So what are beliefs in essence? It is helpful to think of beliefs as
simply meanings we’ve attached to the events that occur in life,
either through personal experience or adoption through cultural
context. Over time, and in accordance with our brain’s desire to
streamline our very complicated decision-making processes, this
distinction tends to get lost and the meanings we’ve attached
to one occurrence start to become more concrete, universal and
non-negotiable.
At this point our brains behave very much like The Filter
Bubble, which Eli Pariser describes in his excellent book of the
same name. We selectively filter the information we seek and
then absorb to reinforce these newly entrenched beliefs and
simultaneously filter out anything that may challenge them.
This is part of the reason why true diversity is so important in
teams.
Ethnic, gender and cognitive diversity actually make a group
or team collectively smarter. They allow for points of view that
would otherwise be missed in a more homogenous group due to
contextual blindness. What this all means is that our beliefs are
far more powerful than we give them credit for. But what is more
disturbing is that we tend to view our own internal persuasive
powers as more than up to the challenge of changing them.
Our brains are over-confident
Confidence is drummed into those of us who have
worked in the corporate w orld. It is seen as one of the
defining characteristics of a leader and its absence is
seen as a life sentence of working in middlemeh! So
much so, that employees are often rewarded for talking
themselves, and their capabilities, up while quietly
intelligent souls who come at the world with a dose of
wariness and caution are not so quietly sidelined and
told, ‘Stop being such a downer’.
Of course, there’s nothing innately wrong with a healthy
sense of confidence or in being engagingly extrovert.
In fact, it can be very useful as long as it is supported
by a measure of complementary competence. The
reasons why over-confidence evolved in our collective
psyche are not completely understood, although
perhaps having a bit of swagger and being skilled in the
persuasive arts was as important to reproduction in our
prehistoric years as it appears to be today.
However, the problems with over-confidence are twofold. Many of us don’t know where confidence ends
and over-confidence begins, but more concerning
are the small over-confidences we use in our everyday
decision-making — the things we don’t even process
as overly confident. The educated guesses we make,
the assumptions we use based on past experience
and the little generalisations we cumulatively filter the
world through have the capacity to create enormous
problems.
Part of this is socialised into us in schools. Whenever a
student asks a teacher how to spell a word or what the
capital of a particular state is and the teacher replies,
‘What do you think?’ or ‘Try to answer it yourself’, they
are unconsciously increasing the chances of guesswork
becoming a lifelong strategy.
In fact, when we conduct over-confidence tests in the
field, asking random passers-by in the street a series of
questions they think they should know the answer to
— such as, ‘How many countries are there in Europe?’
— or asking them to point in the direction they think is
north, people are far more likely to take a guess than to
simply admit, ‘I don’t know’.