Nest Egg: What if I am wrong?

The famous economist John Maynard Keynes has been attributed many great quotes but one of my favourites is the following, “When the facts change, I change my mind - what do you do, sir?”.

His point here is that he had the intelligence not to get completely bogged down in one view only of a subject and stick to it regardless of changing circumstances or information. I feel we can all learn from this in every walk of life. We may have started driving down a road but once we find out it’s the wrong way then it’s just not smart to keep driving down the cul de sac and think we can make it through. The smart thing is to stop, reassess your newfound information, turn the car around and choose a new route.

Often our human nature can cause us to be too proud to admit we have been wrong in our knowledge or opinion, and our pride can get in the way of opening our minds to the other side of the argument.

Einstein told us that the definition of insanity was to continue to keep doing the same thing and expect a different outcome. I must say that I find a lot of people are unwilling to view the other side of the argument or discussion. They often tend to just dig into their trench and hold firm on their opinion, even without all of the relevant facts. In the field of behavioural economics, these concepts are known as over-confidence bias and confirmation bias. In other words, when people are convinced, they are correct in their opinion (research has shown men are more prone to this!), they will typically only listen to or digest those facts that support their argument. They block their ears to the conflicting evidence that supports an alternative viewpoint. A simple example of over-confidence bias would be someone’s own inflated opinion of their sense of direction or driving capability. Research has shown that many of us (men are the worst offenders again here I’m afraid!) way overestimate how skilled we are.

It can be a difficult thing to do to challenge our own thought process when we’ve already formed our opinion. In the social media age where information is available twenty-four hours a day, it has become too easy for us to jump on a particular soundbite or headline, read the first two or three lines of the article maybe, and then that’s our opinion in stone.

We’re told that the average attention span of millennials (born between 1981 & 1996) is 12 seconds, and that of their younger counterparts, Generation Z’ers (born between 1997 & 2012) is 8 seconds. Research shows that the vast majority of these younger generations simply do not read the full article and merely scan the headlines, tweets and uncorroborated comments flashed up on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter etc.

Donald Trump’s election machine taps into this brilliantly as did the pro-Brexit politicians giving their impactful ‘insights’ which ended up becoming opinions in the minds of the consumers of these soundbites. Then, what happens next is that the opinions on the other side of the debate are simply labelled as ‘Fake News’. Rule number one of public relations in the political sphere is to label your opponent first before they label you. In the UK Tory leader race, Liz Truss was out of the traps first and her camp labelled Rishi Sunak as “overly aggressive” in their leader’s debate. Her supporters have accused him of mansplaining (the explanation of something by a man, typically to a woman, in a manner regarded as condescending or patronising), and talking over her in the debate. These are simply opinions thrown out by Liz Truss’s communications team, but many will now hold this opinion firmly of Rishi Sunak without questioning the value of the information making these claims.

You can see how we’ve become surrounded with questionable information & unsubstantiated facts on everything from race to religion, sport to politics, gender to science and so on. The onus must be upon us as adults to question the information that we digest, and more importantly, where we get our information from. It is also our responsibility not to generalise blindly on certain things and be unwilling to engage in a civilised debate with somebody who has the opposite opinion to us.

This should be what separates us from the chimpanzees – our ability to arrange our thoughts and form our own opinions, not just follow someone who shouts louder. Anthropological research tells us that Humans and chimpanzees shared a common ancestor approximately five to seven million years ago. The difference between their two genomes (DNA) is approximately 4%. I worked with a guy in banking many years ago who used to say, “If you don’t know who the chimp in the room is, it may well be you!”. So, be sure to form your own opinions and turn the car around if you’ve found out you’re going the wrong way.