Hi! Welcome. You being here means more than you know. Knowing it resonates with you keeps me going. I'm Lavena Xu-Johnson. I write about psychology for founders. Why? Because scaling a business means knowing ourselves first.
Happy Tuesday, founders,
I have always been hot-headed. On any given workday, I have ten exciting plans in my head and want to execute them all at once.
Everything, everywhere, all at once has always been my style.
In fact, most of the time, I wish I had executed them yesterday.
This leads to a very bad habit: I usually half-commit to decisions before gathering any solid evidence. I fall for a new idea before doing at least a dozen customer interviews, want to sign a candidate before the reference calls, or settle on an outsourced team before getting three more quotes.
But even when I put down my coffee and slow down, I often find that the evidence ends up agreeing with me.
Any positive feedback means the idea is validated, and most reference calls seem to give a green light. So I started to wonder: why does the evidence we gather always seem to agree with us?
Social psychologists have spent more than forty years studying why we lean on evidence that agrees with us, and look away from evidence that is opposed to what we believe.
So, what question should we ask to reduce bias in our decisions?
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Same evidence, opposite conclusions
In 1979, Charles Lord and colleagues at Stanford University recruited 48 students with strong opinions on the death penalty, half of the students believed it deterred murder, while the other half believed it didn’t.
Researchers created two fictitious studies, with one study supporting deterrence, showing the death penalty lowered murder rates, while the other said murder rates were higher.
If we judged evidence purely on its quality, two equally strong studies pointing in opposite directions should have left both groups a little less certain on their previous opinion. Instead, each student group praised the study that supported their own view and picked holes in the other one. Both groups reported firmer views on their opinion than before: Proponents became more pro-death penalty, opponents more anti-death penalty.
This means that instead of reducing their disagreement, the mixed evidence increased attitude polarisation.
Figure J. Top panel: Attitude changes on capital punishment relative to start of experiment asreported across time by subjects who received prodeterrence study first. Bottom panel: Attitudechanges on capital punishment relative to start of experiment as reported across time by subjectswho received antideterrence study first.
Researchers called this biased assimilation: we often accept evidence that reinforces our existing beliefs without scrutiny and look for reasons to dismiss evidence that is against it.
The question that changed their polarization
Five years later, Lord and Lepper returned to the same experiment with Elizabeth Preston, aiming to find a de-biasing strategy. Students again read the two death penalty studies, but with a few conditions, which they called: consider the opposite.
The strategy was explicit:
Group 1/Strategy 1: Participants were told how biased assimilation happens and were instructed to ask themselves, at each step, whether they would make the same evaluation if the identical study had produced the opposite result.
Group 2/Strategy 2: Participants were told to judge fairly and be unbiased.
This simple added instruction in strategy 1 had entirely removed attitude polarization: participants in group 1, who were asked to consider the opposite, did not become more extreme after reading mixed evidence.
Why did group 2 have no change in their attitude? Because the students asked to be unbiased believed they were already being fair, without any biases.
‘Considering the opposite’ for your business
What does it look like when we practice ‘consider the opposite’ in our own decision-making process?
Before we conclude, let’s build the opposite case:
Flip the result. When a piece of evidence supports what we want, we can ask the question from the 1984 study: if this had come out the other way, would we trust it as much? If we would dismiss five customers saying no to a new feature as too small a sample, then five customers saying yes is too small a sample as well.
Write the case against our belief. Before a pricing change, a new hire or a supplier contract, we can write three specific reasons the option we prefer could be wrong. It helps to do this before discussing it with the team, while our view is still open to change.
Decide in advance what would change our mind. Before a pilot or a test, we can write down the result that would make us drop the idea.
Key takeaways
Considering the opposite does not ask us to give up our instincts. Founders need conviction to start anything, and a first impression of a candidate or a product is often built on years of experience. The students in the 1984 study were not asked to change their views on the death penalty either, what changed was how carefully they read the evidence on both sides.
It helps to make the question routine, so we don't have to remember it. This could be a reminder line at the top of a hiring scorecard, an opposite column in our customer interview notes, or a cross-check before any contract is signed.
An established process can help us avoid jumping on commitments on the days we are most excited, and likely to fall into the cognitive bias trap.
Most workdays, I will still have ten plans in my head. What I'm trying to add is a short pause, long enough to ‘consider the opposite’, so I know the next steps if the evidence doesn’t support my beliefs.
How's the depth of today's edition?
As always, hit reply if something in here hits home.
Until next week,
Lavena
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