Staying Open-Minded: A Fight with Our Own Minds
Observations brought me to conclusion that most of us, people, are by default not open-minded. We like stability. We settle. We avoid change and at best when it happens, we adapt to it. And again, we settle.
Open-mindedness thus is not a static trait that just sits there with a person. It is consistent hard work, a struggle with our own mind to make it work differently than our “by default” mode.
Let us first think what open-mindedness is. It does not entail jumping at everything new and getting overexcited about it. Being open-minded is the ability to evaluate the new idea (or a thing) objectively, pushing aside our irrational instincts and the wrong reasons why our brain rejects it.
Our brain is inclined to avoid the new. Guess the instinct is embedded with us since the beginning of time. Our ancestors felt safe in familiar environment. In those circumstances, anything new could bring danger.
The instinct remains to this day, though “danger” in most cases now moved from “being eaten by some passing animal” to a mild failure.
Then, I figured, our mind is made to make sense out of what is going on around us with least effort possible. Our mind constantly tries to figure out the world, find logic and structure everything. After the hard work it has performed, it is not surprising it is unwilling to admit a new piece of information that smashes the logic, topples the structure and brings us some more figuring-out work.
It also doesn’t help that the environment we live in is built on the collectively acceptable logic, structure, system.
Be it workplace, society, family, friendly circle, a book club or business relations, there is a certain routine, rules of conduct and principles that one has to accept and follow. We are so entangled in the community that we don’t even think of questioning any of them.
Even if we enter that environment with a fresh view on things and potential to change them, we tend to get sucked in over time in the routine if we don’t work hard enough to keep ourselves open-minded.
What should we do then? I say, firstly, monitor ourselves. Notice, “catch ourselves” when we routinely blocking the new idea.
I found several tricks our mind plays on us frequently. And I offer questions we need to ask ourselves to improve our “openness”.
- Rejecting the new just for the sake of things staying the same
I call this first line resistance. It is the first instinct when we hear something new. Behavioural psychologists have conducted millions of experiments proving our mind has tendency to stay with how things are.
In experiments on what is called “Status quo bias” – it was proved that people are more inclined to make a substantive choice when they are not presented with a present situation. As soon as people were presented with a present situation (a status quo) and then given an alternative, most people chose to stick with the present situation.
And that is what happens with us routinely: whilst presented an alternative we don’t evaluate it as such. We compare it with present. And in most cases we can’t tell for sure whether things will get better. So we stick with the present because it is at least certain.
Fear of uncertainty is one of the key things driving our mind to this behaviour. Even if things are bad but bearable, we tend to stick with them because they are stable, they are predictable and we always know what losses we have.
Regretting the efforts we have already made is another reason. Once we made a decision. We worked on it hard. Now it feels lame to change things. We sometimes tend to do this even if we are bearing losses and it is not reasonable to do this any more.
Connected with status quo bias are other biases when people show inertia. The experiments on the so-called “default bias” showed that people stick with the default option they are presented with – irrespective of what that default option is. Two groups were presented with opposing default options. Both groups stuck with the default. Most choices are not truly about substantive choice but about our inertia.
So, first thing we should fight is this unwillingness to change things. So here’s our first question to ourselves.
Question: am I really considering the new option, or am I automatically rejecting it for the sake of things staying the same?
2. Our mind focuses on arguments that support our beliefs and undervalues or ignores altogether the ones that argue the opposite.
Once we have formed a belief it is immensely hard to change it. We have made decision, everything lies neatly and logically in our mind. So when we are presented with arguments our valuation goes terribly wrong. We are ready to overvalue even the most absurd arguments supporting our belief over a rational and strong argument against it.
This is called “Confirmation bias” or “Selective exposure”. And most lawyers are aware of it and fight it every day. One of the keys to success in this profession is to evaluate objectively every argument against your point. Only then we can objectively decide on “reasonable prospect of success” of our case. What we do is take the opposing point and try to defend it as well as we can, as if it were our own point.
This is the exercise I think everyone else should do too: take the opposing belief (in this article, we’re talking about a new idea ruining your old belief), and trying to defend it with all the arguments you can think of. As if you are arguing for it.
When you evaluate all arguments objectively, you might want to give the new idea a try.
Question: am I overexcited on this argument because it confirms what I believe in? Do I really consider the counter-argument as minor just because it supports the opposite of my belief?
3. Our mind tries to fit things into existing categories and systems
We’ve talked about how our mind constantly struggles to find meaning in this world. We continuously find logic, build patters, categorise, structure, create a system that would make sense. This of course helps us to live easier in this confusing world, but it also traps us in a web that we can’t easily let go of.
When presented with something new, we tend to put it in the structure we made for ourselves. We try to fit it into this or that category. We notice one characteristics and jump to conclusion as for what “group” of things this should belong to.
Behavioural biases such as stereotyping, generalization, categorisation are the easy way for our brains to understand what it is presented. But easy way is often the wrong one.
We assimilate, compare, associate. What we lack is an ability to view, perceive and evaluate an idea per se.
Also, another psychological moment might be admitting that we were wrong in our logic, structure, system etc. Ok, this is unpleasant, but there’s nothing terrible in being wrong from time to time. After all, who isn’t? And the sad truth is, if we were wrong then, we still are. Irrespective whether we accepted it or not. So, the sooner we admit and change views, the better.
Question: am I desperately trying to squeeze in this new thing into the system my mind made for itself?
Key question: maybe I should reconsider that system?
4. We don’t perceive
Our system might even be precluding us from perceiving the very existence of the new thing altogether. The term “hypocognition” a refers to “lack of a linguistic or cognitive representation for an object, category, or idea” as Robert Levy first defined it.
Some experiments and observations have shown that if our language and culture does not define a certain phenomena, feeling or ideas, we are having difficulty to even perceive its existence, let alone try to categorise.
The famous example cited is Frederic Tudor, who sailed to Martinique in 1806 planning to sell ice to the locals. The plan failed as “never having experienced a cold drink, the islanders could not fathom why ice held any value’.
Recently “hygge” lifestyle became a fancy trend. Most of people had’t heard about it and spent some time reading about the phenomena to perceive its meaning. But that’s a very familiar concept in Denmark.
Some years ago Tim Lomas came up with the positive lexicology project, identifying all untranslatable positive words in different cultures and trying to explain them in English. Some perceivable examples include:
Feierabend. German / n. / faɪɐʔaːbənt / fire-ar-bent. Lit. ‘evening celebration’; the festive mood that can arrive at the end of a working day; can also just mean the end of the working day (with no particular festive connotation).
or
Sobremesa. Spanish / n. / so.breˈme.sa / soh-brreh-may-sah. Lit. over/on/above table; sitting around the table after eating; when the food has finished but the conversation is still flowing.
or
Krasosmutněn. Czech / n. /ˈkra.soˌsmut.ɲɛˌɲiː/ krra-soh-smut-niyeh-niyee. Beautiful sadness; joyful blues
With hypocognition, it may be hard to “catch” oneself. Key is to be curious, both self-observant and exploring always things around us like we’re seeing them the first time. But if we are talking about the ideas that are brought to us by other people, here is the question we should ask ourselves and that person.
Question: how does this person presenting this new thing perceive it?Can I try to perceive it the way he/she does?
5. We are evaluating the source, not the idea
Sometimes we act really biased and accept or reject the idea just because it comes from this or that person. There is not much to write about this really. Plainly, if we want to be open-minded to new ideas, it should not make a difference for us whether it comes from a professional, amateur, newbie or a kid. Unfortunately, we often tend to forget this and jump to conclusions based on who the person arguing for the point is.
Question: am I ignoring the idea because it doesn’t come from a person who has authority in the field? Or because I don’t like the person?
And the opposite.
Question: am I agreeing with the (old or new) idea just because it comes from a person with authority, knowledge, mere confidence?
This is of course far from an exhaustive list of what we can “catch” our mind doing, but is a good basis to start self-observing and pushing ourselves to open-mindedness. It requires constant effort, but in the end, few would argue it is not worth it.
