Updating Your Beliefs

So, how do you deal with confirmation bias and other thinking errors? One excellent strategy is to focus on updating your beliefs. The concept of “updating your beliefs” has helped me and many others who attended Intentional Insights workshops, such as this videotaped one, to deal with thinking errors. To employ this strategy, it helps to practice mentally associating positive emotions, such as pride and excitement, with the decision to change our minds and update our beliefs based on new evidence.

Being proud of changing our minds is not intuitive, because the emotional part of the brain has a tendency to find changing our minds uncomfortable. It often persuades us to reject information that would otherwise lead us to rethink our opinions. However, we can use the rational part of our mind to train the emotional one to notice confusion, re-evaluate cached thinking and other shortcuts, revise our mental maps, and update our beliefs.

In addition to associating positive emotions with changing your mind, you can use these habits to develop more accurate beliefs:

1) Deliberately seek out contradictory evidence to your opinion on a topic and praise yourself after giving that evidence fair consideration.

2) Focus in particular on updating your beliefs on controversial and emotional topics, as these are harder for the human mind to manage well.

3) It’s especially beneficial to practice changing your mind often. Recent research shows that those who update their beliefs more often are substantially more likely to have more accurate beliefs.

Taking all of these steps and feeling good about them will help you evaluate reality accurately and thus gain agency to achieve your life goals.

I think I know how to practice seeing things in a positive way. 

But I'm not sure how to practice changing my mind often. 

I find myself softening or hardening as new information comes in.

Ah! That's a good idea: Actively seek new information, then refine your beliefs as you learn.