Last week, there was something of a debate amongst my now quite elderly parents and me. I remarked that I genuinely struggle to understand why so many people are so reluctant to change their minds. What on earth was so frightening about it? My father, a trained scientist, seemed to get where I was coming from. My mother, a trained counsellor, was less impressed. She sees everything through the matrix of people’s emotional responses and finds it easy to comprehend the ways in which people’s fears and hang-ups are their most powerful driving forces. But I genuinely struggle to understand why people are so fixed in their ways of thinking.
While I’ve never considered myself to be much of a scientist (a glance at my GCSE grades will confirm this for anyone in doubt), I do like to think that I am a rationalist and that I base my responses to most things on the evidence in front of me. I am also, I think on balance, quite emotionally robust. Given these two character traits, I will confess that I genuinely struggle to comprehend why changing one’s mind about something is considered to be such a terrifying prospect; but the older I get, the more I am forced to acknowledge that for many it seems to be so.
In the same week, I met a friend who filled me in on some local gossip and remarked, in passing, that living in our village had been good for her, since she had been exposed to a range of people with different political views and discovered (in a manner that she reported with some surprise) that Conservative voters did not all possess the horns of Beelzebub. She reflected on the limitations of being brought up in a home in which one political viewpoint was presented (a household that she summed up as “Guardian-reading”). I reflected on the fact that I felt there had been a variety of political standpoints within my close family and that these had been openly (and sometimes quite heatedly!) debated, perhaps leaving me open to the notion that there can be well thought-out (and indeed extremely badly thought-out) views on all sides. She said that she envied this experience. It was genuinely fascinating and gave me further pause for thought. Might this exposure to conflicting politics within one family be another reason why I am interested in rather than threatened by alternative viewpoints?
Also this week, whilst listening to a podcast, I heard a reference to an analogy used in human psychology that I had not come across before, and it chimed with all the thoughts I had been having about tribal thinking versus the ability to change one’s mind. I looked up the reference and was fascinated to discover someone called Julia Galef, an author and co-founder of the Center for Applied Rationality. Galef argues that some people act like “soldiers”, while others act like “scouts”. “Soldiers” in her analogy tend to approach a discussion from the sole position of defending their beliefs, attempting to discredit or dismiss conflicting information and seeing the alternative viewpoints as the enemy to be shot down. “Scouts”, by contrast, are motivated more by the desire to find the truth regardless, of their starting point.
But before we “scouts” get too smug about our Stoic capacity for reason, according to Galef, our tendencies towards being either a “soldier” or a “scout” are both rooted in our emotional responses and learned behaviour. The “soldier” mindset tends to be held by someone who is motivated by connection and community (which can lead to tribalism), whereas someone with a “scout” mindset is more likely to enjoy the process of discovering new things (which can lead to innovative or creative thinking, but carries with it the threat of isolation). For a “soldier”, the process of changing your mind feels like a weakness or even a defeat. For a “scout”, it as something positive and exciting. This is exactly how I feel. To me, the process of changing my mind isn’t simply non-threatening: it is genuinely thrilling and wonderful. I love discovering that I have been wrong about something, or that my understanding of a topic has been flawed. I find it genuinely mind-boggling that people can hold the same views that they have always held, and borderline distressing to imagine that they find the process of change a net negative.
In a quest for further knowledge, I will delve into Galef’s book, The Scout Mindset, and find out if her analogy resonates once I’ve read it in full. For now, I feel genuinely happy to be a “scout” and can highly recommend it. It might not make you the most popular person at the party, but it does make you the one who will point out that the emperor is stark, staring naked.
