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scout mindset: the motivation to see things as they are, not as you wish they were.
motivated reasoning—in which our unconscious motives affect the conclusions we draw.
Even if you’ve never heard the phrase motivated reasoning, I’m sure you’re already familiar with the phenomenon. It’s all around you under different names—denial, wishful thinking, confirmation bias, rationalization, tribalism, self-justification, overconfidence, delusion.
The scout isn’t indifferent. A scout might hope to learn that the path is safe, that the other side is weak, or that there’s a bridge conveniently located where his forces need to cross the river. But above all, he wants to learn what’s really there, not fool himself into drawing a bridge on his map where there isn’t one in real life. Being in scout mindset means wanting your “map”—your perception of yourself and the world—to be as accurate as possible.
Scout mindset is what prompts us to question our assumptions and stress-test our plans. Whether you’re proposing a new product feature or a military maneuver, asking yourself, “What are the most likely ways this could fail?” allows you to strengthen your plan against those possibilities in advance.
To be willing to consider other interpretations—to even believe that there could be other reasonable interpretations besides your own—requires scout mindset.
Being the kind of person who welcomes the truth, even if it’s painful, is what makes other people willing to be honest with you.
when you advocate changing something, you should make sure you understand why it is the way it is in the first place.
“What function does motivated reasoning serve?” I’ve broken it down into six overlapping categories: comfort, self-esteem, morale, persuasion, image, and belonging.
Soldier mindset helps us avoid negative emotions like fear, stress, and regret.
COMFORT, SELF-ESTEEM, and morale are emotional benefits, meaning that the ultimate target of our deception is ourselves. The next three benefits of soldier mindset are a little different. Persuasion, image, and belonging are social benefits—in these cases, the ultimate target of our deception is other people, by way of ourselves.13
deferring to a consensus isn’t inherently a sign of soldier mindset.
Deferring to the consensus is often a wise heuristic, since you can’t investigate everything for yourself, and other people know things you don’t.
What makes it motivated reasoning is when you wouldn’t even want to find out if the consensus was wrong.
We use motivated reasoning not because we don’t know any better, but because we’re trying to protect things that are vitally important to us—our ability to feel good about our lives and ourselves,
Even when soldier mindset doesn’t completely backfire, it’s still not obvious that it’s our best option. Rather than boosting your self-esteem by denying your flaws, you could instead boost your self-esteem by noticing and fixing those flaws. Rather than pursuing social acceptance by suppressing your disagreements with your community, you could instead decide to leave and find a different community you fit in to better.
We trade off between judgment and persuasion.
We trade off between judgment and morale.
epistemic rationality means holding beliefs that are well justified, while instrumental rationality means acting effectively to achieve your goals.
Being rationally irrational, therefore, would mean that we’re good at unconsciously choosing just enough epistemic irrationality to achieve our social and emotional goals, without impairing our judgment too much. A rationally irrational person would deny problems only when the comfort of denial is sufficiently high and their chance of fixing the problem is sufficiently low.
Just like sleeping in, breaking your diet, or procrastinating on your work, we reap the rewards of thinking in soldier mindset right away, while the costs don’t come due until later.
Being overly optimistic about your chance of success gives you a burst of motivation right away. But those motivational benefits dwindle over time, or even backfire, when success takes longer than you predicted. As Francis Bacon said, “Hope is a good breakfast, but a bad supper.”
Even when you’re reasoning about something like foreign politics that doesn’t impact your life directly, the way you think still impacts you indirectly, because you’re reinforcing general habits of thought.
the lies we tell ourselves have ripple effects. Suppose you tend to rationalize away your own mistakes, and consequently you see yourself as more perfect than you really are.
A KEY FACTOR preventing us from being in scout mindset more frequently is our conviction that we’re already in it.
We think of ourselves as objective because we feel objective.
Of course your argument seems compelling to you; everyone’s argument seems compelling to them. That’s how motivated reasoning works.
When you start from the premise that you’re an objective thinker, you lend your conclusions an air of unimpeachability they usually don’t deserve.
Feeling reasonable, being smart and knowledgeable, being aware of motivated reasoning—all these things seem like they should be indicators of scout mindset, yet they have surprisingly little to do with it. The only real sign of a scout is whether you act like one.
If you get sued and you win the case, should the person who sued you pay your legal costs? If you’re like most people (85 percent, in one study 1), your answer is yes. After all, if you’re falsely accused of something, why should you be out thousands of dollars in lawyers’ fees? That wouldn’t be fair.
However, when the question in that study was slightly reworded—“If you sue someone and you lose the case, should you pay his costs?”— only 44 percent of people said yes. Imagining yourself in the role of the person who sued and lost brings to mind alternate arguments. For example, you might have lost simply because the other side is wealthy and can afford better lawyers. It’s not fair to discourage victims from suing just because they can’t afford to lose, right?
What Dan did was a version of the “double standard test”: “Am I judging other people’s behavior by a standard I wouldn’t apply to myself?”
The thought experiment Grove and Moore did is called an outsider test: Imagine someone else stepped into your shoes—what do you expect they would do in your situation? When you’re making a tough decision, the question of what to do can get tangled up with other, emotionally fraught questions like, “Is it my fault that I’m in this situation?” or “Are people going to judge me harshly if I change my mind?” The outsider test is designed to strip away those influences, leaving only your honest guess about the best way to handle a situation like the one you’re in.
The conformity test can be used to interrogate your preferences as well as your beliefs.
A leading theory for why we’re biased in favor of the status quo is that we’re loss averse: the pain we feel from a loss outweighs the pleasure we feel from a similar-size gain. That makes us reluctant to change our situation, because even if the change would make us better off overall, we fixate more on what we’ll be losing than what we’ll be gaining.
Certainty is simple. Certainty is comfortable. Certainty makes us feel smart and competent. Your strength as a scout is in your ability to resist that temptation, to push past your initial judgment, and to think in shades of gray instead of black and white. To distinguish the feeling of “95% sure” from “75% sure” from “55% sure.”
QUANTIFYING YOUR UNCERTAINTY
A scout treats their degree of certainty as a prediction of their likelihood of being right. Imagine sorting all of your beliefs into buckets based on how sure you are that you’re right about each one.
What you’re implicitly aiming for when you tag your beliefs with various confidence levels is perfect calibration. That means your “50% sure” claims are in fact correct 50 percent of the time,
A BET CAN REVEAL HOW SURE YOU REALLY ARE
A bet is any decision in which you stand to gain or lose something of value, based on the outcome. That could include money, health, time—or reputation, as in the case of your catering friend who wants your endorsement. So when you’re thinking about how sure you are, your answer will be more honest if you switch from thinking in terms of “What can I get away with claiming to myself?” to “How would I bet, if there was something at stake?”
THE EQUIVALENT BET TEST
There’s a core skill in this chapter, too: being able to tell the difference between the feeling of making a claim and the feeling of actually trying to guess what’s true. Making a claim feels like your press secretary is speaking. It feels pat; neat and tidy. Sometimes hurried, as if you’re trying to put something past yourself. The mental motion is declaring, proclaiming, insisting, or perhaps scoffing. Trying to guess what’s true feels like being the board of directors, deciding how to bet. There’s at least a second or two when you don’t know what answer you’re going to end up giving. It’s
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making a plan, finding silver linings, and changing your goal are just a sample of some of the ways scouts have found to manage their emotions.
If you convince yourself that you will succeed, you’ll be motivated to attempt hard things and persist in the face of setbacks, such that eventually your optimism will be self-fulfilling. Conversely, if you acknowledge the long odds facing you, or contemplate the possibility of failure, you’ll be too discouraged to try, and your pessimism will be a self-fulfilling prophecy as well.
“Is this goal worth pursuing, compared to other things I could do instead?”
AN ACCURATE PICTURE OF THE ODDS HELPS YOU ADAPT YOUR PLAN OVER TIME
AN ACCURATE PICTURE OF THE ODDS HELPS YOU DECIDE HOW MUCH TO STAKE ON SUCCESS
“When you are building a company, you must believe there is an answer and you cannot pay attention to your odds of finding it. You just have to find it,” he writes. “It matters not whether your chances are nine in ten or one in a thousand; your task is the same.”
But even if your task is the same, that still leaves the question of how much you should be willing to gamble on your ability to succeed at that task. If your company has a 9 in 10 chance at success, then it might well be worth it to stake your life savings on it. If your chances are closer to 1 in 1,000, you probably want to leave that nest egg untouched.
