3 Ideas in 2 Minutes on Changing Your Mind
3 Ideas in 2 Minutes on Changing Your Mind
Endowment Effect for Beliefs, Updating Your Mind & Progress
I. Endowment Effect for Beliefs
Comedy legend George Carlin had a famous bit about how we gather and cling to possessions. Our “stuff”, as he put it. We build houses to store our stuff and buy bags to carry it wherever we go. His rant culminated in a pithy observation about other people’s belongings that pretty much sums up the Endowment Effect:
Have you noticed that their stuff is shit, and your shit is stuff?
In other words, we value things more if we own them. Writer Rob Henderson has applied this concept to the views we hold:
The endowment effect for beliefs suggests that we assign greater value to beliefs if we possess them.
We see beliefs out there. They don’t have much worth to us. But once we decide to “own” one, we assign it greater value, and become reluctant to relinquish it.
We also tend to decrease the value of beliefs held by others. We denigrate their views in order to bolster the relative value of our own beliefs.
—Rob Henderson, Luxury Beliefs are Like Possessions
II. Updating Your Mind
Granted, beliefs are more deeply held convictions than opinions or attitudes. But it's not surprising that changing your mind can be painful. Organizational psychologist Adam Grant suggests a perspective change. How about we update our minds instead?
We all have blind spots in our knowledge and opinions. The bad news is that they can leave us blind to our blindness, which gives us false confidence in our judgment and prevents us from rethinking. The good news is that with the right kind of confidence, we can learn to see ourselves more clearly and update our views.
In driver’s training we were taught to identify our visual blind spots and eliminate them with the help of mirrors and sensors. In life, since our minds don’t come equipped with those tools, we need to learn to recognize our cognitive blind spots and revise our thinking accordingly.
—Adam Grant, Think Again
On a similar note, I’ve now unlocked and republished my bonus newsletter about the Five Habits of the Master Thinker: How to Upgrade Your Mind for free subscribers.
III. Progress
Clearly, there are benefits to changing your mind. Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw explains why:
Progress is impossible without change, and those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything.
—Bernard Shaw
🐘
Have a great week,
Chris
themindcollection.com
