This is BS I'm Angela Duckworth.
I'm Stephen Dubner.
And you're listening to No Stupid Questions.
Today on the show, what's the cost of admitting you're wrong?
Oh, this is so uncomfortable.
I don't really want to do it.
No, no, wait, hold on.
I'm going to put up my grown up pants.
Angela, I recently had an embarrassing moment that I thought I could turn into a question for you, but will not be embarrassing for you.
This is like my favorite thing.
It's going to be embarrassing for you.
Exactly. Great. So I was having a conversation with a neighbor of mine, an elderly Japanese fellow, and the shoes I was wearing happened to be this brand of Japanese sneaker that I love.
I've been wearing them since high school.
Wait, what's the brand?
They're called Onitsuka Tiger, or So I Thought.
Oh, I think I know what these look like.
They have stripes that go down instead of up like the Nike swoosh.
Yeah. They're kind of minimalist shoes.
They're comfortable.
So anyway, I wear these a lot and I was wearing them and he looked down and pointed at them and just said something like, oh, yeah.
And I said, yeah, Onitsuka.
And he said, Onitsuka.
And I said to him, no, no, no, it's Onitsuka.
Zero self -awareness, like none.
And in that split second, I realized, wait a minute, that is a Japanese brand and he is Japanese and I'm not.
So I stood corrected.
It was a little embarrassing.
It did make me think back to this incident years earlier when a friend of mine, he was a guy in a band.
We were all in bands back then.
And he was trashing this other guy in another band and he said, yeah, that guy, he's the epitome of stupidity.
I thought to myself, wait a minute, you sure he's the epitome of stupidity?
I love that. So, you know, that's a case where there's a word that you've seen written.
You don't know how it's pronounced.
My son, when he started to read, he would have all these words that he sort of knew what they meant, but he didn't know how to say them.
So anyone from Norway was, according to him, a Norwegian, which, you know, makes a lot of sense on the page.
Yeah. So anyway, there are these things that you learn over time you're wrong about and then you correct yourself and it's pretty costless.
But it made me want to ask you a much larger and more serious question, which is, have you had a similar experience, not on something small and silly, like a pronunciation, but on an idea?
In other words, can you tell me something that you believed for a long time to be true and didn't question it at all, but later learned that you were in fact wrong?
I can think of a couple of examples, one small and one big.
So small example is I'm having dinner with my mother -in -law and my husband recently, and they're talking about Scandinavia.
And I'm trying to join in the conversation as if I know anything.
It comes to light that I clearly think Scandinavia is a country.
And then gently, ever so gently, my mother -in -law points out that Scandinavia is not a single country, but a region.
And I was like, why would they go and name a region, something that does sound so much like a country?
And doesn't it have a flag?
And she was like, Scandinavia doesn't actually have a flag.
But I can see how you would get confused because many of the flags of these countries, they're so similar.
And my husband says like, no, they're not.
And did she ask you to produce on the spot your actual PhD certificate to prove that you so that she could shred it?
So she could rescind my credentials?
No, as I said, my mother -in -law is very gentle and tactful.
And it's not the first time that she's encountered the oceans of my ignorance.
So I think she's pretty good at finding a way out of the situation that allows me to save face.
But it is sort of shocking, actually, to spend your entire adult life thinking that a region is a country.
By the way, the Norwigian people live in Scandinavia.
That's a small example.
But let me give you a bigger one.
I, for a very long time, subscribe to this theory of self -control called ego depletion.
Have you heard of it?
I have, I think from you.
And it's one of those phrases that is so compelling as a name.
Yeah, it's incredibly compelling.
It's a theory and it's also a metaphor.
And it goes like this.
Roy Baumeister, among others, but chiefly Roy Baumeister, a brilliant psychologist, was interested in what's really going on with self -control and why is self -control so hard and why is it that after a long day we end up maybe drinking too much or eating too much or losing our temper?
His theory of self -control was that the self, the ego, is a limited resource.
And the way this works is that if you use up your self -control, as it were, if you do one, two, three, four hard things in a row, you have to concentrate on a boring proofreading task for your work and then you have to control your temper and then you have to do something else that your self -control
bit by bit goes down to the point where you don't have enough left.
And that's why you end up acting impulsively at the end of a long day or after doing a series of hard things.
I'm still waiting for the sword to drop, though, because to me it sounds like it should be true.
Well, there was a study where you have to do some tasks that require self -control.
Stuff that takes a lot of concentration is very tedious and unfun and therefore requires some amount of impulse control because you have to do it and not let your mind wander.
And in one condition, the research subjects drank some Splenda sweetened lemonade.
And another condition, they drank sugar sweetened lemonade.
And the idea is if self -control is a limited resource, if the ego is a limited resource, maybe it runs on sugar because we know the brain essentially does run on glucose.
The result of the study was striking.
Only the subjects who drank the sugar sweetened lemonade ended up having this kind of bounce back in their ability to exert self -control on a subsequent task.
And so not only did we have this compelling metaphor, self -control is a limited resource, but now we have what seems like brain science.
The limited resource is not just a metaphor, it's a thing.
So you're just persuading me more and more and more and more that ego depletion is real.
Yeah, and that's where I was.
It was so provocative.
And here's the sword dropping.
So in quiet ways, one PhD student after another was trying to actually do these ego depletion experiments, and they were failing to find the ego depletion effect.
Then it turns out that the lemonade study that I just told you about does not replicate.
When you do it again with bigger samples, you don't get the effect.
What the field now believes, which is a big update, most people think that what happens when you do something that requires you to choose an effortful, not so fun option over a really fun, immediately gratifying one is not that you run out of self -control, not that your brain uses up more glucose or energy,
but really that you're getting a signal, the sensation that, hmm, there is a cost to what you're doing.
And that feeling of effort or that feeling of displeasure is just like a counter.
Like, hey, keep in mind that what you're doing here is coming at a cost, even an opportunity cost, things that you could otherwise use your attention to do.
What did it cost you to give up your belief in that?
I'm guessing not very much.
Were you heavily invested yourself in the theory of ego depletion?
I'm sure I had written papers on self -control that alluded to ego depletion.
I don't think, and this is maybe one reason why I was able to update my beliefs more readily than otherwise, I don't think that I had my reputation to lose.
It wasn't my theory.
It was Roy Baumeister's theory.
So what did Roy Baumeister lose from having his ego depletion theory picked apart?
Well, I'll tell you, it's kind of an ongoing saga.
I think Roy Baumeister stands by his original proposition, maybe with some slight modifications.
He's a giant of a social psychologist who, you know, he should be pretty comfortable walking away from that one theory.
Right, because he's got enough.
He has a half dozen, you know, the nature of consciousness, why we have self -esteem, the list goes on.
But I do think that when you talk about grit, for example, like what if everything I have claimed about grit is simply untrue?
How easy will it be for me to turn around, make a 180, and say, you know what, I just need to announce to everyone that success doesn't come from passion and perseverance.
So let's have that thought experiment for a minute.
Oh, this is so uncomfortable.
I don't really want to do it.
No, no, wait, hold on.
I'm going to put up my grown up pants.
Okay, go. We can talk about ice cream sundaes if you'd prefer, if that's where comfortable.
No, self control. Let's do the better, more gratifying thing in the long run.
So you're an academic who's built a reputation in the academic arena and in the public arena, really around this one idea of grit.
And there are people who've written about grit not being the great explanatory factor that you have claimed it is.
So how do you process those claims?
And how do you allow yourself to take them in without your ego getting in the way and saying, well, let me take a look at what's being said here.
And let me reexamine my research and my argument to make sure that I'm on the right track.
So we all know what the right thing to do is, we all know that when somebody criticizes you and your work, it's to hire a private investigator to trash your critics.
Yes, exactly. We all know that.
No, we all know that we're supposed to be intellectually humble.
Let me give you a little quiz, Steven, and I'm not avoiding the question.
I'm going to answer these questions for myself.
They're intellectual humility questions.
And then let's see how I do in terms of grit.
Can I just say, if this is a quiz to measure intellectual humility, I have a lot.
Let's see how you do.
Actually, I'm just going to read them all to you.
Do you want to just keep a tally?
Okay. First question, yes or no?
I question my own opinions, positions, and viewpoints because they could be wrong.
Okay. I reconsider my opinions when presented with new evidence.
Isn't that kind of the same as number one?
They're all kind of the same.
This is the way scales work.
I recognize the value and opinions that are different from my own.
I accept that my beliefs and attitudes may be wrong.
In the face of conflicting evidence, I am open to changing my opinions.
I like finding out new information that differs from what I already think is true.
Okay. So how'd you do?
I hate these kind of things because yes or no is hard for me.
Even though I ridiculed the first two as being very, very similar, there were a lot of distinctions as we went.
And so if I had had a scale of let's say zero to five, I think I would have been pretty variegated.
But I answered yes to four of the six, numbers one, two, three, and five, and no to four and six.
So you answered no to accept that my beliefs and attitudes may be wrong.
And I like finding out new information that differs from what I already think is true.
Yeah, I think that's painful.
Even if it's not a public thing, even if it's not a costly thing, I feel a little bit like a dummy.
Like, wait a minute, why was I convinced that was true?
And now I see evidence and plainly it's not.
And then you feel worse, not better.
Correct. And I'm with you.
I think that when I'm criticized about grit, you know, grit is not nearly as predictive as Angela Duckworth makes it out to be.
Or grit is essentially the same thing as five, six, or seven other things that psychologists had been studying for centuries.
It stings. I kind of want to first show that I'm right before I take any steps towards intellectual humility.
And of course, those are at odds with each other.
But let me tell you, over the last year or two, I've started to work more closely with Danny Kahneman, our friend, great psychologist, thinker.
And I have watched his facial expressions very carefully when we are working through a problem, and he makes a correction of himself.
We'll be talking about something, and he will say, I'm wrong.
And what's interesting is that he's simultaneously smiling.
He lights up. Yeah, yeah, he really does.
Right. Well, I know he's argued that the best thing about being wrong is you have a new set of information to play with your learning, which is an extremely healthy attitude.
But I think it's taken him a lot, a lot, a lot of years to get there.
I really have tried to imitate that.
I was like, wow, what would it be to feel like I'm wrong with a smiley face?
And I think it's working.
I try it with my own students.
I'm like arguing with them.
And then I realize that they've made a point and I say, I'm wrong.
I just smile at the same time.
And I think saying it completely straightforwardly, not you have a good point there.
Right. Literally saying, I'm wrong.
I made a mistake. So Adam Grant, your colleague, has written this book called Think Again.
And I know that one argument about why people have such a hard time changing their minds is because a change of mind is essentially a threat to your identity, your opinions, your beliefs, your research, the stories you tell, et cetera.
They are who you are.
We all feel that we are the kind of people who hold a certain set of beliefs or ideas, or we think certain facts or scenarios to be true.
And then if we're presented with evidence that perhaps are not true, then am I the me who I thought I was?
And even if it's not costly in a reputational way, I think it can shake people up enough to dissuade them from wanting to examine themselves in that way.
The only like Jedi master trick out of that is to rest your identity on intellectual humility or call it open mindedness or thinking of yourself as a curious person, whatever it is that you can build into your identity that gives you an escape route out of this.
I've been thinking about this in the context of something that Lee Ross called the fundamental attribution error.
This is one of the great social psychologists ever.
Lee Ross did pass away recently.
He was famous for the fundamental attribution error that is overly attributing the behavior of people to their personalities and underweighting situational factors.
You know, somebody comes late to a meeting and you're like, ugh, they're lazy and unconscious, and then ignoring the fact that they may have gotten tied up in traffic or had situational constraints.
It became this bedrock principle in all of psychology to look for the situational explanations for what people do.
But one of the last things he wrote was called literally from the fundamental attribution error to the truly fundamental attribution error and beyond my research journey.
And the fundamental attribution error that he thinks is truly the problem is the illusion of personal objectivity, the illusion that you see the world as it is, not as you interpret it to be, but just as it is.
And this illusion that we have clear -eyed objectivity gets us into trouble, especially when it comes to politics and war, but, you know, our marriages and work.
So if I feel like I have a handle on the way the world really is as a psychologist, I'm on thin nights.
Are you talking about the notion that some people believe there is an objective truth in all cases versus subjective views, or is it something different?
I'm not talking about, like, relativism.
It's not that epistemologically deep.
I don't think what he wanted to say is, like, we're all living in a dream.
It's just to say that the human mind is like a meaning -making machine, and we're constantly making inferences, we're leaping to conclusions.
There is this universal flaw of human cognition where it feels so real.
Like, if you have strong views about what's going on politically in this country, the idea that you could be just as wrong as your mortal enemy across the aisle is very hard to truly appreciate.
Still to come on No Stupid Questions, Stephen and Angela discuss how the desire for consistency can result in a change of beliefs.
Oh, look, I just updated a belief.
Before we return to Stephen and Angela's conversation about the challenge of changing your mind, let's hear some of your thoughts on the topic.
We asked listeners to tell us about a moment when they realized they were wrong.
A Twitter user called at that WMD writes, I used to be for the death penalty.
I remember arguing with my classmates in law school that it's only fair if you commit a serious enough crime, murder, you pay with your life.
Oddly enough, the movie The Green Mile really showed me the issue in a way that made me question my beliefs.
At 1976, Bulldog says, when we had forced integration into our white schools in South Mississippi in 1970, the guys from the other side of town were no different from us.
That realization changed my life completely.
I honestly felt stupid for not realizing it before.
At Mostly Bitter writes, I once mixed up the meanings of anthropologist and philanthropist and ended up arguing about it with a friend for much longer than I should have.
Still painful to think about.
Mostly Bitter, I have to say that seems pretty on brand for your username.
If you'd like your thoughts to appear on an upcoming show, make sure to follow our Twitter account at NSQShow.
Now back to Stephen and Angela's conversation about the psychology of changing your mind.
We've been spending time thinking about the areas and ways in which it can be really hard to change your mind or change your position.
When I think about changing your mind, I think about incentives and cost.
And it seems one area in which changing your mind is really costly is politics.
Politicians are routinely punished if they change their positions.
Yeah, because you're a flip -flopper, you're not trustworthy, and you're disloyal.
And also, you've built a constituency around a certain belief, and now the only chance you have on that position at least is to go get a different constituency, which is really, especially in a two -party system, really hard.
So I understand why politicians very rarely will quote change your mind.
But then I try to think about areas where people really do change their minds routinely.
You know, science, theoretically, I should say when I talk about academia and science, I see them as a little bit different because in academia, everybody's got a reputation.
But the goal of science is to find stuff out.
And you don't do that except by coming up with a lot of hypotheses, many of which turn out to be not true.
I think two other areas are sports.
