John Hennigan had beliefs about how he would adapt to Des Moines.
Our beliefs drive the bets we make: which brands of cars better retain their value, whether critics knew what they were talking about when they panned a movie we are thinking about seeing, how our employees will behave if we let them work from home.
This is ultimately very good news: part of the skill in life comes from learning to be a better belief calibrator, using experience and information to more objectively update our beliefs to more accurately represent the world.
The more accurate our beliefs, the better the foundation of the bets we make. There is also skill in identifying when our thinking patterns might lead us astray, no matter what our beliefs are, and in developing strategies to work with (and sometimes around) those thinking patterns. There are effective strategies to be more open-minded, more objective, more accurate in our beliefs, more rational in our decisions and actions, and more compassionate toward ourselves in the process.
We have to start, however, with some bad news. As Mr. Carlson learned in WKRP in Cincinnati, our beliefs can be way, way off.
Hearing is believing
When I speak at professional conferences, I will occasionally bring up the subject of belief formation by asking the audience a question: “Who here knows how you can predict if a man will go bald?” People will raise their hands, I’ll call on someone, and they’ll say, “You look at the maternal grandfather.” Everyone nods in agreement. I’ll follow up by asking, “Does anyone know how you calculate a dog’s age in human years?” I can practically see audience members mouthing, “Multiply by seven.”
Both of these widely held beliefs aren’t actually accurate. If you search online for “common misconceptions,” the baldness myth is at the top of most lists. As Medical Daily explained in 2015, “a key gene for baldness is on the X chromosome, which you get from your mother” but “it is not the only genetic factor in play since men with bald fathers have an increased chance of going bald when compared to men whose fathers have a full set
of hair. . . . [S]cientists say baldness anywhere in your family may be a sign of your own impending fate.”
As for the dog-to-human age ratio, it’s just a made-up number that’s been circulating with no basis, yet with increasing weight through repetition, since the thirteenth century. Where did we get these beliefs? And why do they persist, despite contrary science and logic?
We form beliefs in a haphazard way, believing all sorts of things based just on what we hear out in the world but haven’t researched for ourselves.
This is how we think we form abstract beliefs:
1. We hear something; 2. We think about it and vet it, determining whether it is true or false;
only after that 3. We form our belief.
It turns out, though, that we actually form abstract beliefs this way:
1. We hear something; 2. We believe it to be true; 3. Only sometimes, later, if we have the time or the inclination, we think about it and vet it, determining whether it is, in fact, true or false.
Harvard psychology professor Daniel Gilbert, best known for his book Stumbling on Happiness and his starring role in Prudential Financial commercials, is also responsible for some pioneering work on belief formation. In a 1991 paper in which he summarized centuries of philosophical and scientific study on the subject, he concluded, “Findings from a multitude of research literatures converge on a single point: People are credulous creatures who find it very easy to believe and very difficult to doubt. In fact, believing is so easy, and perhaps so inevitable, that it may be more like involuntary comprehension than it is like rational assessment.”
Two years later, Gilbert and colleagues demonstrated through a series of experiments that our default is to believe that what we hear and read is true. Even when that information is clearly presented as being false, we are
still likely to process it as true. In these experiments, subjects read a series of statements about a criminal defendant or a college student. These statements were color coded to make it clear whether they were true or false. Subjects under time pressure or who had their cognitive load increased by a minor distraction made more errors in recalling whether the statements were true or false. But the errors weren’t random. The subjects were not equally likely to ignore some statements labeled “true” as they were to rely on some statements labeled “false.” Rather, their errors went in one direction: under any sort of pressure, they presumed all the statements were true, regardless of their labeling. This suggests our default setting is to believe what we hear is true.
This is why we believe that baldness is passed down from the maternal grandfather. If you, like me until I looked it up for this book, held that belief, had you ever researched it for yourself? When I ask my audiences this question, they generally say it is just something they heard but they have no idea where or from whom. Yet they are very confident that this is true. That should be proof enough that the way we form beliefs is pretty goofy.
As with many of our irrationalities, how we form beliefs was shaped by the evolutionary push toward efficiency rather than accuracy. Abstract belief formation (that is, beliefs outside our direct experience, conveyed through language) is likely among the few things that are uniquely human, making it relatively new in the scope of evolutionary time. Before language, our ancestors could form new beliefs only through what they directly experienced of the physical world around them. For perceptual beliefs from direct sensory experience, it’s reasonable to presume our senses aren’t lying. Seeing is, after all, believing. If you see a tree right in front of you, it would generally be a waste of cognitive energy to question whether the tree exists. In fact, questioning what you see or hear can get you eaten. For survival-essential skills, type I errors (false positives) were less costly than type II errors (false negatives). In other words, better to be safe than sorry, especially when considering whether to believe that the rustling in the grass is a lion. We didn’t develop a high degree of skepticism when our beliefs were about things we directly experienced, especially when our lives were at stake.
As complex language evolved, we gained the ability to form beliefs about things we had not actually experienced for ourselves. And, as Gilbert pointed out, “nature does not start from scratch; rather, she is an inveterate jury rigger who rarely invents a new mechanism to do splendidly what an old mechanism can be modified to do tolerably well.” In this case, the system we already had was (1) experience it, (2) believe it to be true, and (3) maybe, and rarely, question it later. We may have more reasons to question this flood of secondhand information, but our older system is still in charge. (This is a very simple summary of a great deal of research and documentation. For some good overviews, I highly recommend Dan Gilbert’s Stumbling on Happiness, Gary Marcus’s Kluge, and Dan Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow, listed in the Selected Bibliography and Recommendations for Further Reading.) A quick Google search will show that many of our commonly held beliefs are untrue. We just don’t get around to doing Google searches on these things. (Spoiler alerts: (1) Abner Doubleday had nothing to do with inventing the game of baseball. (2) We use all parts of our brain. The 10% figure was made up to sell self-improvement books; neural imaging and brain-injury studies disprove the fabrication. (3) Immigrants didn’t have their names Americanized, involuntarily or otherwise, at Ellis Island.) Maybe it’s no big deal that some of these inconsequential common beliefs are clearly false. Presumably, people aren’t using a bogus dog-age calculator to make medical decisions for their pets, and veterinarians know better. But this is our general belief-formation process, and it applies in areas that can have significant consequences.
In poker, this belief-formation process can cost players a lot of money.
One of the first things players learn in Texas Hold’em is a list of two-card starting hands to play or fold, based on your table position and actions from players before you.* When Texas Hold’em first developed in the sixties, some expert players innovated deceptive plays with middle cards consecutive in rank and of the same suit (like the six and seven of diamonds). In poker shorthand, such cards are called “suited connectors.”
Suited connectors have the attraction of making a powerful, camouflaged straight or a flush. Expert players might choose to play these types of hands in a very limited set of circumstances, namely where they feel they could fold the hand at a small loss; successfully bluff if it doesn’t
develop; or extract maximum value in later betting rounds by trapping a player with conventionally stronger starting cards when the hand does develop favorably.
Unfortunately, the mantra of “win big or lose small with suited connectors” filtered down over the years without the subtlety of the expertise needed to play them well or the narrow circumstances needed to make those hands profitable. When I taught poker seminars, most of my students strongly believed suited connectors were profitable starting cards under pretty much any circumstances. When I asked why, I would hear “everyone knows that” or “I see players cleaning up with suited connectors all the time on TV.” But no one I asked had kept a P&L on their experience with suited connectors. “Do that,” I’d say, “and report back what you find.”
Lo and behold, players who came back to me discovered they were net losers with suited connectors.
The same belief-formation process led hundreds of millions of people to bet the quality and length of their lives on their belief about the merits of a low-fat diet. Led by advice drawn, in part, from research secretly funded by the sugar industry, Americans in one generation cut a quarter of caloric intake from fat, replacing it with carbohydrates. The U.S. government revised the food pyramid to include six to eleven servings of carbohydrates and advised that the public consume fats sparingly. It encouraged the food industry (which enthusiastically followed) to substitute starch and sugar to produce “reduced-fat” foods. David Ludwig, a Harvard Medical School professor and doctor at Boston Children’s Hospital, summarized the cost of substituting carbs for fats in the Journal of the American Medical Association: “Contrary to prediction, total calorie intake increased substantially, the prevalence of obesity tripled, the incidence of type 2 diabetes increased many-fold, and the decades-long decrease in cardiovascular disease plateaued and may reverse, despite greater use of preventive drugs and surgical procedures.”
Low-fat diets became the suited connectors of our eating habits.
Even though our default is “true,” if we were good at updating our beliefs based on new information, our haphazard belief-formation process might cause relatively few problems. Sadly, this is not the way it works. We form beliefs without vetting most of them, and maintain them even after receiving clear, corrective information. In 1994, Hollyn Johnson and