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Shumita Basu, Narrating: This is "In Conversation" from Apple News. I'm Shumita Basu. Today, how to challenge your beliefs and change the way you think.
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Basu, Narrating: Malcolm Gladwell would like you to try this little thought experiment: picture yourself ten, 20 years ago and ask really ask yourself…
Malcolm Gladwell: Would you wear the things you were wearing back then? Would you wear your hair the way you wore it in that picture? Would you — think about who your best friends were, are they the same?
Basu, Narrating: Now, the answer for me, and probably a lot of you, is absolutely not.
Gladwell: And what you'll discover, of course, is that huge amounts of your life have changed. The way you present yourself to the world, the way you think, the circumstances of your life, they've all changed.
Basu, Narrating: So, if we're okay with changing our sense of style, our friends, our interests, shouldn't we better at changing our minds about other things too?
Gladwell: Given that fact, how can you somehow think that on matters of opinion you should remain resolutely in place, even as everything else is in motion?
Basu, Narrating: This is our first episode in a new series we're launching called "Think Again." Over the next few weeks, we'll be rethinking old ideas about health and wellness, about gender equality, work and life, and exploring new ones. Now, I wanted to start the series off with Malcolm Gladwell, the bestselling author of books like "Outliers" and "Talking to Strangers" and the host of the podcast "Revisionist History," because he's something of an expert on counterintuitive thinking. So, I asked him to get us ready for all the conversations ahead and to give us his best advice on how to be intentionally open-minded.
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Gladwell: There's various sort of habits the world imposes on us, rituals, that have the effect of reinforcing this false notion of ourselves as stationary. So, a good example would be I'm very much opposed to these kind of personality-typing tests, because they say, you know, someone will say to me, using the Myers-Briggs, "I'm an ENNT." And my point is, well, how do you know you're always gonna be that way? So, maybe you were that way when you took the test, but it's a real mistake to think that your personality is something cast in stone, right? The people I know in my life all change over time, sometimes in really lovely ways, so why would you try to put a label on who you are if who you are is in a state of largely good flux?
Basu: Yeah. Yeah, they can be limiting.
Gladwell: Yeah. Or a similar thing would be an IQ test, which you take when you're… you might take when you take the SATs, which is basically an IQ test when you're 18. But like, so why would you reference that ever again? Because you're not 18 anymore.
Basu: [CHUCKLES] Right.
Gladwell: I mean, it's like, all these things seem really silly to me when I think about them.
Basu: I think as a rule, never reference your SAT tests after you're done using them for some official purpose. You know, it seems like-- I think a reason why a lot of people are resistant to declaring that they're gonna change their mind about something is that a lot of people see it as a weakness. Why do you think that is? Why do we associate that with weakness?
Gladwell: There is a kind of fetish that develops around what we call hypocrisy or contradiction, particularly in public life, you know? And I think that leaks into personal life. With politicians, it's a tremendous mistake to insist that politicians never change their mind. I mean, of any profession that should be completely wide open, it's that. I mean, if you're asking someone to be a leader in an extraordinarily complicated environment, of course they should be able to revise their opinion on things or to be free to say that "At that point in my life, I felt that the right decision was X. Now, I feel that the world has changed so much, the right decision is Y."
Basu: And instead, you get branded as a flip-flopper on the political stage, right?
Gladwell: Yes.
Gladwell: I mean, I realize why we do that because we vote for people because we agree with what they think, but I would suggest that maybe that strategy's wrong, that you should vote for people whose way of thinking you like, so whose approach to the world is similar to yours, not whose specific positions are similar to yours. Because both parties can change-- should be changing their minds over the course of that kind of relationship. You know, part of the reason divorce is so painful for people is that it's a kind of macro example of, you know, you changed-- you or your partner changed their mind about the relationship. And it's traumatic enough to break up a long-term relationship, but on top of that to beat yourself up over the fact that you made a commitment to someone and then you realize you didn't wanna make the commitment? That shouldn't be a-- I mean, there are plenty of other reasons to be sad about a divorce. The abstract notion that you feel ashamed for changing your mind shouldn't be one of them.
Basu: Yeah. My mom is a public school teacher-- she was a public school teacher for many years, and this is making me think a lot about a concept she used to talk about at home or bring home from school, which is this idea of a fixed mindset versus a growth mindset. And I think what's hard to understand for people, even though those words are very understandable, is how do you cultivate a growth mindset? And I want us to come back to that thinking in a little bit, but I thought maybe first we should talk about why it is that we often get things wrong the first time or why we dig in on our first impressions. And you write a lot about this in your book, "Talking to Strangers." You bring up this idea that humans tend to make this assumption from the beginning. Even though we should know better, we kind of default to one way of thinking. So, can you explain this bias that we have?
Gladwell: Well, so this is an idea that Tim Levine, who's a communications researcher, came up with, which I thought was really brilliant, and a lot of my book, "Talking to Strangers," deals with this issue. So, he has this notion of what he calls "default to truth," and default to truth is that as human beings, our first assumption in meeting someone and listening to someone and dealing with information is to believe it. And it takes a lot of effort to push us off the assumption that what we're being told is true. He argues that, although that opens us up to occasional deception, it is, in the main, a very, very useful strategy because it's what makes human cooperation possible. It's what makes society possible. It's why, the example I always give is, it's why you can put your child on a school bus in the morning, because you believe the school bus driver is a school bus driver and you believe the bus is headed for school, right? If you didn't have that baseline belief, you would spend your day-- you would have to trail the bus to school every morning to verify that it's going to school.
Basu: Right. Right.
Gladwell: You would defeat the whole-- might as well just drive your kid at that point. So all these acts of faith, he argues, are crucial to human society. But it's funny, I hadn't thought about it until you raised this point, but you can see though about how that would lead us sometimes to a fixed mindset so that we-- You know, maybe as human beings, we kind of easily lapse into thinking things are the way they are and that we should never question them, and that a side effect of that could be this kind of way of thinking about your traits and your positions as being immovable. Part of this, as well, is another idea that I think is important here, which is that changing your mind requires that you hold your ideas lightly. And I think that strikes people as being a strange notion.
Basu: Yeah, what does that mean, to hold them lightly?
Gladwell: It means that when you adopt an idea, you're not taking-- making that idea a constituent part of your personality or your identity. You're saying that "This is the way I believe-- This is what I believe at the moment, given what I know." But that's a very different way of belief than saying "I will now and forever identify myself as a New Yorker."
Basu: Right. For example.
Gladwell: Whereas I came to New York 20 years ago, loved New York, but always tried to hold my identity as a New Yorker lightly because I wanted to be able to move other places without regret, right? So it's like, I'm a New Yorker for now, but if I suddenly decide that Toronto is a better option, I feel like I'll happily call myself a Torontonian and put my New Yorker-ness in a box.
Basu: Yeah. Right.
Gladwell: You know, so that kind of-- But on similar things, like on very-- I don't wanna wade into very controversial topics, but…
Basu: No, wade away. Please.
Gladwell: We've been talking a lot about reproductive rights in this country right now, about how do we resolve this kind of incredibly divisive moment that we're having about that, or about gun control. There's all these kinds of-- And I wonder whether if people on the kind of dug-in extremes held their ideas a little more lightly, there would be greater room for some compromise or common ground. That's a way forward from an impasse, if people are willing to say that my identity is bounded. The same way I said "I'm a New Yorker for now," what I'm doing is I'm putting a boundary around my position and I'm saying it's time limited and if I get a better offer, I'll take it.
Basu: "I'll be off." Yeah. Yeah. It sounds like adding "for now" is maybe a very useful exercise to think about, for people to add at the end of a phrase that they think that they believe in something really strongly to try that out.
Gladwell: Or you know what's another one? This is actually interesting, 'cause I've thought about this a lot. I think the world would be very much improved if-- Imagine if on aesthetic judgments, people along the same lines always add "I believe that…" So…
Basu: Mm. Give me an example.
Gladwell: So, you read a book or-- A friend of yours sees a movie and they say "That's the worst movie I've ever seen," right? If they instead say "I believe that is the worst movie I've ever seen," not only do they open themselves to the possibility that other people could see the same thing and like it, but they also open themselves to the possibility that they could somehow-- they could one day change their mind. Made a lot easier to change your mind because "I believe that" actually builds in that notion "for now" that you're talking about.
Basu: Yeah.
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Basu, Narrating: Another way to reconsider your opinions is to put yourself aside. Try to see the world from another person's perspective.
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Gladwell: I would like, at some point in my life, to teach a college class. I always think of what are some exercises that I would make students go through? And one of the exercises would be, if, say, this was a writing class, I would forbid them from writing about their own personal experience. So you cannot ever write a single thing about something that happened to you or your family. Or another exercise might be you can't use the word "I," just-- I would like you to kind of only try and see the world through someone else's eyes as a kind of exercise. I think it would be really fun to work with a group of students and kind of push them as far away from themselves as possible.
Basu, Narrating: Malcolm said so often we're stuck in this mode of defending our own ideas and thinking of them as the best. But what if it was more acceptable to admit that other people have good ideas too?
Gladwell: I read this proposal about how to reform science funding in this country. So, the way we fund science is broken. All the money's going to the same group of people year after year. We seem to be discouraging good ideas and all kinds of things. So, the idea was you disband all the central funding authorities in this country. You give every scientist a sum of money, the same sum of money. Some portion of that they can use to fund their own research, but the biggest portion of which they are required to give to someone else to fund an idea they like. So not their own idea, but another idea out in the world that appeals to them. So every scientist is required to move outside of their own set of ideas for a moment and ask "What would I like to see someone else do?"
Basu: That's really interesting.
Gladwell: Really interesting. I love that as a kind of practice of forcing people outside of themselves, which, by the way, is… You know, why is the idea of service so important in religious traditions? For this exact reason, right? Because the discipline of service is the discipline of operating outside of your own interests, right? That's why it has been such a powerful part of religious traditions for thousands of years, because they have always understood that getting people, pushing people outside themselves, is important in pushing people towards a more kind of meaningful and moral life.
Basu: Can I tell you one thing that I'm thinking about that worries me?
Gladwell: What's that?
Basu: It's this idea that you can do these exercises to try and engage with and think about another person's perspective, that's one thing, other perspectives, but I feel like a lot of people-- we're seeing a lot of examples where people are really digging their heels in when what they're opposing is fact- or science-based. So, I'm thinking of COVID vaccines.
Gladwell: Yeah.
Basu: Climate change.
Gladwell: Yeah.
Basu: This isn't necessarily about considering another person's viewpoint, it's about considering science.
Gladwell: Yeah.
Basu: I feel like we're losing some kind of debate there and we're losing ground there, and I'm not sure why.
Gladwell: Well, you know, it's funny, we did an episode of "Revisionist History" this season on COVID vaccines and thinking about what it might take to change people's minds who are resistant to vaccination. 'Cause I was struck by this, that many of the objections to-- many of the people who rolled their eyes at a vaccine or objected to them would say "So-and so-got a vaccine, and they still got COVID," and what they were showing was they didn't understand what a vaccine was. They thought a vaccine was absolute protection.
Basu: A magic pill. Yeah.
Gladwell: A magic pill. In fact, all it's doing is-- You know, it's a wonderful phrase by one of the people who developed a COVID vaccine, "It's not a lifeboat, it's a life vest. You're gonna get wet, but it'll save your life," right?
Basu: Mm. Oh, that's good.
Gladwell: We just didn't explain it right. In other words, what I'm suggesting is that a lot of what we think of as intransigence and an inability of people to kind of accept science is just a lousy selling job on the part of people who wanna change our behavior. And when we are confronted with people who we think are not changing their mind appropriately or accepting change appropriately, I think it's important for us, for those who are trying to drive the change, to find fault with their own strategies first.
Basu: Yeah, and how are we delivering this message?
Gladwell: So a good example would be seat belts. For years and years and years and years in this country, nobody used seat belts, even though they were told they will save your life. When I say nobody, I remember as a kid driving with my parents in the '70s, nobody had a seatbelt on. No one-- even occurred to them. And if we were having this conversation in 1975 and you and I were both people who were familiar with the research on seatbelts, we would've said "There is a hostility towards science on the part of the average American who will risk their lives and that of their children by foolishly driving…" We'd have done the whole nine yards.
Gladwell: What happened with seat belts was that the people who were pushing seat belts woke up to the fact that all of those strategies were stupid. They were lecturing people. You can't get people to wear a seatbelt if you lecture them. So instead what they did is they got clever about it and they realized "Let's only talk about children." So the whole campaign about getting adults to wear seatbelts stopped in the '80s and we started a campaign that just said, Look, a kid-- a 20-pound kid is really vulnerable in a car if a car is going 60 miles an hour. Just-- would you please buy a car seat? And everyone bought into car seats. And the minute they bought into car seats, they were like, Wait a minute, the same principles hold true for me. Talking about family responsibility was the driver that took us from 20% to 80% in the space of I think it was like five or six years. It was an insanely quick-- But that was about people driving the change being much more self-aware about how it was up to them to help people change their minds. You can't just lecture people and expect people to kind of accept some new idea or technology.
Basu: Yeah. If anything, it feels like it backs people into a corner or causes them to double down in a lot of cases.
Gladwell: Yeah. So I think this is that lovely word, "iatrogenic," which is the disease caused by the doctor. A lot of what we think of is people sticking in the mud, it's just iatrogenesis. It is caused by lousy strategies on behalf of the-- on the part of the change makers.
Basu: Mm. Let's talk about something that you recently revisited. In a recent episode of your podcast, "Revisionist History," you go back to the most controversial argument in your book, "Outliers," about the role that age plays in a person's success. I'm curious to know, why did you wanna revisit that argument? Did your mind change over time about this?
Gladwell: Well, I had made this argument in my book "Outliers." I just pointed out-- not an argument, I was just pointing out that in the educational sphere and in sports, your birthday is hugely predictive of your success, that hockey players in Canada are all born within the first-- not all, but most of 'em are born within the first three months of the year because the cut-off date is January 1st and you have a big advantage when you're competing at the age of seven and eight if you're relatively oldest in your age cohort. Same is true in schools. We know that in a group of second graders, the kid born, if it's a January 1st cut-off, the kid born in January and February can be eleven months older than other kids in the class, and eleven months of maturity when you're seven years old is massive.
Basu: It's huge. Yeah. Yeah.
Gladwell: So I described this, and the result of this was that over the course of the 15 years since "Outliers" came out, one parent after another has told me that they read that book and held their kids back in school.
Basu: [GASPS] Oh, really?
Gladwell: Yeah, so the epidemic of red shirting is at least partially my fault, I'm told. I didn't realize this. But there are school principals who literally have said "They all come in here because they read 'Outliers' and they hold their kids back."
Basu: Oh, no. Okay.
Gladwell: Now, individual parents holding their kids back does not solve the problem. It just creates a different set of losers, right? So…
Basu: Wait, say that again, 'cause that's really interesting.
Gladwell: If your kid is born in December or November and you're in a school that has a January 1st cutoff, so you hold your kid back, so they're now the oldest in their class, right, then all you've done is you've turned the kids who used to be relatively older into relatively younger kids. So, literally, there's a school near me where, I talk about this in the episode, a private school where some parents now hold their kids back twice.
Basu: Oh, wow! Two… So that would be two years-- two school years?
Gladwell: Oh, yeah! Their kids are graduating from high school at 20 and 21 in this little school near me.
Basu: Oh, my goodness.
Gladwell: Because they used to be the oldest in their class, then the parents of the youngest kids held their kids back a year, so then the parents of the kids who used to be the oldest responded by holding their kids back a second time.
Basu: Oh, my God. It's a race to get an advantage.
Gladwell: It's lunacy, right?
Basu: Yeah. Yeah.
Gladwell: So, that's nuts, right? So my question is why did I write a book which had exactly the wrong effect? I wrote that chapter because I wanted schools and sports leagues to fix the problem, but instead what happened is parents took the initiative and took a step that doesn't fix the problem, but only, in some ways, makes it worse. So, I blew it. So I decided to go back and, this time, fix it. Make the argument, say what I've done-- should have done in "Outliers," which is "Here's how you address the issue…" Right? There's all kinds of strategies you can take to kind of solve the problem of what's called the "relative age effect."
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Basu, Narrating: So, just to recap, so far, Malcolm has laid out a few concrete ways that you can challenge your own thinking. One, hold your own ideas lightly by adding "for now" or "I believe that" to statements you feel strongly about. Two, experiment with giving other people's ideas more weight than yours. And here comes a third: try not to think of things as being either good or bad.
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Gladwell: I have a kind of middle space in my mind where I put things where I think I know what I believe but I'm not sure. Maybe I should talk about that middle category, because lots of things get pushed into the middle because I either don't know enough or I feel like we'll learn a lot more. So, one I've wrestled with a lot is, this is gonna sound super geeky, but I can't make up my mind about the Supreme Court. I can't decide whether it's a good thing or a bad thing. The answer that people-- If you say "I think the Supreme Court's a bad idea," people will always say, "Well, the Supreme Court played a key role in desegregating schools, the Brown decision. Where would we have been without that?" But actually, I did a podcast episode a couple seasons ago about the Brown decision from the perspective of African American families, and talked about how the result of the Brown decision was that an entire generation of African American teachers were fired. What white schools did when integration was compelled by the courts was they took the occasion to fire thousands and thousands and thousands of Black teachers and replace them with white teachers. So, if you think about that, and then you think about all the backlash to Brown that happened, and then you think about the fact that American schools still aren't particularly integrated, in fact, on some measures, they're as segregated as ever, then you have to ask yourself, All right, so wait, so we're celebrating this decision that the court made, but then the outcome of the decision was not all that great, maybe we should have just waited for the political system to catch up. I don't know. Like, I don't know how I feel. Given what a mess reproductive rights are right now, are we sure "Roe v. Wade" was a good idea? I mean, states were-- At the time, in the early '70s, there was a broad movement towards liberalization of abortion laws. Would it have been better just to let that play out than have the kind of just craziness that we've had for 50 years over this thing? I don't know. Why do we need this group? Why do we need nine cranky people who've been there forever telling us how to live our lives, you know?
Basu: No, not at all.
Basu: So it sounds like you're leaning toward the "I think we don't really need the Supreme Court" but you're willing to keep it in this sort of middle space, the "I don't know" bucket.
Gladwell: Yeah, I'm not convinced I want to do away with it, but I'm really open to arguments about. Could the world be a better place without it? And would it be a better place if we put all of our energies into the political system and just making sure that it was fair and we debated things thoroughly? It feels like a lot-- that having the Supreme Court induces a kind of laziness in our thinking about difficult issues, which I don't think is productive. But that's something where, you know, if you asked me 15 years ago, I would've said the Court's great. I mean, it's like an important check on blah, blah, blah, blah. I would've given you the standard Federalist Papers line.
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Basu, Narrating: Malcolm's final piece of advice is experiment, a lot. Try checking old ideas with an open mind to see if they still feel right.
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Gladwell: It's a good habit to fall into, but like any habit, you need to kind of train yourself to do it. So, reflexively, if you don't do it a lot, it can seem very daunting. If you do it all the time, then it becomes, I think, less intimidating as a practice. So, I think people should actively kind of start with little things, and I think you will get in the habit of understanding. Like, I routinely try and revisit-- You know, all of us have a list of foods we don't like, but I always try to revisit 'em every now and again to make sure that I still don't like them, right?
Basu: [LAUGHS] Just confirming.
Gladwell: Yeah. Like, I mean, there was a time in my life where I would've said "I love beer." I drank a lot of beer in college. Then I stopped drinking beer because I said I didn't like it. Every now and again, I have a beer just to check in. What if I like beer again?
Basu: [CHUCKLES] Do you?
Gladwell: I mean, what I've discovered is that certain kinds of beer are actually a lot tastier than my memory had suggested.
Basu: Okay. Yeah.
Gladwell: Yeah, so it turns out-- But that kind of starting small prepares yourself for big shifts.
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Basu, Narrating: You can find Malcolm Gladwell's podcast, "Revisionist History," on Apple Podcasts. We'll include a link for you on our show notes page. And as I mentioned earlier, this is just the beginning of our series "Think Again." In the coming weeks, we're gonna reimagine lots of different big topics, like our health…
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Unidentified Speaker: You don't need to start eating kale because a study came out yesterday about kale.
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Basu, Narrating: …our partnerships…
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Unidentified Speaker 2: Do we think that the person who earns more money doesn't have to do as much in the home?
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Basu, Narrating: …our work…
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Unidentified Speaker 3: Some people are in jobs that are beyond recovery.
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Basu, Narrating: …and our relationship to technology…
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Unidentified Speaker 4: If you have to look at ads on Instagram, try to look at them like they were in a sci-fi movie.
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Basu, Narrating: That's all coming up on "In Conversation." You can find the show every week in the Apple News app and in the Podcasts apps.
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