sort of curious, especially in my faith tradition, that, you know, we talk about people having conversions, and that's a positive thing.

7:25But in politics, you can't convert. You've got to stick with whatever the mistake is that you said when you first ran. And, you know, you can stick to it, even though the evidence is melting up that you're wrong. Admitting you're wrong can be painful. Many see it as a sign of weakness. And sticking to your beliefs these days, that shows you've got guts and a backbone. But what if we understood how flexible thinking can spark our curiosity and bring people who differ together, or at least feel more compassion towards each other? So today on the show, changing our minds. Why re-evaluating our ideas and beliefs can be good for our brains and relationships, and even bring us a little joy.

8:21For Bob Inglis, the last step in his transformation was proposing climate legislation. He introduced the Raise Wages, Cut Carbon Act of 2009, which would impose new taxes on fossil fuels. And as a Republican from South Carolina, it was a pretty controversial move. Probably not the best idea in the midst of the Great Recession. I think for many of my constituents, they thought, this is just too much. I mean, you've gone too far here, Inglis. You've broken trust with this because we're not sure who you are. So for those who don't know, tell us what happened when you ran for re-election in 2010. Well, it wasn't even close, you know.

9:08So after 12 years in Congress in a Republican runoff, I got 29 % of the vote and the other guy got the other 71 % of the vote. So a rather spectacular face plant in politics, I suppose. You don't usually lose by that margin after 12 years in Congress. So it was quite an abrupt end. How did you feel about that? Did you think to yourself, well, you know, this is the sacrifice I have to make? Or did it, like, sting as much as it sounds like it would have? Oh, it's very – it's awful. It's quite a sting. I mean, to lose in a primary especially is painful. It's one thing to lose in the general action.

9:57You know, if you lose in the general action, there's a party to come home to. They'll invite you to the next Lincoln Day dinner. They'll let you speak. They'll say, yeah, you put on the good fight and you were our champion and you came a little short, but still we love you. You lose in a primary, there's no party to go home to. It's sort of like a divorce or something. It's just a terrible feeling because people who have hugged you around the neck, told you they love you, they're praying for you. You go to the next county convention and they got the other guy's sticker on their lapel. And so it's really, it's why I think so many politicians, this is left and right, are so worried about losing in a primary.

10:45Because it is way more painful than losing in a general election. So tell us then what you did after not winning the primary. You weren't a congressman anymore. but you decided that you wanted to focus on climate. So tell us about what you decided to do. Well, a foundation came to me and said, you know, English, you're an unusual zoo animal. You know what I mean? You're like an actual conservative who says climate change is real. Will you speak and write for us? So that's what I've been doing ever since. And it's now this thing called RepublicEN.org that urges conservatives to engage in climate.

11:25There are a lot of conservatives who just haven't heard it in their own language yet. And if they could hear it explained in the language of conservatism, they can say, well, now I'm seeing a solution that fits. I see you're not trying to regulate my very breath. You're trying to do just what Milton Friedman would have told us to do. There's a great clip of him on the Phil Donahue Show in the 1980s. Dr. Friedman is our guest, and we hope you'll join us. Way to a pollution then, Dr. Friedman. There is a case for doing something about pollution, but the way we've been going about it is the wrong way.

11:59Is there a case for the government to do something about it? Yes, there is a case for the government to do something about it. If you don't want to regulate it, Friedman says, you tax it, you tax pollution. The amount of pollutants emitted by a car and make it in the self-interest of the car manufacturers and of the consumers to keep down the amount of pollution in that way. Conservatives will be able to say, oh, this is our story. This is our song. It's rock-solid conservatism to act on climate change. You've got to send the right messenger because most politicians are waiting to follow. They typically don't lead.

12:39So we need to create a constituency that they can follow because this is a problem, and it's for real, and we're literally all in this together. You know, at the end of your time in Washington, can you imagine the emptiness of knowing that you stood for nothing, that you risk nothing, that all you did was follow fearful people to where they were already going rather than trying to lead them to a better place? If you're not willing to lose your seat in Congress, there's really very little reason to be there.

13:21So here's the thing. It's not too late. Speak out. Speak up. Tell them the very good news, that we can bring America together to solve these challenges and to lead the world. Thank you very much. That was Bob Inglis. He's the head of the nonprofit Republic EN. You can find both his TED Talks at ted.npr.org. Today on the show, changing our minds. I'm Manoush Zomorodi, and you're listening to the TED Radio Hour from NPR. We'll be right back.

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16:34Listener support is crucial to keeping us going. Go to plus.npr.org slash TED or give it a try right in the Apple Podcasts app. It's the TED Radio Hour from NPR. I'm Manoush Zomorodi. On the show today, changing our minds. Okay, so let's talk about rethinking our ideas, our principles. Adam, what have you found? Is it good for us? Can it even make us happy? Well, Manoush, I don't think that rethinking always makes you happy. But failing to think again is a recipe for misery. I can't tell you how many students I've had, for example, who decide, you know, at age three and a half, I must be a doctor or a lawyer.

17:23and they don't bother to question that until they're long through med school or law school. They're like, but I hate this, but this is my identity. I think they're really misunderstanding what it means to think again, right? So changing your mind does not mean you've abandoned your principles. It means you've evolved or the world around you has evolved. This is Adam Grant. He's an organizational psychologist. And I host the TED podcast, Work Life. Adam has written many books on human behavior. His latest is called Think Again, and it's something that he has struggled with himself. You know, I've had a hard time with admitting I'm wrong pretty much my whole life.

18:09No. I think I've gotten better at it recently, I hope, although I might be wrong about that. You know, I think, Manoush, I have these memories. Like, I remember being on the phone with my best friend. I think it was a commercial during Seinfeld. and we were arguing about a movie quote. I knew I was right, so I played the tape. I had it on a VHS tape. I played the tape, and I was wrong. Oh. And I couldn't believe it, and I couldn't admit it. And finally he said, shut up, Adam. I won't talk to you until you admit you're wrong. And then he hung up on me. And I think that was the beginning of my journey to try to figure out why is it so hard to rethink our opinions and our convictions?

18:55And, you know, fast forward a couple decades, I wrote a book about it. Here's Adam Grant in his TED Talk. You might have heard that if you drop a frog in a pot of boiling water, it'll jump out right away. But if you put it in lukewarm water and then slowly heat it up, the frog won't survive. The frog's big problem is that it lacks the ability to rethink the situation. It doesn't realize that the warm bath is becoming a death trap until it's too late. Humans might be smarter than frogs, but our world is full of slow-boiling pots. Think about how slow people were to react to warnings about a pandemic, climate change, or a democracy in peril.

19:33We fail to recognize the danger because we're reluctant to rethink the situation. Rethinking isn't a hurdle in every part of our lives. We're happy to refresh our wardrobes and renovate our kitchens. But when it comes to our goals, identities, and habits, we tend to stick to our guns. And in a rapidly changing world, that's a huge problem. I mean, we think about today and we think, oh, well, when you stick to your belief in ideas, that means you stand for something or you have a spine. You're not a flip-flopper. Well, I think the problem is people confuse flip-flopping with rethinking. Flip-flopping is changing your mind because it's convenient.

20:12Or not even changing your mind. just telling people what they want to hear without reconsidering what you really think. So when people flip-flop, they're thinking like politicians. They're saying whatever they need to say to appease an audience. You know, Manoush, one of my biggest frustrations is with the amount of time that I have spent and also that a lot of people spend thinking like preachers, prosecutors, and politicians. So originally this research goes back a couple decades. basically when you're in preacher mode, you're defending a view that you already hold. When you're in prosecutor mode, you're attacking somebody else's views.

20:49And when you're in politician mode, you only listen to people if they already agree with your views. All three of those mindsets can make it hard to think again because you've concluded that you're right and other people are wrong. So they might need to open their minds, but your cognitive work is done. And I think one of the most interesting Explorations of these tendencies happened in a study back in the late 1950s. There was a psychologist, his name was Henry Murray, and Henry Murray was one of the great personality psychologists of his time. Murray was a researcher at Harvard who was interested in something that he called stressful interpersonal disputation.

21:34Which is essentially if you have not just an argument with someone, but you really feel like your worldview is threatened. How do you deal with that? So Murray designed an experiment. The subjects were 22 Harvard sophomores. He actually handpicks them based on a range of psychological profiles he's interested in to participate in these experiments that would go all the way through college. And if you're one of these students, for the first month, you answer some questions. You take some tests, basically write out your philosophy of life. You wax poetic about your guiding principles, your core values, your deepest held beliefs.

22:14And that's a great way to get people into the mindset of preaching the virtues of their existing opinions and being ready to prosecute anyone who disagrees. And then after that month, you show up to submit your portrait of you, essentially. And you're told you're going to be paired with another student who's gone through the same exercise. And you'll each get, I don't know, maybe a day or two to read. And then you're going to have a filmed debate about your worldviews. But there's a catch. You don't know that the other student is actually a law student who's in cahoots with Henry Murray and his colleagues.

22:54And he has been trained to spend 18 minutes just demolishing your worldview. It's brutal. Okay, wait. When you say demolishing your worldview, basically saying like here's what you think and here's why it's wrong kind of thing? Yes. Like that's what we're talking about? Yeah. So I come in as the law student and I say, you know, Manoush, I read your worldview. It reads like it was written by a six-year-old. Your beliefs are completely contradictory. I think your morals are completely out of whack. And let me tell you why several of the beliefs that you claim were core to who you are are ignorant and stupid.

23:33And you should be embarrassed. How did you get into Harvard? Wow. OK, so how did these poor young students respond? Most of them did not like it, Manish. They did not like it. No. One of the students said he felt unabating rage. There was another who said, quote,

24:01That's how I would have responded. Yeah, so this, I mean, this is just a devastating thing to put a teenager through, let alone any human. But here's the crazy part. A few of the participants liked it. Liked it? How could you possibly like that? You read through some of these transcripts, and one participant looking back basically said, quote, it was highly agreeable. There was another who said it was fun. Quote, fun. What? Okay. So, but what is the point of all of this? Like, what does that kind of weirdly positive reaction say about these students? I mean, I think there were some participants in this experiment who felt like the highest form of learning was to have somebody really hold up a mirror and help them see all their own blind spots so that they could learn to see a little bit more clearly.

24:58Real intellectual chemistry exists not when you agree with someone, but when you enjoy your disagreements with them. Okay, I have to say that this study gives me a little bit of a stomachache because I do think, and the reason being is I think if you come to a place where you feel quite certain about your ideas or you find arguing about core beliefs fun, you are coming from a place where you feel pretty secure in your place in the world, in your intellectualism, in your right to be in that realm. room, right? We're talking about 1950s white dudes at Harvard. And now I think we're at this place where we are trying to figure out how do we have these conversations where we challenge each other about our beliefs when there are some people who have never been asked what their beliefs are or other people who will resort to violence if you question their beliefs.

25:57Or I hear a lot of conversations where there is no argument because that's considered to be unkind. And we're in a world where a lot of people are talking about kindness and bringing people into a conversation. It's hard, right? Like we're at a moment where we're really struggling to make people feel good about having their ideas challenged. I think that's true. I might quibble, though, with one of the premises. Okay. And I'm open to that. Go ahead. I don't think you always have to be intellectually secure to be open-minded. You just have to be curious and humble, right? You have to know that you don't know everything and you have to want to learn more.

26:41But I guess that requires you then to not make your ideas your identity. Yes. That's a huge part of what thinking like a scientist is about, right? When I say think like a scientist, sometimes people think, oh, wait, so I have to go buy a microscope or own a telescope? No. For me, thinking like a scientist is about not letting your ideas become your identity. Saying what I believe is not who I am. Right. And I should say that that is one of the main points in your book, that instead of being like a preacher, prosecutor, or politician, we should think like a scientist. But to me, that could mean I have to come up with a hypothesis, an idea of what I think is right.

27:23But then I need to prove it. Right? No. No? No, don't do that. Bad. OK. Tell me. You definitely want to come up with hypotheses. But then good scientists are as motivated to disprove their hypotheses as they are to support them. Ah, yes. And I think what a scientist is after is actually discovering the truth, not selling it. There is one person you mentioned who has made this kind of thinking or rethinking, I should say, a habit. And it really made me chuckle because it's a Nobel Prize winner, Daniel Kahneman. And I would think that that is someone who is probably right, if not all of the time, then most of the time.

28:03But he responds to having his ideas challenged exactly as you just described, kind of like the students in the study, like he enjoys being challenged or even being wrong. Yeah, I had this surprising experience with him a few years ago where I went to give a talk at a conference. I finished the presentation. I got off the stage. I'm walking out and I see Danny Kahneman in the audience. And he pulls me aside as I'm walking out and he says, that was wonderful. I was wrong. You know, those are situations in which you're surprised. I really enjoy changing my mind because I enjoy being surprised. And I enjoy being surprised because I feel I'm learning something.