When is practice a vice? - Chapter 10

What does claim 5 tell us?

Claim 5: It’s bad to jump to conclusions. It’s better to wait to see all the evidence.

Whenever you hear about a dramatic news event, track the initial account and watch as it changes over the next few days. Sometimes we don’t get the real story for months.

When a story is likely to be wrong, it clogs our minds. It gets us thinking in the wrong direction, and it makes shifting over to the truth more difficult. When we get contradictory evidence, we fixate on the first story and preserve our mistaken impressions.

What is our problem? Our fixation on our initial beliefs.

What about the disclaimer?

Claim 5 (that we shouldn’t jump to conclusions, but instead wait to see all the evidence) has two weaknesses: We can’t follow the advice to keep an open mind, and we shouldn’t follow that advice because it will make us passive.

• We can’t keep an open mind: Elstein et al (1978) studied the way physicians made diagnoses. The physicians knew they were supposed to gather all the data before starting to speculate about what was wrong with the patient, just as claim 5 states. But they couldn’t stop themselves. As they got more information, they naturally began to imagine what it meant.

• We shouldn’t keep an open mind. An open mind equates to an empty mind. How will we know when we have seen all the evidence? How long are we supposed to wait while we leave our minds on idle?

The advice is also misguided

Keeping an open mind can make it harder to figure out what is happening. To understand why, look at a study conducted by Jenny Rudolph. She studied 39 resident anesthesiologists to see how they interpreted evidence and diagnosed a problem.

Conclusion of this experiment: The one who kept an open mind, failed. The only one who succeeded had jumped to conclusions and tested them. They hadn’t fixated on their first explanation. Instead, they had used that explanation to guide the tests they had performed and the way they had searched for new information. They exemplified the strategy of ‘strong ideas, weakly held’.

What are unintended consequences?

Claim 5 (that it’s bad to jump to conclusions, and one should wait to see all the evidence) fits an orderly situation where we can use past experiences to estimate the flow of information and pick a point where it is safe to begin guessing.

The replacement for claim 5 is to speculate actively, but to test those speculations instead of getting committed to them. Rather than advising people to keep an open mind, we can encourage them to engage in a speculate and test strategy. Cohen, Freeman and Thompson have developed a training approach to support the speculate-and- test strategy, and have demonstrated its effectiveness. Claim 5 doesn’t work under conditions of complexity!

Story of Watson and Crick: The story of the triple helix shows two scientists who didn’t have an open mind. They started out with a set of beliefs, which guided their investigations. They showed active exploration and a speculate-and-test mentality.

Claim 5 warns us that we can get fixated. Its recommendation to keep an open mind usually isn’t realistic in most complex settings, but there are other ways to protect ourselves. They will be described in Chapter 17.

What does anticipatory thinking involve?

Advice: People should in complex and ambiguous settings actively speculate, instead of passively absorb data. This advice is just the opposite of claim 5. Experts distinguish themselves by their ability to anticipate what might happen next. By forming sharp expectations, experts can notice surprises more readily.

When we anticipate, we get ourselves ready for what may come next. We redirect our attention. We also can prepare for a few different possibilities. Anticipatory thinking lets us manage our attention so that we are looking in the right places to spot anomalies in case they appear. For example, driving a car depends on being able to anticipate dangers, and is a metaphor for many other activities. Good drivers aren’t waiting for data. They are using their experience to actively scan for possible threats and hazards.

Anticipatory thinking describes how we actively speculate about what might happen next. The next chapter (11) will describe how we have to actively speculate about what has just happened in order to make sense of feedback.

Why does claim 5 matter?

It matters because claim 5 can disengage people and create a passive, lazy stance of waiting to receive all the data before doing anything. It also matters because claim 5 ( it’s bad to jump to conclusion, wait to see the evidence ) encourages organizations to impose bureaucratic procedures for collecting and sorting data instead of helping people engage in anticipatory thinking.

Overall conclusion: The claim matters because the advice embodied in claim 5 make people slaves to the flow of information. We always have new information just around the corner that is about to surface. If we follow claim 5, we may never try to synthesize the data.

Claim 5: It’s bad to jump to conclusions. It’s better to wait to see all the evidence.

Whenever you hear about a dramatic news event, track the initial account and watch as it changes over the next few days. Sometimes we don’t get the real story for months.

When a story is likely to be wrong, it clogs our minds. It gets us thinking in the wrong direction, and it makes shifting over to the truth more difficult. When we get contradictory evidence, we fixate on the first story and preserve our mistaken impressions.

What is our problem? Our fixation on our initial beliefs.