Loserthink: How Untrained Brains Are Ruining America

by Scott Adams

For example, a trained engineer learns a certain way of thinking about the world that overlaps but is different from how a lawyer, a philosopher, or an economist thinks. Having any one of those skill sets puts you way ahead in understanding the world and thinking about it productively. But unless you have sampled the thinking techniques across different fields, you are missing a lot. And again, to be super clear, I am not talking about the facts one learns in those disciplines. I am only talking about the techniques of thinking that students of those fields pick up during the process of learning. The good news is that you don’t need to master the fields of engineering, science, economics, philosophy, law, or any other field in order to learn the basics of how to think the way experts in those areas think. For example, if you didn’t know what the concept of sunk costs is all about, I could explain it in thirty seconds and you would fully understand it. Sunk costs: Money you already spent shouldn’t influence your decision about what to do next, but for psychological reasons, it often does.

Learning how to think productively does not come naturally to any of us. But it is easy to learn. You simply have to be exposed to the techniques and you’ll likely remember them for the rest of your life. The techniques are simple to understand and easy to master. This book will set your brain filters to recognize loserthink wherever you encounter it, in others and in yourself. We humans give greater weight to things that have names. And giving loserthink its name creates a shorthand way of mocking people who practice unproductive thinking. Mockery gets a bad rap, but I think we can agree it can be useful when intelligently applied. For example, mocking people for lying probably helps to reduce future lies and make the world a better place, whereas mocking people for things they can’t change is just being a jerk.

If you have studied psychology and economics, you would understand that the overwhelming consensus of climate scientists could easily be more wrong than right, and it wouldn’t be unusual in human history. Whenever you have money, reputations, power, ego, and complexity in play, it is irrational to assume you are seeing objective science. The fields of psychology and economics have shown us in a thousand ways that people are influenced by all sorts of forces while generally not being aware of how much they are being biased. In other words, the only way one could be dead certain that the consensus of scientists is right on any topic that can’t be replicated in a controlled experiment, or proven true by math, is by ignoring the entire fields of psychology, economics, history, and—if you are older—your own experience.

I have been using a persuasion skill set for most of my adult life to help people see the world more clearly. And I know from experience that doing so isn’t a task the untrained can do. Your smart friends don’t have the right tools and techniques to get out of their mental prisons, and there’s a good chance that describes you as well. The business models of the press and social media act in concert to keep you in your mental prison, like some sort of indentured servant working on a click farm. As long as you are clicking on the media’s content, that’s all they need from you. And they know you’ll click with more passion if they can keep you spinning around in your biased bubble.

Our old understanding of reality is rapidly dissolving. Fake news and conspiracy theories have become the building blocks of what we mistakenly believe to be the world we live in. Any two of us can look at the same evidence and have entirely different interpretations of what it all means. Politicians, businesses, and even scientists routinely mislead us. Not always, and not necessarily intentionally, but often enough that we generally can’t be sure what is true and what is not.

The inevitable outcome of the press having a business model that rewards brain manipulation versus accuracy is what I call political warming. As the press becomes increasingly skilled at stimulating the emotion centers in our brains, one should expect the public to be in a continuous state of fight-or-flight anxiety. We’re more scared and angry than I imagine we ever have been, at least since World War II. And that means bigger storms ahead in the form of protests and divisiveness. As I write this book, the news is full of appeals for more civility in politics. Nearly everyone recognizes that the country is becoming more divided and we are turning on each other in a way we have never seen before. The loserthink way of looking at the situation is that we need to try harder to be nice to each other. But that prescription misdiagnoses the problem. People did not suddenly become different in a fundamental way. The business model of the press manipulated our brains until our emotions overwhelmed whatever traces of rationality we started with. You can’t fix that by trying harder to be nice.

If you spend more than five minutes on the Internet, you’ll notice people branding other people as apologists, racists, trolls, and other words that mean “evil.” That’s usually a form of loserthink. Just to be clear, if you are talking about someone who keeps the remaining parts of his victims in a freezer in his basement, go ahead and call that person evil. I’d call it mental illness, but I don’t see much downside in labeling it evil at the same time. In this example, I’m assuming there is no doubt on the facts of the case. The loserthink comes into play when we imagine we can read people’s minds (as opposed to observing their actions) and we totally-definitely see some evil in there. We humans did not evolve to be mind readers. We did evolve to jump to ridiculous conclusions while imagining we did not. So if you are playing the odds, your confidence that you can see some evil in another person’s soul is probably closer to being batshit crazy than to being the first known human with psychic powers.

My view on projection is that a professional with a background and education in psychology, who has spent time with a particular client, might be capable of diagnosing projection. And it makes sense that a liar would have a filter on the world in which everyone else is lying too. So I do think projection is a real thing, and I assume professionals can identify it in individuals more often than chance would suggest. The problem occurs when people on social media who are neither mental health professionals nor personally familiar with the target of their comments diagnose strangers as experiencing projection. That’s closer to loserthink than science.

If I accuse you of being a liar, it might be because I’m a liar who is projecting, but it could easily be that I’m right and I have caught you in more than one lie. Those situations look the same, and realistically we’re usually not in a position to do fact-checking. Humans aren’t good fact-checkers. As evidence of that claim, see every discussion of politics ever.

There are two ways to look at the thing we call ego. One of those ways is extraordinarily useful. The other way is loserthink. And by that I mean it almost guarantees you will be unsuccessful in your career and your personal life. The productive way to think of your ego is to consider it a tool, as opposed to a reflection of who you are on some core level. If you think your ego is a tool, you can choose to dial it up when needed and dial it down when it would be an obstacle. When we humans hold a higher opinion of our abilities than the facts warrant, that mindset can lead to better results in sports, test taking, romance, our social lives, careers, and more. That’s because confidence is strongly correlated with success. The sweet spot for self-confidence involves operating with a belief that you can do more than the available evidence suggests, but not so much more that it would be crazy.

Once you embrace the reality that we all present the “enhanced” versions of our real selves, all the time, you can relax a bit and get into character. It is frightening to believe you are the pretender in a room full of confident professionals. Luckily, that is rarely a description of reality. The common situation—and the one you should treat as true—is that we are deeply flawed humans pretending to be otherwise. You aren’t the one defective person in the room. Ever.

Later in this book, I present my case for why we are entering a Golden Age. You might quibble with the details of my optimism, but note how it makes you feel, and let that feeling be your reward as you train yourself to seek good news and positive interpretations of reality. Your natural instinct is to notice problems, but you can train yourself to think more positively and to notice the good in things. All it takes is intention and practice. Try it for a week and you will notice a difference in yourself. You’ll probably feel happier and less anxious, but—equally important—you will discover a more accurate filter on reality.

As a rule, we can’t always tell the difference between the people who are far smarter than us and the people who are dumber. Both groups make choices we can’t understand. That’s an important thing to keep in mind. If your opinion is that another person’s idea is terrible, you can only be sure that at least one of you is stupid. You can’t really know which one of you it is except in rare cases in which things can be objectively measured.

The article includes a link to a known hoax—the idea that President Trump called racists in Charlottesville “fine people.” That fake news is still widely reported as fact. The president was not referring to the racists, or anyone “marching with them” at Charlottesville, as fine people. He was referring to both sides of the Confederate statue issue as fine people. He clarified his opinion and denounced the racists (as he has done many times) when asked to do so. The existence of a known hoax in the article suggests the writer either believes the hoax, which discredits the rest of his opinions, or he is intentionally promoting a hoax, which also means his opinion lacks credibility. Those are a few explanations I can imagine.

ALIEN SCOUT: “The planet is dominated by some sort of organic robots. Their operating system uses a faulty pattern recognition algorithm that is designed to make it easier for them to hate each other.” Nailed it! Our tiny brains don’t have the capacity to grasp the complexities of life and then process that knowledge to make smart decisions. We only think we can. What we do instead of rational decision-making is employ a sloppy form of pattern recognition to make sense of our world. There are three important things to know about human beings in order to understand why we do the things we do. Humans use pattern recognition to understand their world. Humans are very bad at pattern recognition. And they don’t know it.

My first bestseller got me scads of attention and lots of happy readers who gave me stellar reviews. I assumed they were spring-loaded to buy my next book too, and I assumed new readers would discover me as well. In other words, I was hoping history would repeat. I published my follow-up book, Dogbert’s Top Secret Management Handbook, and it did well enough to top the nonfiction bestseller list. But overall, it sold about half as many books as the first. Why the heck did history decide to stop repeating just when I needed it??? One day my publisher explained to me that nonfiction books tend to follow the same pattern that mine had. The authors who consistently wrote one bestseller after another were fiction authors. Consumers of fiction want more of the kind of writing they like, only next time with different characters and stories. Consumers of nonfiction books apparently think some version of “I already know what that author has to say.” Especially when the topic seems to be in the same domain as the previous book. The defense against that pattern, for nonfiction writers, is to write books on entirely new topics if the audience lets you get away with it, the way Malcolm Gladwell and Michael Lewis do. I use the same strategy now.

Consider the stock market. That is a bundle of competing histories. You might be looking at the track records of top management. You might be looking at the history of price competition in this market. You might be looking at the history of unexpected innovations. Every company is a collection of patterns. Which ones matter? The smartest people in the investment world will tell you the quality of management is the most predictive variable. They will also advise you to buy index funds instead of individual stocks because no one can consistently predict how managers will perform. Maybe the managers of some public companies got lucky with success a few times in the past. Maybe their skills were perfectly suited for the last situation but not this one.

And when you do see history apparently repeating, ask yourself if you needed to know history to make your prediction. For example, if every time someone challenges a professional MMA fighter to a bar fight, the trained fighter either wins or refuses to fight, that might seem to us like a predictive history. But you could predict the same two probable outcomes with no knowledge of history. The better fighter should be expected to win a fight. And a professional fighter would know that the legal system would treat him harshly for fighting a drunk with no special fighting skills.

For the nitpickers reading this chapter, I acknowledge that we only understand human nature because we observe how people have acted throughout history. History gives us useful insight on how humans act. But that insight is useful only in simple cases. Will people who are hungry seek food? Yes. Will people exploit loopholes for personal gain? Yes. Will people lie if they think it helps a lot and they can get away with it? Yes. When we talk about the idea of history repeating, we’re usually not talking about the simple and predictable impulses of human beings. Usually we’re comparing, for example, one complicated set of negotiations with hundreds of moving parts to some past situation in which the variables were substantially different but we are still reminded of it.

I’m obviously exaggerating for effect, but I think you get the idea. For simple situations, experts usually agree. The problem comes with complicated situations in which there are opportunities for lots of judgment calls. And when I say experts, in this context I mean anyone with extra knowledge of a topic, including your coworkers. If you are wondering how skeptical you should be about expert advice on complicated issues, keep in mind that the next expert probably has no respect for the last expert. And vice versa.

For most topics of national or global interest, you can’t rely on biased experts to sort things out for you, and those are the only experts you are likely to encounter. We generally have to rely on our own cleverness to discern truth from fake news. But how does one do that? If you are like most people, you look for a one-variable shortcut. And sometimes that works. For example, years ago, when Newsweek was a physical magazine, they invited me to create a Dilbert-themed cover. The catch was that they were trying to decide between using my art versus another option in which they would use an attractive female face on the cover. I created the art, but I knew it was a waste of time. The one variable that mattered was that nearly all humans enjoy looking at attractive female faces.

The gist of it is that humans are irrational creatures who mistakenly believe they use logic and reason to arrive at decisions. The reality, which science has proven in lots of different ways, is that we routinely make irrational decisions and then try to rationalize them. That’s why the people who disagree with you so often appear to be not just wrong, but totally bonkers. And importantly, they think exactly the same about you.1

The way human minds are wired, if we take a firm position on a topic, we are unlikely to change our minds even when facts emerge that debunk our initial belief. That’s why it is smarter to not commit to a firm opinion when facts are still coming into focus. My mantra in these situations is: But I could be totally wrong. That gives me the mental freedom to later adjust my opinion if needed. Always ask yourself if the opposite of your theory could be true. Doing so keeps you humble and less susceptible to bias until you get to the truth of the situation.

PROVING A NEGATIVE If any part of your argument depends on asking critics to “prove it isn’t true,” you are thinking like a cult member. Generally speaking, it isn’t possible to prove things don’t exist. The best you can do is show that you can’t detect the existence of something. But that is very different from proving something can’t be done or doesn’t exist.

The secret to thwarting couch lock of any sort is to stop imagining everything you need to do, and start imagining the smallest step that you can do without much real effort. If you feel you can’t talk yourself into standing up and doing something that needs to get done, talk yourself into moving your pinky finger. Then move it. As you move your pinky, you will immediately regain the sense of agency over your body that had been temporarily missing. Moving your pinky finger is easy no matter how stoned, tired, depressed, or unmotivated you are. Do what you can do, not what you can’t. Then build on the momentum.

In 1988, I decided to pivot from my stalled corporate career to become a cartoonist. But how does one become a cartoonist? Where do you start? What do you do first? I had no idea. The enormity of the challenge was a huge mental obstacle. So I did the smallest task I could talk myself into doing. I drove to the local art supply store and bought some high-quality pens and paper for drawing. That was all I did that day to begin working on my long-term career objective. Later that week, I sat down with my pens and paper and started doodling, mostly to test the quality of the materials and to see how much I liked them. And that was all I did that day. I decided to set my alarm clock half an hour earlier than normal from that day on so I would have time to draw some comics, for practice, and drink coffee before work. That became my morning ritual. Each step was tiny, but they added up. By 1989, I had assembled enough microsteps to get exactly where I wanted to be. That year, Dilbert started running in newspapers across the country. Looking back, I see the amount of effort I put into becoming a cartoonist was enormous. But on any particular day, the effort was quite manageable. And that’s how life works in lots of realms. We take continuous microsteps that sum up to big things over time.

One of the fringe benefits of being mildly famous is that I meet a lot of successful entrepreneurs. I also know lots of people who have failed so often it seems intentional. If I had to pick one defining characteristic that separates the successful from the unsuccessful, it would be luck. But if I had to pick two defining characteristics, the other one would be a sense of control. Successful people, and people who will someday be successful, seem to believe they can steer their fate by their actions. Whether they are right about that or not, it’s a winning mindset. People who think they control their situations will put more effort into doing so.

Perhaps the most important thing the book does is move people’s minds from wondering how to succeed in a world that seems mostly driven by luck, to habit-driven systems in which you are evolving from a situation with low odds of finding luck to situations with better odds. When you spend time every day doing something productive, whether that involves learning something useful or exercising, for example, you gain a sense of control over your reality. And that sense of control can be both motivating and satisfying, which helps you do more of what works. At the other extreme, people who are consistently unsuccessful often believe they are victims of life, although the details of that victimhood can differ.

You can figure out which group you are in by asking yourself what is keeping you from achieving your objectives in life. Is the first answer that comes to mind something about your own efforts? Or did you immediately think about an obstacle that life has put in your way? If you take full responsibility for your outcomes, even while knowing much of it depends on luck, that’s how rich people think. If you blame something beyond your direct control, you’re probably engaged in loserthink, and your outcomes will reflect it. Now let me talk directly to the people who would like to be successful in life but are “thinking like poor people.” And by that I mean you believe you are not the primary authors of your own life experience. The place to start is by changing that mindset. If you don’t fix that first, don’t expect anything else to work out for you. I think nearly every successful person would agree with me on this point: get your mind right first. Everything else depends on that.

Capitalism is similar to both science and fishing in that it is largely a failure machine. Most startups fail, for example, and most companies eventually go out of business, one way or another. But while all that failing is happening, employees are getting paid, vendors are selling products and services to the doomed business while it lasts, and the economy chugs along. You only need a small percentage of companies to succeed in order to have a strong economy.

The skill one needs for comparing things is similar in a sense to any other human skill. The people who have been taught to do it right, and the people who have practiced it over time, are going to be a lot better at it than people who are just winging it. Learning a new skill and practicing it is a system that works for just about any talent you can describe. For most other types of skills, we are completely aware of our limited capabilities compared to those who have been trained. For example, I know I shouldn’t get in a fight with someone who has a black belt in karate. I know I shouldn’t get in a debate about statistics with a professional statistician. But if I had never been formally educated in “comparing things,” I probably wouldn’t even know it was a skill that could be improved. And if I don’t know it is a learned skill, I probably think I am good at it already. That kind of blind spot can become a wall in your mental prison.

In political discussions, you rarely see anything like a full description of the costs and benefits. Political advocates focus on the costs of a plan when they hate it and the benefits when they like it. People who follow politics mimic the advocates and end up with halfpinions instead of full opinions. Ideally, you want to consider all the impacts of your decisions, both now and later. But the present has one quality that the future does not: certainty. You can often predict with confidence what will happen tomorrow, but predicting events more than a year in the future gets iffy fast. In the business world, no one takes too seriously predictions that are more than three years out. That’s a good rule of thumb. Financial predictions that are more than three years out are about as useful as underpants on a robot.

The world in general is becoming more of a confusopoly. If you have a firm opinion about international trade deals, the future of cryptocurrencies, or any of a thousand other complicated topics, you might be engaging in loserthink. I say that because no one should be confident in the face of complexity. You might have arrived at your certainty by trusting experts. But experts can’t penetrate complexity either. At least not so often that you can trust the next one to get it right because the last one did. Experts have been wrong—at least some of them have—about nearly every complicated event in history. To be fair, at least one expert usually gets it right no matter the topic. But how do you know ahead of time which expert will be right? That would require you to be an expert about those particular experts, and you probably are not anything like that.

STRAIGHT-LINE PREDICTIONS Economists spend a lot of time trying to predict what will happen to people’s money if one or more variables in the world are tweaked. If you try to predict the future by assuming no variables ever change, you get predictions that look like these: “The horse is here to stay but the automobile is only a novelty—a fad.” —The president of Michigan Savings Bank advising Henry Ford’s lawyer not to invest in Ford Motor Co., 19032 “The world potential market for copying machines is 5,000 at most.” —IBM, to the eventual founders of Xerox, saying the photocopier had no market large enough to justify production, 19593 “There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home.” —Ken Olsen, president, chairman, and founder of Digital Equipment Corp., 19774 “Stocks have reached what looks like a permanently high plateau.” —Irving Fisher, professor of economics, Yale University, 19295 “We don’t like their sound, and guitar music is on the way out.” —Decca Records, rejecting the Beatles, 19626

Straight-line predictions told us the population would increase faster than the food supply. The opposite happened. Straight-line predictions told us we would run out of fossil fuels, but we keep finding new sources. We humans are not good at predicting. And any notion that we have developed that superpower, in light of all observations to the contrary, is pure loserthink. Straight-line predictions are generally wrong, and dangerous if you act on them. Still, they are not useless. Sometimes a straight-line prediction can encourage people to make the changes necessary to avoid a bad outcome. And sometimes you can rule out some possible outcomes, which can be helpful. But don’t confuse helpful with accurate.

If you tried to describe what you meant by problematic, you might sound like this: “I don’t see any specific problems with your plan, but I feel as if there must be some.” You would be ignored or mocked for having such an empty opinion. But if you say the plan is problematic, you have suggested there is some sort of commonsense reason to expect problems, and geniuses such as yourself can recognize those problems. To be clear, you might be absolutely right about the risk of unspecified future problems. Some plans are so bad it would take all day to list all the ways they can go wrong. Those situations are indeed problematic. But in those cases, you can probably describe realistic scenarios for how things might go wrong. If the best you can do is label something problematic without offering some reasonable-sounding speculation on exactly how that might be the case, you are engaging in loserthink.

How you feel about President Trump’s criticisms of the press depends on how accurate you think the press has been when covering him. If you believe the press has been willfully inaccurate to the point of delegitimizing itself, any criticism of the press is warranted, even if it comes from a president. If you think the press has been an honest broker of facts, you might believe that criticizing the free press is something only dictators do. Former president Jimmy Carter, who no one would call a dictator, said this about press coverage of President Trump: “I think the media have been harder on Trump than any other president certainly that I’ve known about. I think they feel free to claim that Trump is mentally deranged and everything else without hesitation.”

MENTIONING IS NOT COMPARING Let me tell you about some of the things I enjoy in life. I love my girlfriend, good food, exercise, creative ideas, dogs, cats, and world peace. That list seems uncontroversial, doesn’t it? But if someone in a mental prison sees this list, they might write a snarky article or tweet claiming I “compared my girlfriend to a dog.” If you find yourself arguing that someone else has “compared” two things in a way you feel is offensive—but the so-called comparison is in the form of a list—you might be in a mental prison. Sometimes things are on the same list because they have something trivial in common. My grocery list has cheese and fabric softener on it, but that doesn’t mean I am comparing cheese to fabric softener. All they have in common is that they come from the same store. One is not being compared to the other. You might be thinking this “compared to” problem is rare. But if you watch political news, you see it all the time. It’s a form of gotcha commentary at worst and of stupidity at best. Let’s split the difference and call it loserthink, because it doesn’t make anything better for anyone.

Our DNA does program us to a huge degree. But a more productive way of thinking about your experience in this life is that you are what you do. And you have some executive control over what you do. In other words, you can change who you are by changing what you do. For example, learning good manners and making it a habit to use them often will turn you into a polite person even if you weren’t “born that way.” One of the best mental habits you can develop is to think in positive terms even when you don’t feel positive.2 For example, I was a negative person in my twenties, but I didn’t know it. I thought I was humorously pointing out the flaws in everything around me. I wasn’t aware of how damaging it was to the people who had to listen to it. Nor did I realize how the negativity affected my own sense of happiness. Dwelling on the negative is expensive in terms of your social life, your mental health, and even your career success. People like to be around positive people, for all the right reasons. One day a friend explained to me with brutal honesty (alcohol might have been involved) that I was too negative and it was a drag. I was surprised to hear that my continuous complaining about just about everything wasn’t being well received by the people I liked most. So I set out to change that with a simple technique that I borrowed from another friend: if I need to talk about something negative, I pair it with at least one positive thought. I’ve made such a habit of this over t...

CLIMATE CHANGE In 2018, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released a “dire” prediction that climate change could depress GDP by 10 percent in eighty years. That might be the best news you have heard on the topic, albeit disguised as terrible news. In eighty years, the world is likely to be five to ten times wealthier, assuming normal trends, and we wouldn’t even notice we were 10 percent worse off than we might have been without climate change.

Removing Regulatory and Legal Obstacles The healthcare situation in the United States is burdened by a tangle of rules and regulations that have evolved over time to choke out the benefits of free markets and competition. One assumes that healthcare lobbyists, the natural complexity of the topic, and an inefficient government are the base problem. But there is reason for some optimism, as the Trump administration is making a major push to modify federal laws and processes to improve competition in all areas of healthcare. It is too early to know how all that will shake out, but efficient market competition is generally good for consumers.

Loserthink involves waiting until you know how to do something right before you do anything at all. That strategy makes sense only when it is physically or financially dangerous to make a mistake. For most ambitions in life, we can jump in, make some mistakes, and figure it out from there. If you get embarrassed in the process, good for you! It means you just learned that embarrassment doesn’t kill you. And that, my friends, is like a superpower. If you can’t figure out how to do a task the right way, do it the wrong way and watch how quickly you get free advice.

People who are often the subject of news and articles, such as me, know that perhaps 60 percent of the time the reporting is either completely wrong or lacks important context that would change your opinion of the situation. If, during the course of this book, you find yourself thinking I am far too distrustful of experts, the media, and people in general, you have to understand my context. If you see a story about a stranger, you usually can’t tell how accurate it is. But when I see a story about me, I know exactly what they get wrong. The same is true for nearly every negative story you hear about me on the Internet. I know the various scandalous stories about me are fake because I know what context they leave out. But you can’t tell.

We live in a world in which it is dangerous to ignore the advice of experts, but it is almost as dangerous to follow their advice. The trick is to know when the experts are the solution and when they are the jailers of your mental prison. I find it most useful to believe experts when the situation is simple and there is some historical situation much like it. In those cases, experts have a good handle on what works and what doesn’t. But for situations in which there is overwhelming complexity, there is no historical pattern that is predictive, and experts disagree, treat that sort of expert opinion as no more useful than an educated guess.

The Roseanne situation is what caused me to suggest the Forty-Eight-Hour Rule for public clarifications. The rule, if followed, would allow anyone to clarify a statement that has been interpreted negatively. Once the clarification is given, I think the press and the public should accept the clarification. But wait, you say—what if the clarification is nothing but an ass-covering lie? The Forty-Eight-Hour Rule suggests you should accept the lie as if it were the truth, then move on. That’s how a lot of social interactions work. We call it “manners.” YOUR FRIEND: Sorry I’m so late. Traffic was terrible! YOU (THINKING): That’s probably a lie. YOU (TALKING): Glad you got here safely! Let me buy you a drink. We can’t be the thought police. It isn’t a practical way to run a society. But it is both practical and useful to insist that people do and say the right things. If you have evil thoughts, but consistently do and say things that are good for the world, you’re a good person in my book. Shorter version: You are what you do, not what you think.

People who have studied psychology and persuasion are already primed to know they can be confident and wrong at the same time. But almost everyone else thinks their sense of confidence is a good indicator of how right they are. Maybe they have never noticed the high levels of confidence coming from the people who totally disagree with them. Confidence is not a reliable signal of rightness, at least not when it comes to the big political and social questions. We generally observe high levels of confidence from opposite positions on every issue. To help people out of their mental prisons, first you must train them to stop trusting their understanding of the world.

trapped in mental prisons, not rational actors. In my experience, if someone has up to three reasons for an opinion, that person might have a strong case. But people who present laundry lists of ten reasons rarely have a strong case. I can’t say this rule of thumb is predictive every time, but you can easily test the validity of a person’s laundry list with this request: Give me the strongest argument or evidence on your list that supports your point. Just one, please. Your critic will usually smell a trap, resist your request, and demand that you consider all the damning evidence on the laundry list. Here’s how to reply: In the interest of time, would you agree that if I can debunk your strongest point, you should rethink all of your points that are weaker than the one I debunk? If you can’t debunk the strongest point, you might be the one in the mental prison in this case. But if you can, I don’t recommend debunking anything else on the list, even if you have the time and desire. Remember, your goal is to reduce the other person’s confidence in their rightness. Taking their strongest argument off the table (if you can) should be enough to get that done.

Don’t play Whac-A-Mole with people who have laundry lists of reasons supporting their hallucinations. Ask for their strongest point only, and debunk it if you can. Target their undue confidence, not their entire laundry list.

DEFINE THE WEEDS One of the ways people lock themselves in mental prisons is by not differentiating between the things that matter and the things that do not. I blame the news and social media for that, because unimportant news can often be the most entertaining and most profitable. Our human instinct is to assume that whatever subject we think about the most must also be the most important. That is backward, of course, because we should be picking the most important topics to think about the most. The business model of the news industry and the design of social media almost guarantee we will be thinking the most about the least important topics. Your news sources can get more clicks about a political gaffe or a hypocritical opinion than they can from chattering about the boring details of a new law or discussing a disaster that was skillfully avoided.

None of us are good at mind reading, and we know it, even if we don’t admit it. Once you have introduced the mind reading criticism, people will be primed to notice it, and the idea will grow in power over time. I know that to be true because my followers on social media throw it in my face every time I cross the subtle line from judging people by their actions to judging them by what I assume are their intentions. It’s a sticky idea.