You 2.0: Trusting Your Doubt

The transcript below may be for an earlier version of this episode. Our transcripts are provided by various partners and may contain errors or deviate slightly from the audio.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: This is Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedantam. June 5th, 1944, General Dwight D. Eisenhower, Supreme Commander of Allied Forces, had driven unannounced to the Greenham Common Air Force Base in the United Kingdom. Paratroopers of the 101st Airborne Division were preparing for a historic jump. General Eisenhower wanted to boost morale. The soldiers knew they were on a mission, but they didn't yet know the scale. The general eased their fears with a confident demeanor and friendly small talk. Where are you from? He asked one lieutenant. Michigan? Spectacular fishing there, Eisenhower said. He was about to release a short and blunt one-page memo, telling troops that they were on a great crusade to liberate Europe. He ordered them to accept nothing less than full victory. By that evening, as he made his way back home, the general confided in his driver, I hope to God I'm right. The weather forecasts were uncertain, and a slight change could lead to failure. Eisenhower returned to his cottage and wrote a message that no one was supposed to see, a statement taking full responsibility if D-Day failed. Our landings have failed to gain a satisfactory foothold, and I have withdrawn the troops, he wrote. If any blame or fault attaches to the attempt, it is mine alone. He underlined those final words for emphasis, and tucked the note into his wallet. He never needed it.

CLIP: Under the command of General Eisenhower, Allied naval forces, supported by strong air forces, began landing Allied armies this morning on the northern coast of France.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: A few days later, a now iconic photo was published in newspapers. Ike, surrounded by those American paratroopers. He leans in, tall and eagle-eyed. He was lauded as a hero. The general who launched the Great Crusade. He was the epitome of American decisiveness, confidence, command. Ike's failure note, as it has come to be known, was never used and remains little known. But it reveals something profound about leadership. Behind his public confidence was massive doubt, uncertainty, and the heavy burden of a decision. This week on Hidden Brain, we explore the hidden power of doubt, not as weakness or indecision, but as a tool that helps us make better choices, build stronger relationships, and navigate an uncertain world.

When you picture a strong leader, what do you see? Someone confident, decisive, unwilling to back down. We don't think of strong leaders as hesitant, doubtful or unsure of the right answers. Confidence and determination are admirable traits, but they also have drawbacks. Confidence can lead to overconfidence. Decisiveness can make leaders less tolerant of dissent. Determination can blind us to risks. At the University of Virginia's Darden School of Business, Bidhan Parmar studies the value of doubt. He goes by Bobby, and he says that by avoiding uncertainty, we miss out on opportunities for growth. Bobby Parmar, welcome to Hidden Brain.

BIDHAN PARMAR: Shankar, thanks so much for having me.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: Bobby, some years ago, you went on a 14-day backpacking trip to Wyoming. I understand that you are someone who is prone to allergies. Was this backpacking trip a good idea?

BIDHAN PARMAR: I'm not so sure. I am allergic to everything outdoors, and in 2017, in a fit of rebellion, I think I decided to do this 14-day backpacking trip in the Wind River Range in Wyoming. This was a group from a course called the National Outdoor Leadership School, or NOLS. And so we were a group of 14 strangers. Some folks were younger, aspiring to leadership positions. I wanted to do this in part because it was something I had never done before. I am, as I said, allergic to everything outdoors, and this was a way of pushing myself outside of my comfort zone, literally. And there were people who wanted to spend more times outdoors. There were avid backpackers and people like me who were brand new.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: Bobby's group varied widely, not just in backpacking experience, but in fitness levels.

BIDHAN PARMAR: Half were pretty solid in terms of hiking and carrying a 50-pound backpack, and others were relatively new, and that first week was a huge transition for half of us. You're up pretty early, between 5.30 and 6, and you're making breakfast as a camp. Then very quickly, you're deciding the plan for the day, you're working together to say, here's where we are, this is where we're trying to get to by this evening. And then very quickly, we're off hiking, and you're hiking for roughly 45 minutes to an hour, and then you take a 15-minute break, and that cycle continues until you reach base camp.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: How much hiking were you doing each day?

BIDHAN PARMAR: Oh, jeez, each day, I'd say maybe 10 to 15 miles a day. Oh my gosh, so how many hours of hiking was this each day? It was like 8 to 10 hours a day.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: Good grief. Yeah.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: I just went on a four-hour hike last weekend, and I was just exhausted by the end of this four-hour hike. You were doing eight hours every day?

BIDHAN PARMAR: Every day for 14 days. Now, we had some days where there were half days, and they were like optional hikes. So we would go, and we would be by a lake, and there would be an optional hike to summit a peak, for example. And some people would go, and other people would stay at base camp, and do laundry or go fishing. So the second half of the expedition, there was a little bit more choice. But the first half was pretty daunting and grueling. Your feet would be completely calloused each evening. My goal was just to make sure that I didn't get helicoptered out of there.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: Halfway through the trip, Bobby and his new friends found themselves having to make a difficult judgment call.

BIDHAN PARMAR: So this was a day where we were coming out of a wooded area into a more open, grassy area. And if you can picture the scene, it's kind of wide open spaces with mountains surrounding you. We're in a valley. We're surrounded by tall grasses that are kind of waist height. And you look around and you see different levels of mountains. And so it's unclear when you're looking at the topographical map and looking at the contour lines, which exact peaks are we looking at when we try to triangulate between the map and what we see on the horizon. And we had to find this lake where we were going to camp that evening. And we weren't sure if the lake was above us or below us or in which direction we had to go. And as you're looking at the topographical map, trying to say, OK, it says that there's a peak here. Which peak are we looking at? What's the highest peak? And it's very hard to get a sense of where your bearings are when you're looking at those topographical maps. And we were tired and confused. And I just wanted to get in my sleeping bag and go to bed.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: So the group has to make a decision. You're not quite sure what to do. What do you end up doing?

BIDHAN PARMAR: So I'm exhausted. And I basically say, look, you know, leaders are supposed to be decisive. I think we should move down the mountain. And people pick up their bags and they start to follow me. At first, I was like, look, I'm excited to get back into my sleeping bag. Things are great. But then all of a sudden, the terrain started to look different than what we were expecting. There didn't seem to be any water sources nearby. And so, yeah, we started to feel a little bit like maybe we are going in the wrong direction. But it was easier to keep moving than it was to admit that I was wrong. So you go two hours, you discover that you are not where you want to be, what does the group do? Thankfully, everyone was pretty understanding, and we're all relatively new to reading maps and orienting in the outdoors. And there was some grumbling, but we look back at the map, we try to orient ourselves again, and we realized that the lake was above us the whole time. It was at a higher elevation, which is counterintuitive, right? You think water flows downhill, the lake should be below us. So we packed up our stuff again after reexamining the map and trudged an extra couple of hours back to base camp. We did finally make it, but I know that I felt really bad about leading everyone in the wrong direction.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: One thing I've noticed when I have lost my way, Bobby, is that if I miss my exit on the highway, for example, and I know that I have to go to the next exit and turn around and come back, that whole journey is just excruciating for me, because every second as I'm driving the wrong direction, I know I'm gonna have to come back and go the other direction, and every step feels like it's painful. That must have been your experience as well.

BIDHAN PARMAR: Oh, my head was bowed as I was walking behind the group the whole time.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: So I'm wondering, as you were heading back, retracing your steps, climbing back uphill, up this mountainside, did you have a chance to reflect on how you had gone wrong, Bobby? I think it started the reflection that took several months and several years after to really figure out what was going on in that moment. Why was it that I was so eager to be over the decision and to be moving in the right direction? And I think so much of it was discomfort with the uncertainty, with hearing these dissenting opinions and wanting so much to be in my sleeping bag, in a comfortable spot. In that moment, uncertainty was an obstacle. It wasn't a resource.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: I mean, I can put myself in your shoes. Everyone around you is hungry or tired. You're being bitten by mosquitoes. You don't know which way you're going. You're trying to get to the sleeping bag. You don't know whether to go up or down. And just making a decision, any decision feels better than being indecisive. Yeah, that's right. When we come back, how to know when doubt and uncertainty can be our friends? You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. This is Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedantam. As we go through life, all of us are going to face forks in the road. Those can pop up in our personal lives and at work. They can rear up in emergency situations. People might turn to you and say, what should we do? How should we respond? Which way should we go? And seeing their stress and panic, and sensing your own stress and panic, you might be tempted to find a way to quickly soothe the distress. A quick decision can feel reassuring. It can make the fear subside. But at the University of Virginia, Bobby Parmar says there are times when reassurance is not our friend. Bobby, your story of your mistake during the hike illustrates a common quirk of the mind, which is that we hate to sit with uncertainty. Talk about why this might be the case.

BIDHAN PARMAR: When we're in school, we learn that being smart means getting the right answer. People like to be what I call right answer getters. Certainty makes us feel really great. It feels like we have agency and we have control over our lives. But there are also some serious downsides to certainty. It can make us really overconfident. It can get us to ignore competing perspectives. We can underestimate risks.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: I'm also reflecting on the fact that sometimes when we are in a state of uncertainty, the uncertainty itself feels aversive. It feels like I don't know which way to go. I feel confused. I feel distressed. And there's a part of us that actually just wants to suppress that distress.

BIDHAN PARMAR: Yes, for sure. Many of us do experience uncertainty or doubt as this aversive feeling. And neuroscience suggests that that's because the parts of the brain that are related to understanding uncertainty or doubt are related to the parts of the brain where we experience kind of aversive feelings. They're very close together.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: So I'm curious about what exactly does go on in the brain when we are faced with these difficult choices like you were with the map that day. You say that there is a trio of interconnected systems in the brain that regulate our behavior in different types of situations. And these systems work together to influence how we experience uncertainty. Tell me about what you call the Pursue System, a part of the brain that involves the prefrontal cortex and the ventral striatum.

BIDHAN PARMAR: Yeah, this is what others have called the mesolimbic pathway or our reward system. We anticipate something in the future or something further away from us being enjoyable, desirable, pleasurable. And it works primarily through a neuromodulator called dopamine. Dopamine makes anticipation feel good. And so we exert energy to get up and go after that valuable future state or further state of affairs. So on the side of the mountain, exhausted after seven days of hiking, you're dreaming about being in your sleeping bag. You're dreaming about sitting by the campfire and not having to hike another 10 hours. That is my happy place.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: So this contrasts with a part of the brain that involves the amygdala, the hypothalamus, the adrenal cortex, and the autonomic nervous system. And you call this the protect system?

BIDHAN PARMAR: Yeah, because its goal is to protect us from both physical and social threats. When we look out in the environment and see something that could be potentially threatening, we have a response to either fight, fly, or freeze. And this is a system that regulates that kind of behavior. How do the Pursue and the Protect systems interact when it comes to decision making, Bobby? So both of these systems work really well when there are clear signals in our environment to say this is something that we should approach or avoid.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: So in other words, chocolate cookie, my system says, great, approach. Grizzly bear, my system says, avoid, run. Very straightforward.

BIDHAN PARMAR: Absolutely. Except when there are signals that we don't know how to interpret because they're not clear signals. So sometimes there's a very same stimulus that you want to approach and avoid simultaneously. Should I break the rules to help my friend? I want to help my friend, that's something I want to approach, but I don't want to break the rules. That's something I want to avoid. Sometimes we find ourselves in situations where there are two things we want to approach, we're not quite sure which one, or two things we want to avoid, and we're not sure which one I should avoid first. And so when there are these multiple conflicting interpretations of what we should do, the brain doesn't have a single clear signal, then the third system gets to work. And this is what I call our pause and piece together system. This system involves multiple brain regions, but it recruits our attention and our working memory in order to get us to look around and say, which of these conflicting interpretations should I pay attention to? This is a system that creates our experience of doubt.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: Put yourself back in the mountainside that day and explain how these three brain systems were working in your brain as you were confronting the choice you had to make, Bobby.

BIDHAN PARMAR: So as we're sitting there huddled around this map, debating and discussing which way we should hike and why, my pause and piece together system is noticing that there are these different interpretations of what we should do. Should we go up the mountain? Should we go down the mountain? But I'm also tired. I'm also hungry. I'm itchy from all the bug bites. And this doubt that I'm seeing in front of me is also something that feels aversive. My protect system is telling me, Bobby, we should get out of here. We need to find our way back to that sleeping bag, back to that campfire. And in those moments, what happens is pause and piece together, system activity diminishes, protect system activity increases, and I say, let's go. We're moving down the hill, we're gonna get to safety. In one study, neuroscientists modified the functioning of a part of the brain to stimulate this third network in the brain. What happened when they did this, Bobby? So we should mention that when neuroscientists do this, they do this with the utmost care and consent and supervision. But they can use technologies to temporarily inhibit or promote the functioning of these different brain areas. And when they temporarily inhibit the functioning of the pause and piece together system, what you see is that people become much more impulsive and much more reactive to whatever stimuli they're given. So if they're given a gambling task, they're much more likely to gamble and not be very careful about how they're gambling because they're not able to regulate their impulses. If they're given a task where they have to cheat, they're much more likely to cheat because they can't regulate their impulse to say, no, maybe we shouldn't be cheating.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: So how does this system in the brain, almost like a referee system, it's deciding who gets the point? Is it the player on the left or the player on the right? What happens to the system when we're stressed, when we're exhausted? Do these things affect how these systems work in the brain?

BIDHAN PARMAR: Absolutely. One of the things that we know is that acute stress upregulates our dopamine receptors. So what that means is it makes us much more reactive when we're seeing different things in our environment that might promise relief from the stress that we're feeling. The other important piece about this is stress is something that's negative, but the same thing can happen when we're very excited about something that's positive, like when we're going off to that cookie or going after a conversation with a good friend. Things in our environment become blurred in order to propel our action towards the thing that we're trying to approach or avoid.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: You say that one of the things that happens when this inhibitory system, this referee system in the brain is affected, is that we start to trust our intuition much more. Can you talk about what happens when we do this, Bobby?

BIDHAN PARMAR: Intuitions are incredibly important to our decision making. There's a really famous set of studies done in the early 2000s on something called moral dumbfounding. These experimenters had this really clever design, and they brought participants in, and they asked them about these scenarios that were morally repulsive, but harmless. They would ask them things like, is it okay for siblings to have consensual sex? If they use contraception and protection. Is it okay for someone to have sex with chicken and then eat it, for example? And as we can imagine, these participants in these studies were repulsed by all of these scenarios, and they would say, no, of course, it's not okay. This is terrible. Nobody should do this. And then the experimenters would ask them, well, why? And then they would say things, well, you know, they could get a disease if they had consensual sex without, but they use protection, or the person didn't get sick. They would give all these counter examples. And finally, the participants would say, well, I don't know why it's wrong, but it's just wrong. What does this tell us about how these brain systems are working, Bobby? What the authors of these studies argue is that people have an intuitive reaction first, that this is wrong, and then they come back and justify that intuition with reasoning. So I know that this is wrong, and now I'm going to come up with three different reasons why it's wrong. But what the authors argue is that people aren't thinking first and then deciding they're having an intuition and then SHANKAR VEDANTAM: So in other words, it seems to us as if we've thought through a decision before we come to it, but what you're saying is we've actually come to the decision and we're actually explaining the decision to ourselves afterwards.

BIDHAN PARMAR: Exactly. Intuition works really well as a guide for our decisions when we're in familiar circumstances. So when we've seen a situation repeatedly, we have an intuition that we've got to make this choice or that choice. Our intuition is a really good guide because we have experience to back that intuition up. There are times though where our intuition can lead us astray, particularly when we're in novel circumstances, when we're encountering things that we haven't encountered before, when they're competing interpretations. Intuition isn't always a good guide for our decision-making. And so we've got to be careful about when we rely on our intuition. And when we try to educate our intuition.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: I remember talking with the great psychologist, Danny Kahneman, many years ago, and he was telling me about how, in some of his earliest studies, he looked at the effect of selecting people just based on intuition. So you're trying to pick the right person for a job, and you say, well, I think this person's gonna do pretty well. And it turns out that's a terrible way to pick people, because in fact, our intuitions are really awful. But he found that if you actually went through all of the details of people's biographies and resumes and learned everything there was about them, and then you closed the book, and then you asked yourself, which is the best candidate for the job, now your intuition becomes informed intuition. You're actually basing it on a base of knowledge, and in fact, it becomes quite accurate.

BIDHAN PARMAR: That's exactly right. And so one of the things I work with with my students is not to ignore our intuition, but to take that intuition as a starting point.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: One big challenge when it comes to judging our intuitions is that when we go out and test our intuitions, we often have a propensity to find evidence that matches our intuition. Can you talk about the role of confirmation bias in how we deal with doubt and the role that it plays in intuition?

BIDHAN PARMAR: >Remember that when we make decisions primarily by relying on our Pursue system or our Protect system, the goals of both of those systems is to catalyze action, to catalyze approach or avoidance. And in the process of doing that, in the process of catalyzing action, those systems actually take uncertainties or ambiguities we might see in the world and make them certain. And so information that we might have gotten us to think differently about our choices, we reinterpret as actually being in line with our choices. And there's a lot of research that shows, for example, that after having made a choice, if you give people an opportunity, for example, to look at data, they're going to look at data that's much more consistent with the choice that they made. They can look at anything they want. They can look at information about a defendant that they decided was innocent and not guilty, and they're much more likely to read stories that are consistent with the decision that they made. And whether that decision is about a court case, a product they bought, their health choices, after having made a decision, we tend to stop learning and focus on things that make us feel like we made the right choice.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: And again, I think this might have happened on your mountainside hike. I mean, you're basically, as you start going, perhaps two hours into the mistake, you recognize that it's a mistake. But for the first 15 minutes, you're probably finding all kinds of evidence that basically tells you that you made the right decision.


SHANKAR VEDANTAM: We also talked about this briefly in the context of your Mountainside Expedition, which is that you effectively became the leader of this little group, and you had decided to take this group down the mountainside because that's where you thought the lake was. And at some point, as you were walking in the wrong direction, you started to have a sneaky feeling that you may have been going in the wrong direction, but you found it difficult in some ways to say, hang on a second, let's reevaluate. Can you talk about the role that blame avoidance plays in our decision-making?

BIDHAN PARMAR: Blame is a form of social punishment. And when we experience blame or we even anticipate that blame is coming, it revs up our protect system activity. We anticipate there's going to be some negative social interaction happening in our environment, and it makes it much more difficult to learn, to experience doubt as something that can open up the possibility of learning. It makes doubt feel like a liability, something is wrong with me. And so when we anticipate blame, it shuts learning down. And there are lots of examples of this. A recent example from the headlines are things like the crisis at Boeing. Engineers tried to raise issues about the quality of the engineering on the 737 MAX, and they experienced senior leaders at Boeing as saying, no, actually, we've got to make sure that we're delivering on time and under budget, and raising issues about quality or safety was seen as something that was inefficient. People felt like they would be blamed if they were raising those issues, and so they stopped raising those issues. When we feel threatened, when we anticipate blame, it's so easy for doubt to lead to confirmation of our beliefs, not conversation.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: It's also striking to me, Bobby, that when we look out on our social landscape, we often have a tendency to want to follow people who are extremely confident. The political leaders who seem like the most effective leaders seem to know exactly where to lead us. The business leaders who we feel are good business leaders seem to know exactly what they want to do. Talk a little bit about this. The social norms we have all basically valorize the role of decisiveness.

BIDHAN PARMAR: Yeah. You know, when we all internalize this message that being smart means getting the right answer, then when we look around and we see people who confidently project having the right answer, it's easy to defer to them and say, well, I might not be feeling as certain about this, but this person over there, they seem to know. And it alleviates some of the discomfort we might feel when we experience doubt. And it allows us to follow that person and say, well, maybe they have the right answer because I know I don't.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: You know, I'm thinking about some work looking at what happens in crisis situations like terrorist attacks. There was this very interesting set of studies that was done at the World Trade Center. This was not during the 9-11 attacks but during a bombing that took place some years earlier. And I found that largely what people did was shaped by what the people around them were doing. So in other words, if there was someone in your workplace that decided to stay put, you ended up staying put. If someone decided to make a hasty exit, you and everyone else jumped up. And in some ways, I don't think we like to think of ourselves as being sheep. But what the research suggests is that we are heavily influenced by the people around us.

BIDHAN PARMAR: And as a social species, that's a huge cue of how we should be behaving. If I see people running, I better run. If I see people carrying on with like nothing happened, then maybe I should be doing the same. One of my favorite studies that illustrates a similar effect takes place in Manhattan. And the researchers had this very clever design where they just wanted to measure how they could influence the behavior of people who were passing by on the street. And they put one research assistant on the street corner, and the person was just looking up at the skyline, and they were just measuring how many people would stop and also look up. And when they put one person there, almost nobody stops, right? It's New York, there's always people doing crazy things, just keep walking in your own direction. But when they put three research assistants on the corner looking up, virtually every person who crossed the street also stopped and looked up to say, what are they looking at? They must be looking at something.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: I've seen a variation of this that is actually even funnier, where you have people walking into an elevator, and you have a group of five research assistants who are basically standing in the elevator, and then a person comes in, and this is the person who is the unsuspecting study participant, and then all five people turn and face in one direction on the elevator. They turn to the left, and then this poor sixth person looks around and sees five people facing to the left, and slowly, sheepishly turns around and looks to the left, and after seven seconds, everyone turns and looks to the back of the elevator, and this person turns again, and you have these videos of this poor person basically slowly turning around in the elevator based on what these other five people are doing, and it really paints a picture of exactly what you're talking about.

BIDHAN PARMAR: Yeah. My heart goes out to those participants in those studies. But it's such a human thing. It's such a human thing when we walk into any environment, we don't know what to do, we default to what others around us are doing.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: When we come back, Bobby gets the chance to redeem himself on another hiking trip, plus strategies for leaning into doubt to make better decisions in your own life. You're listening to Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedantam. This is Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedantam. Have you had moments in your life when you felt impelled to make a quick decision? Did it turn out well? Did it turn out disastrously? If you have a story you would be willing to share from your own life with a Hidden Brain audience, please find a very quiet room or a walk-in clothes closet and record a voice memo on your phone. Email it to us at ideas at hiddenbrain.org. Use the subject line, doubt. We generally think of doubt as a bad thing. Our minds are wired for certainty. Not knowing the answer to something feels uncomfortable, even threatening. Bobby Parmar is the author of Radical Doubt, Turning Uncertainty into Surefire Success. He says, doubt doesn't have to be the enemy. In fact, it can be our friend. Bobby, we talked earlier about your trip to Wyoming and how you got yourself and the rest of your crew lost looking for a campsite. A year after that happened, you went to Patagonia. I've never visited. Describe the landscape to me and how you came to be on this trip.

BIDHAN PARMAR: Patagonia is a place where in every direction you look, the vistas are incredibly beautiful. I've never been to a place where every direction you look is just breathtaking. This is a year later, and I'm with 12 of my MBA students, also now taking an outdoor leadership course in the wilderness in Patagonia. And so we had just camped at the summit of a very snowy peak, and our goal was to find our new base camp near a river. So we had to come off the mountain, find this river, and then follow the river's aways to our new campsite. So we start to hike down, and very quickly we come off of the rocky peak of the mountain into densely wooded forest. So it's very hard to see where we're going. And I thought to myself at the time, look, we're just descending a mountain. How hard can it be? You're just going down. But very quickly, we started to hit ravine after ravine or thick brush after thick brush. And we found ourselves pretty trapped. We didn't know how to descend a mountain, as simple as it sounds. And in that moment, I felt very similar to how I felt when I was in Wyoming. Despite being on a completely different hemisphere, it was like deja vu.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: I'm wondering whether you used what happened to you the previous year in Wyoming to help you in this situation, Bobby. What did you do?

BIDHAN PARMAR: So this time, I didn't let my desire to make it to base camp get the better of me. And so together with my students, instead of barreling forward or giving up too quickly, we decided to actually hike back up the mountain so we could get a better view of where we were. And so we made it back up the mountain and started to trace out different paths. Look, if we walk down this way, then it looks like there's a ravine that way. We shouldn't go that way. What about going this way? And we tried out multiple different options until we found one that we felt was safest. This time, instead of feeling like hiking back up the mountain is a waste of time or inefficient, it was like an investment in learning. It was a way of saying, you know what? Yes, it's not moving in a straight line to our goal, but it's allowing us to zoom out and see where we are. So we do actually reach our goal.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: You know, this reminds me in some ways of something that I think is ascribed to Albert Einstein. He once said, if I had an hour to solve a complex problem, I would spend 55 minutes thinking about the problem and five minutes thinking about the solution. In some ways, that mirrors exactly what you're talking about here.

BIDHAN PARMAR: Yeah, I love that quote as well. But the tricky thing is that when you try to get people to think about the problem and not the solution, that can be very painful. People don't like doing that. We jump to solutions because that part feels so much more fun than really wrestling with a problem. One of the things I'm trying to change about my own language when I talk about doubt is that I've learned that doubt isn't something that we sit with. Sitting with doubt feels like this very passive thing. No one wants to sit with something that's uncomfortable. What I've noticed when I examine people who are really good at making decisions under conditions of uncertainty is they're actively engaging the doubt. So they're naming what it is. They're generating hypotheses about how to address it. They're looking for strengths and weaknesses in those hypotheses. They're playing with different solutions, all of which are very active and engaged.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: One of the ways that you and others suggest that we can use doubt as this kind of hypothesis building exercise is demonstrated in a study that looked at how military officers come up with decisions. Tell me about this study and what it found.

BIDHAN PARMAR: This is such an interesting study. What they did is they compiled all of this complex information about a battlefield scenario, the weather, the direction and location of different armies and where they were situated, their logistics and weapons, and they gave all of this complex information to two types of participants. Some were novices, they were captains, and others were much more experienced, they were generals. And what they asked both of these groups to do is to say, why don't you read through all of this complex information, it's conflicting and uncertain, and write down some questions that you want to ask, and then write down a strategy. What do you think you should do in this situation? And so after they captured all that information, they had an independent panel of judges look at the questions and the strategies of both of these groups, one novice group, the captains, and the more experienced group, the generals. And they noticed some really interesting patterns. The patterns that they noticed were novices were much more likely to treat their intuition as if it was their decision. I think this is what we should do in the battle, and here's some data that suggests that my strategy is the right strategy. With the exact same information, experts saw that data as much more complicated and nuanced. They decided to treat their intuition not as a decision, but as a hypothesis. They were asking questions about key uncertainties. They built strategies that were flexible and had mitigation strategies, so how could we fall back if something goes wrong? The level of their thinking was just much more careful and nuanced than the novices, even with the same information.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: Is there evidence that this is true across different industries, Bobby?

BIDHAN PARMAR: This is a finding that's been replicated in lots of different domains. You know, people who are experienced dealing with doubt are just much more sensitive to their surroundings. So when we look at expert entrepreneurs, entrepreneurs who've started several businesses, when they talk about a business concept, they're just much more able to see, here are all the ways in which this business concept could impact different stakeholders. They're able to assess what are the unintended outcomes of this business concept. And they can also think about here, like the second or third order consequences of this business concept. They're just much more careful thinkers. When we look at nurses, when nurses are making an uncertain diagnosis, they collect twice as much data when compared to novice nurses about the exact same patient. Expert lawyers are much better at scanning the courtroom and adapting their arguments in real time based on what they're seeing in the jury. Expert writers spend a lot more time revising their drafts than novice writers. All of this suggests that people who are experienced when it comes to dealing with uncertainty and doubt are more sensitive to their surrounding and they're investing in learning. They're not investing in trying to get to a right answer quickly.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: I mean, it's almost a paradox, Bobby. The people who are the most experienced are the most hesitant to quickly come to a conclusion.

BIDHAN PARMAR: Yeah, that's what I think is so interesting, is many of us who are not at the top of our industry or running organizations, who don't see ourselves as experts, look at experts and say, wow, they have the right answer, and look how decisive they are. And then when you spend time with people who have significant experience and expertise, they're actually investing time in becoming what I call better answer makers, not right answer getters.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: You said that some of this work points to another important strategy we can use to make better decisions, and it's called anomalizing. What is anomalizing, Bobby?

BIDHAN PARMAR: Anomalizing is basically looking for very early signals that something is departing from our expectations. Going back all the way to when I was in Wyoming, looking at the ridgeline and saying, wait, this is really different than what we would expect if the lake was nearby, would be a form of anomalizing. As a parent saying, my kid isn't eating their lunch, I wonder if something is going wrong, is anomalizing. It's looking for early weak signals that maybe our expectations aren't turning out the way that we anticipate. In other words, what you're trying to do is you're trying to say, how can I be wrong? Exactly. A great way of practicing that in teams, in organizations is something that's called a premortem. You take an idea, a strategy, we're going to launch a new product or we're going to change this internal process, and before doing anything, we say, okay, let's imagine that we launch this product or we change this process, and three weeks later, it failed, it died. What is the most likely cause of death? What is the most likely reason that we might fail? And by anticipating that most likely reason of failure, we can do something about it ahead of time.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: In some ways, this builds on a very interesting idea, which is that many of us in some ways are able to look back at a decision and understand how that decision happened. We have what's called hindsight bias. So in some ways, this is taking advantage of our propensity to look back at an event that's already happened and try and use that hindsight bias in some ways prospectively to say, let's assume the bad thing has happened. Let's try and explain why this bad thing had happened. And now you're using this fact-finding mission to basically say, how can we fix the problem before it happens?

BIDHAN PARMAR: That's right. How can we fix the problem? Or if we run into the problem, how can we be adaptable and flexible to work our way around it?

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: You give the very interesting example of Airbnb. It's obviously a multi-billion dollar company with millions of properties around the world, clearly a huge success. But in 2007, you say the company was on the verge of bankruptcy. What was happening, Bobby?

BIDHAN PARMAR: Airbnb is a brilliant idea. When you look at it on paper or on slide decks, the idea of having people rent out or lease their properties makes so much sense. But in the actual implementation of the idea, the founders learned that they had some more work to do. Early on, they started to say, we built this beautiful system, people can lease their properties, the backend financial system works really well, you can get credit card transactions to work. But no one was actually renting properties and they couldn't figure out why. So they got really curious and they said, why don't we spend some time with some of our customers? And they watched customers actually navigate the Airbnb website. And one of the first things they learned is at the time when people were posting their properties in Manhattan, they were posting very grainy cell phone photos. So you couldn't see the quality of the place that you were renting. And people would say, well, why would I spend $250 or $300 a night for this place that looks really grainy? I can't quite tell what it is. I could stay in a really nice hotel for the same price. And so that led them to this other hypothesis, which is why don't we have someone take professional photos of some of these properties? And they found very quickly that properties with professional photos rented very quickly. And what's important about this story is that many times when we're making decisions, we focus on the what. What's the business that we build in order to get people to be able to rent out property that they have? We spend less attention to the how. And when we focus on the what, it's really easy to have a big abstract vision that has lots of assumptions baked into it. There's lots of things that we don't know. And we can convince ourselves that we're right. But when we focus on the how, we have to become much more specific. And it focuses us to imagine, with much more discipline and much more detail, how we're going to get from point A to point B.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: It also strikes me, Bobby, that so much of what you're talking about is so closely connected with the scientific method. That if you think about why science itself has been effective, so radically effective over the last two centuries, so much of it has been about the embrace of doubt, the embrace of uncertainty, the testing of ideas, as opposed to just going with your gut.

BIDHAN PARMAR: Yeah, I think that's exactly right. Observation, generation of hypothesis, testing those hypotheses and then leading to new observations is critical to learning. What I think is really important to underscore when we think about the importance of the scientific method is that many times we think about learning as a predominantly cognitive endeavor. But when we embrace doubt, we have to understand that learning is just as much a social and emotional endeavor. And when we take doubt seriously, we take very seriously the way that people experience the world both emotionally and socially to preserve learning.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: So I'm getting a couple of things from this. One is that I think when we sit with the problem and we sit with the doubts that we might have about a problem or sit with the uncertainties involved in the problem, we start to see first how complex the problem is, that in fact it's more complex than we might have allowed previously. But second, we also discover that there are actually more solutions than we initially thought about.

BIDHAN PARMAR: Yeah, that's right. When we cannot engage doubt, there are all kinds of phases in the decision making process from framing a problem to generating alternatives to testing those alternatives to implementation that we can inadvertently shortchange or rush through. And when we're able to engage doubt, when we see it as a signal for learning, we don't rush through those stages, we can be much more effective in creating novel options, in implementing more effectively. I think one of the important things to remember about doubt is that it's like the burn that we feel when we're working out at the gym on rep 8 or rep 9. If we were to give up in that moment, we'd be foregoing actually getting stronger. And I think about doubt as that burn. It's a signal that I'm about to become much more capable. I'm about to become stronger or wiser in that moment. And so when we experience doubt, remembering that it's a signal for growth, rather than a signal that we're not smart, is really important.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: What do you make of political leaders who sound extremely confident today, Bobby? I'm wondering, when you watch the news and you see people make pronouncements with great confidence about things that will happen two years from now, if a particular policy is implemented or not implemented, what goes through your head?

BIDHAN PARMAR: One of the things that I think in those moments is that it just feels like you're offering an addictive substance to your audience, that in that moment, your audience is like, ah, there's some certainty, I know this will happen. And you're pulling people along in that moment. No one can make those promises, but it feels so good to hear them in the moment. So it's like offering some addictive substance that people have a hard time saying no to, even if they might know that it's not in their best long-term interest.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: In other words, even if they have been in some ways misled or disappointed in the past because your previous promises have failed to materialize, the certainty that you're offering in some ways feels like a drug that basically says it limits the uncertainty I'm feeling and that makes me feel better.

BIDHAN PARMAR: One of the things we have to really be careful of in the information age is this risk of the addiction to feeling right. All of our social media environments can be completely manufactured to help us feel good about our existing set of beliefs. And many of us come to associate that feeling of not knowing as very uncomfortable because we're so used to feeling right. It can be an addictive thing.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: Bidin Parmar is the author of Radical Doubt, Turning Uncertainty into Surefire Success. Bobby Parmar, thank you so much for joining me today on Hidden Brain.

BIDHAN PARMAR: Shankar, it was such a pleasure.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: If you have a personal story about dealing with doubt that you would be willing to share with the Hidden Brain audience, or a question or comment about this episode, please find a very quiet room and record a voice memo on your phone. Two or three minutes is plenty. Email the file to us at feedback at hiddenbrain.org. Use the subject line, doubt. That email address again is feedback at hiddenbrain.org. Today's episode is the conclusion to our month long You 2.0 series. Over the past few weeks, we have talked about courage, patience and the psychology of spiraling. We have also looked at what to do when you get stuck in a rut. If you missed any of these episodes, you can find them in this podcast feed or at hiddenbrain.org. When we come back, what's really happening when someone gives us feedback and we react badly? Researcher Emily Falk returns to the show to answer listeners' questions about defensiveness. You're listening to Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedantam. This is Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedantam. You know you shouldn't say anything. It's really not such a big deal. You tell yourself to keep the peace. After all, does it really matter that your partner loads the dishwasher all wrong? But it does matter, whispers the little voice in your head. Don't you remember the wine glass that broke last week? In all of our lives, the people around us do things that drive us up the wall. If it's not the way your partner loads the dishwasher, it's the way your dad backs into a parking space, or your colleague's annoying tendency to interrupt you in a meeting. Sometimes we let these things slide. At other times, we feel compelled to speak up, either for our own sake or for the other person's benefit. But getting a good result from this sort of feedback is not easy. Chances are, the other person will feel that we're picking on them or nagging. They'll become defensive. So what can we do to make the process of giving and receiving feedback a little less fraught? That's where Emily Falk comes in. She's a psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania and our guest on a previous episode of Hidden Brain titled, It's Not My Fault. Today, Emily returns to the show to address your comments in our latest installment of our popular segment, Your Questions Answered. Emily Falk, welcome back to Hidden Brain.

EMILY FALK: Thanks for having me back. Emily, you pointed out in our earlier conversation that one reason we respond defensively to feedback is because our minds associate what is me with what is good. What do you mean by that? Well, in our brains, we have a system called the value system that helps us evaluate whether things are good or bad, likely to be rewarding for us. And we also have a self-relevance system that helps us decide whether things are me or not me. And interestingly, those two systems are really intertwined with one another. So the same kinds of brain patterns that differentiate between whether I think that a particular trait like messy or intelligent applies to me can also differentiate whether I'm looking at an image that I think is positive, like a birthday party, or negative, like a pile of trash or a gory scene. And in our day-to-day lives, this comes up in so many different places, starting with the physical things that we hold on to. So right now, I've been thinking a lot. I've been helping my mom navigate clearing out stuff in her house, and we have movers scheduled to come and take the rest of the stuff out of her house next week. And in preparation for that, I have spent so much time recently going through a lot of my childhood things. So some of those things are really important and things that I'm going to hold dear, like the stool that my dad made for me, the little wooden stool that has an E on it when I was a kid, that 100% I'm keeping. But then there's also stuff that would just be clutter, like all of the textbooks and notebooks that have hundreds of pages of notes that I took in high school and college. Like the things that I learned about, you know, revolutions in Central America in high school, there are books that do a much better job of describing those situations than my, you know, partial understanding as a 16-year-old. And yet, going through those notebooks and seeing my handwriting and thinking about who I was at the time, it feels so hard to let go of those things and throw them out. And I think that comes from this idea that things that I think of as me are also then kind of inherently valuable in a different way than, you know, looking at somebody else's notebook. I can see that that's probably not something that I need to keep. And so that intertwining of self and value is sometimes really beneficial because it helps us maintain a positive sense of self. But it can also get us in trouble because we hold really tightly to the things that we've done in the past or to things that we think of as being part of us.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: So in other words, when your partner tells you that you're loading the dishwasher wrong, you're not just hearing that there might be a different way to load the dishwasher. You're also hearing in some ways an attack on this sense of self.

EMILY FALK: Yeah. I think that the ways that we tend to conflate self and value can get us in trouble in exactly that way. That somebody is giving us advice or coaching or input that might otherwise be beneficial for us. And instead of hearing the potentially valuable kernel of truth, we hear something that is suggesting all kinds of things about who we are, and maybe what we're capable of, or evaluating something bigger than might be at stake there.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: One of the things we talk about with some regularity on Hidden Brain is the fact that we assess ourselves by our intentions, but other people don't necessarily know what we intended to do. They can only see our actions. Do you think the fact that we have insight into our own thoughts and intentions is why we feel defensive sometimes when someone critiques our actions?

EMILY FALK: That's a really interesting way of framing it. I think that this idea that we can understand why we did something is such a valuable insight for when we're the person giving the critique. So when we think about how we're going to frame the request to our partner to load the dishwasher differently, there might be all kinds of things that are on their minds that we don't have access to. And so what you're proposing is that on the other side of it, we also think it's really obvious why we did what we did. There are so many reasons that are salient in terms of what happened already in our day or other past experiences we've had. That's a space that's rife for miscommunication of all kinds.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: Right. I'm thinking about a coach who's basically advising an athlete, is asking the athlete to do something that would improve the athlete's performance. And the athlete is thinking, but you don't know how exhausted I am, how tired I am, how many different things I'm juggling in my head. You're just asking me to do this one additional thing, and you're not paying attention to all the context that's going to make it difficult for me to follow your advice.

EMILY FALK: Oh, I love that you bring up the coach example, because I think the coach example is a situation where we've both agreed on the terms of engagement. We've agreed that if you're the coach and I'm the athlete, presumably I've signed up to get your advice. And we've also agreed that you are trying to do something that's in my interest, which is make me better at whatever the sport or activity is. So if I'm paying you to be my swim coach, for example, and you give me some advice, it actually really reduces the chance that I'm gonna say, well, why is Shankar telling me to do it that way? Because the terms of engagement are much clearer than the dishwasher situation where there are so many other variables at play where I'm not your dishwasher coach. And so we haven't actually agreed that I give you input about those kinds of household chores.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: Right, and in fact, in some situations, we both think that we are the coach and the other person is our trainee. Of course.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: So, we heard from several people who called in to share the difficulties they've had in dealing with friends or family members who get defensive about feedback. Here's a message we received from listener Katie.

KATIE: How can someone stay calm and grounded when dealing with a loved one who becomes highly defensive or even aggressive, especially when the reaction feels disproportionate or personal? Basically, how do you honor their feelings without absorbing or engaging in the negativity?

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: I really like the way that Katie presents this dilemma, Emily. When we're having a tough conversation, it can be important to acknowledge how the other person is feeling. But when we feel that someone's response is disproportionate to the situation at hand, it can be really difficult to acknowledge all of what they're feeling, instead of saying, just listen to me.

EMILY FALK: Yeah. First of all, just as a little bit of background, there's amazing neuroscience research about the ways that the assumptions that we bring to an interaction or to even just hearing a story change the way that our brains respond to it. So in research where people were given different backstories before hearing a narrative about a man who it's ambiguous whether he's having an affair, and half of the participants are given a backstory that makes it really clear that he is, and half of the participants are given a backstory that makes it really clear that he isn't. And then what we see is that the brain responses of the people who share the first backstory are really similar to one another, but they really diverge from the people who are given the alternative facts, the alternative backstory. And so our assumptions work like that too. When we're coming into an interaction and I think that our conversation is about the dishwasher and you think that our conversation is about whether we take time to do things that are important to the other person, then if I'm just thinking this is about when we do the dishes, it shouldn't be a big deal. But if for you there's lots of other things that are wrapped up in it, then it's unlikely that we're going to make the same meaning of that conversation. And so, in Katie's comment, I'm certainly not proposing that people engage in situations where somebody is being disrespectful or, you know, where safety is at stake. But in a situation where it seems like somebody has a bigger emotional response than you were expecting, I think being curious and thinking about asking for a little bit more information about what's going on for them can be really helpful.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: Now, sometimes when we offer feedback to another person and they react defensively, we are tempted to say, why are you acting defensively? And that turns out not to be a very effective strategy to get somebody to act less defensively.

EMILY FALK: When you think about the response that you're making and saying, why are you reacting defensively, that implies a fault in some way, right? Because defensiveness is not typically something that we think of as a positive way of interacting. This reminds me a little bit, actually, of something that happened to me with my kids last week, where I have two kids who are twins, and they came home three days in a row from school, off the bus, basically in tears. They were so angry about what was happening in their ride home from school. And in particular, what was happening was that there's a seven-year-old who's on the bus with them, who was really effective at dividing them, at sort of doing all kinds of things to promote, to provoke big emotional reactions from the kids. And my kid Emmett came in and he was just like, I can't handle this, this is like so awful. Like he's being terrible. And I said, you know, I think it might be helpful to have a conversation. Like, how would you feel about giving the other child's mom a call, and we could just talk about it. And Emmett's initial reaction was that he would really like to do that. But what he would like to do is tell the mom all of the reasons why her child was not behaving in a way that worked for Emmett, and to get her to, you know, punish that kid in some way. And what I said to him was, well, we can't really come into the conversation assuming that your friend is at fault here. Because if we come in that way, what kind of reaction do you think you're going to get? And eventually, after he had had a minute to, you know, do a different activity, calm down, we called the other family, and we had a really great conversation. And I think the crux of that, the insight that the kids were able to generate with some coaching was that this younger kid really wanted Emmett's attention. He really wanted to be able to engage and to play. And when Emmett was doing things like reading instead of interacting, that that was painful or frustrating. And so he was willing to do all kinds of things in order to get Emmett's attention. And so the setup of this phone call, I think, would have gone very differently if Emmett had come in initially saying, here are all the reasons why I think what you're doing is wrong, then we get a defensive reaction. And I think Emmett would say that, you know, then it's his fault for not engaging in the conversation. And so I say that to say that I think the way that we set up the context of the conversation matters a lot. And so having some initial relationship where we talk to each other about things that are hard and where we have the assumption that the other person has good intentions is so important. So if we just start with the moment of the confrontation, we've already sort of lost the battle. We want to have this mental and emotional preparation going in that makes it possible for us to do all these other things that are beneficial.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: You know, this reminds me, Emily, about this idea that psychologists have talked about for a long time, the fundamental attribution error. We see the mistakes that other people make as reflecting their inner dispositions, but we often see our mistakes as the product of our situations. In other words, we see our failures and mistakes in context but often fail to extend the same grace to others. A listener named Michael offered this theory about why humans might be bad at taking criticism.

MICHAEL: I wonder how much, based on Dr.Falk's comments, these trends are the result of evolution, making us able to deflect responsibility for our faults. Or put it another way, when I succeed, it's because of me. I attribute my success to me. And when I fail, I attribute it to my environment or some external threat. And I don't know if Dr. Falk would ever comment on that. But thank you very much.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: What do you think, Emily?

EMILY FALK: I think Michael is exactly right here. As you said, the fundamental attribution error says that we have access to all of this additional information about our own motivations and about all of the things that we've done that might set us up for success. So for example, if we put in a lot of hard work and dedication leading up to an eventual payoff, it's really obvious to us all of that work that we put in. And likewise, let's say we put in that same work, but we have bad luck and something happens in our external environment that makes it so that things didn't go the way that we anticipated, that it's much easier for us to see what all of those other things that thwarted us were. Whereas when we're thinking about other people's experiences, we might not see all the behind the scenes effort and work that they put in, and we also might not be aware of all of the contextual factors that went wrong. And so the idea that Michael is putting forward is really well supported by decades of social psychology research. It's also related to the idea of naive realism, which is that we see the world as it actually is, that we think that we have a sense of objective reality that's correct, and that other people who deviate from that have all kinds of reasons why they're not able to see things as they actually are. And so then trying to get on the same page is hard.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: I also want to talk about how when we jump in sometimes with feedback without paying attention to the contextual factors, in some ways we're not extending the compassion to others that we often demand from them. So in other words, when I criticize my partner for loading the dishwasher wrong, without acknowledging that my partner has actually taken the trouble to actually load the dishwasher, my partner might be tired. And all I'm focusing on is what my partner is doing wrong as opposed to what my partner is doing right.

EMILY FALK: Yes, and that also gets to this point that the social situation is not only unfolding in this exact moment, but is also a product of the history that we have together and of what I imagine your intentions to be. And when we get into a situation where we're not extending that grace or compassion to other people, maybe because all of the work or the motivations that they have aren't obvious to us, then things can compound, right? And so, you know, I'll share, when my partner Brett and I were thinking about getting married, we thought about what our wedding vows should be. And first we had a party where we had a wedding vow bracket and we let friends nominate what they thought we should vow. The winning one was, I vow to treat you like a queen but respect you like a prime minister. And we decided that, you know, although that's funny, it's probably not the formulation to be the foundation for the rest of our lives together. And one of the things that we did vow was that I will assume that you have good intentions. And also, on the other side, that basically we'll earn it, right? That we'll always try to come into interactions with good intentions for each other. And so, having that kind of base expectation that if somebody is doing something where it seems like they're being a jerk, their behavior makes sense to them. And so, trying to understand why what they're doing makes sense to them is so important because we don't have access to it automatically.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: When we come back, ideas on how we can reduce our defensiveness and help others do the same. You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. This is Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedantam. When someone gives us constructive feedback, we often instinctively think, no way, that can't be true. It's psychologically easier to reject criticism than to grapple with a challenge to our sense of self. At the University of Pennsylvania, psychologist Emily Falk studies the psychology of defensiveness and what we can do about it. Emily, if our attachment to the self is part of the reason we are defensive, you and others have found that we may need to get some distance from ourselves if we want to become less defensive. What do you mean by this?

EMILY FALK: Well, if our sense of self and our sense of value are intertwined, then one of the ways that we can maybe be less defensive or more open to new ideas is by having a chance to zoom out and see that our self-worth isn't necessarily tied up in the specific thing that somebody's asking us to change. And there are a lot of different ways that we can get that kind of psychological distance. So one of the ways we can do it is by reflecting on the things that matter the most to us, which psychologists call values affirmation, like really getting in touch with the things that are most important, most core to us, which then can offer the perspective that, you know, whether or not I backed into the parking space correctly or loaded the dishwasher the way that you wanted me to, doesn't actually determine whether I'm a good person or not, because it's not as fundamental as these other kinds of things, like friendship or compassion or spirituality. On the other hand, we can also do it more directly by taking a step back and thinking about a perspective of somebody who we think would have a wise response to this situation. So thinking about a role model or another person who we think might be able to respond to the situation in a way that we ideally would like to. Both kind of takes us outside of ourself. And then there's really fantastic research that Megan Meyer and Diana Tamir did that shows that when we do that mental simulation of somebody else's response to a situation, the way that our brains handle that task actually then make us take on some of those qualities. It makes us sort of identify with the characteristics of that wiser or more patient person.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: Can you talk about some of the other techniques that research has found are very effective when it comes to self-distancing, Emily, including the idea that sometimes it's helpful to imagine how we might feel about the current situation if we were, for example, two years in the future?

EMILY FALK: Yes. So our brains handle different kinds of psychological distance in similar ways, which I think is incredible. So thinking about ourself somewhere far away in time, like two years in the future, somewhere physically removed, somewhere that's geographically distant from where we are, thinking about ourself as a different person or with different identities, all of those things can create psychological distance. Taking that perspective of a fly on the wall, for example, can help us feel less angry or reduce aggressive thoughts or reactions that might escalate the conflict or have us show up as not the way that we would want to be. This is true, interestingly, both in adults and in kids.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: It's interesting. We heard from a listener named Sue, who is herself a writing professor. She had an interesting experience in class after listening to our episode about defensiveness. Sue was teaching a class of graduate students, and I let her pick up the story from there.

SUE: I noticed in the crowd one of my former undergrads, and I recognized her. Her name is Desiree, and I said, oh, Desiree, you'll be familiar with all these concepts that I'm talking about, concrete nouns, active verbs. I won't bore you with the grammar lesson. And then she responded and said, oh yeah, I remember those. And of course, you're all over the place. I remember that about you. And I stood kind of like a deer in the headlights and recognized one of my challenges, and that is to be methodic and linear with my students. I am not that way in the world. I'm associative. I jump around. I'm theatrical. I'm eccentric. I'm sure you can tell this already. And in that moment, bless her heart, Desiree called me out. But because I had listened to Hidden Brain that morning or the day before, I had an opportunity in real time to reframe that experience and use it as a teachable moment. So I stopped the class, and what I got to do in this moment with Desiree and in front of this class and said, you know, Desiree, I am aspirationally organized, not actually organized, but I try and now you've given me a chance to try again. And in that moment, not only did I humanize myself to these people in the classroom and not only did I get a big laugh, but I really did get to take a breath and then be a little more methodic. And I sort of did a, okay, let's take it from the top. Here's what I'm talking about. It was such a wonderful moment for me. Emily, what does Sue do right here?

EMILY FALK: I love this story so much. And Sue, I'm just so delighted that you're able to do that because what a gift for the students to see that model of somebody who takes a beat and recognizes that everybody has areas to grow, and then gets this really positive response, right? That the students laugh and they're with her. So now Sue and her students are all on the same team. But I really love that she was open to that feedback.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: One thing I noticed is that after she heard the criticism from her student, Sue took a moment to pause. She didn't react right away. She took a beat to consider what she was hearing and what she was feeling. And in some ways, that echoes what you were saying a moment ago, Emily, which is that one key to not getting too defensive is to not react immediately.

EMILY FALK: Yes. I think Sue did herself and her students a big service by taking that moment to honor what she was feeling, because of course, it feels hard to hear the things that we might be able to do better at. And in the moment, I completely relate to the idea that we would have that moment of feeling defensive. And she also then was able to take a step back and think about it in context, right? And also, the idea that Desiree was willing to give that feedback, I think, speaks highly of Sue. Because students are in a somewhat vulnerable position. And if they think that you're the kind of person who can't take critique, then I would imagine that they wouldn't give you that feedback in the classroom to begin with.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: There was also a wonderful moment in this anecdote that Sue narrated, where it started out being Desiree versus Sue, where Desiree says something, it was perceived as a criticism. I can imagine students sitting up and asking themselves, how is the professor going to react? But Sue's very wise and mature response put them all, as you said, on the same team, and suddenly it's not me versus you. It's me and you versus whatever the problem is that we're confronting together.

EMILY FALK: Exactly. And I think that that type of response, where somebody has a critique or feedback for us, that we can benefit from framing that situation as an opportunity for us to solve the problem together. So when we do performance feedback in my lab, for example, one of the things that helps me a lot is when my team is giving me feedback about how I could be a better boss, to have them also offer solutions. So rather than just identifying the problems, when they give me thoughts about how we could solve the issue, how we could work around the thing that is a problem, then it puts us on the same team. Likewise, when I'm trying to give them feedback, not just saying, I need you to do this differently, but also what are the ways that I can support you to get additional training or for us to rearrange things, so that you have the time or the bandwidth and so on. So basically, thinking about situations where we're either giving or receiving feedback as opportunities to be on the same team with that person and first establishing that we both want to solve the problem and then assuming that's true, how can we do it together?

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: Some listeners wondered if defensiveness might be triggered or elevated by the specific language that we use. Here's listener, Laura Lee.

LAURA LEE: I have a friend with whom he does not like hearing the word, I'd like to give you some feedback. He would much rather me say, I'd like to share something with you or I've been thinking about this. So I just find it interesting because I would like to hear what the author has to say about the way we word our quote feedback.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: So Emily, are there ways of phrasing feedback or even describing what it is that we are doing that can reduce defensiveness?

EMILY FALK: Laura Lee's situation is interesting because it sounds like she already has a norm with her friend that they give each other feedback. So if she knows this about her friend, that there are particular ways that he likes to get feedback, then that seems very valuable to know because on her side, the stakes might be pretty low in terms of whether she says, I'd like to give you some feedback versus, here's something that I've been thinking about. And so if those words have particular meaning to the person that she's interacting with, then that's really valuable information to have. And so one of the things I take away from Laura Lee's story is this idea that norms matter a lot. So if we're on a team where we never give each other feedback, and then all of a sudden I come to you and I say, Shankar, I've got some feedback for you, it might loom very large or really elicit defensiveness in a bigger way than if we have the norm that at the beginning of our meetings, we check in about things that are going well and places where we want to potentially make changes. And so the kind of context set up, I think, is important that Laura Lee's story highlights. And then in terms of the words that we use, there's broader kind of categories, I think, psychologically. So we've talked a lot about how taking a step back, getting some psychological distance can be helpful. And there's a lot of research about how stories help reduce defensiveness. So that's not at the word level, but rather the kind of packaging of information. And both the psychology and neuroscience literature highlight how powerful stories can be in helping people learn lessons or see things from a new perspective without getting defensive. And also the anthropology literature. So for example, a lot of cultures around the world use stories as a way to give feedback to kids or to other people about how we should behave.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: Can you talk a moment about why this is effective psychologically? Why is it that stories and parables, for example, have such power? So in other words, you go up to someone and say, you know, you really shouldn't be so selfish. You should be more generous with your money. That's likely to provoke defensiveness. But you tell them a story about somebody who's very generous or somebody whose generosity transformed some community, and people hear the same story with a completely different mindset. What's going on, Emily?

EMILY FALK: In our brains, stories are processed differently than other kinds of information. So they tap into brain regions that help us think about what other people think and feel, for example. And they seem to circumvent the kind of defensive processing that comes, as you said, if you just directly tell somebody to change their behavior. And we've seen this in lots of different examples. During the COVID pandemic, for example, my team did some research looking at people's willingness to help others in their community or change their behavior. And what we found was that when the same exact information was delivered just in terms of facts, you know, the number of people who are being affected and how frontline healthcare workers were suffering because of the behaviors that we were engaging in, that landed differently than when the exact same information was delivered through stories, for example, of frontline health workers or people who were incarcerated, people whose circumstances made it so that they couldn't take the kinds of preventative actions for the spread of the virus. And in other neuroscience research that we've done, we found that when we use brain stimulation technology that changes the way that people's brains are functioning temporarily, stories are still able to help people understand new ideas and people are able to reason about them in a different way than when the same information is delivered as didactic facts.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: Right, right. And in some ways, I think stories might also allow us to see flaws in ourselves if they're depicted in another character. So in other words, if you're hearing the story of somebody who's very selfish, for example, even if we might have that same selfishness inside us, it's harder to hear it when that feedback is directed directly at us versus when we hear this about someone else. And that allows us to say, oh, I can see a connection between how I'm behaving and how this other person's behaving.

EMILY FALK: Yes, and it also allows us to think about solutions, right? So in a story, you can see what you might want the character to do differently. And without having that immediate defensive response that we sometimes have and we're thinking about our own behavior when we feel bad because we potentially have harmed somebody else, when we see somebody else engaging in a particular set of things that are not in their best interests or aren't kind or aren't the way that you'd actually want to behave if you were being your best self, it's also easier to see, well, what could the person do about it?

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: When we come back, is it always wrong to be defensive? How should we respond to feedback that is inaccurate or unwise? You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. This is Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedantam. There's an old joke, just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they aren't after you. We've seen how defensiveness can keep us from hearing useful feedback and criticism. But does fixing our defensiveness mean that we should always listen to criticism? At the University of Pennsylvania, psychologist Emily Falk studies the psychology of defensiveness and what we can do about it. Emily, there's a layer of complexity that's often involved when it comes to handling feedback. How do we suss out if the person giving us feedback has our goals and best interests at heart? Sometimes, of course, the feedback we get isn't designed for our benefit, it's designed for the benefit of the person who's trying to give us the feedback. Here's a question on that front from a listener named Rob.

ROB: I would like to hear the researchers' thoughts on how one might still be on guard for things like manipulation, for example, gaslighting. It seems to me like someone can use the kind of information laid out in the researchers' talk and apply it to somebody who is otherwise very logical. So how do we take this kind of information and allow ourselves to be more open to constructive criticism, at the same time protecting ourselves from people who really just want to manipulate us? Thank you.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: So, Emily, how do we tell the difference between garden variety defensiveness and the potentially useful ability to watch out for manipulation by bad actors?

EMILY FALK: I think that the key distinction here is that taking feedback doesn't necessarily mean believing everything that we hear or acting on it. It's just giving ourselves enough space to consider whether it might be helpful for us in the first place. So, if we're thinking about the situations on average that tend to make people more open to new information or constructive feedback, we see that when people have a goal to be accurate or a goal to improve or a goal to solve a particular problem, then they're often more open to what scientists call uncongenial information, like ideas that might challenge your current beliefs or perspectives or suggest that you do something differently. And so, that makes sense that if we have a particular goal and we think that this person's input might help us achieve that particular goal, then we'd be more receptive to it. Now, on the other hand, when somebody gives us unsolicited advice or unsolicited feedback, that's not necessarily starting from our goal, we're just going about our day-to-day life, and this person comes along and proposes a new goal for us, right? And then we can evaluate whether they share our best interests, whether they have some particular motivation that is incompatible with our best interests. And so, I say all of that to say that we can focus our attention on things like accuracy motives and on things like whether this is actually compatible with my bigger picture goals and values. And that that is not necessarily saying that we're being defensive, right? That's being thoughtful.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: Right. I mean, when someone gives you financial advice, for example, it really is important to actually ask, is this advice coming from a place of vested interest? So in some ways, having a certain amount of cautious skepticism is not a bad idea.

EMILY FALK: Yes. And my friend Jamil Zaki calls this being a hopeful skeptic. So as opposed to being a cynic, where we just think that everybody's out to get us or that people are terrible, that we can demand evidence, that we can ask for things to back up particular claims that somebody's making or behaviors that they're suggesting that we can change and that we can be thoughtful and reflective in how we use that information moving forward. So we can disagree with someone else without being defensive, right? We can be curious about their position. We can learn about what their motivations are. We can even potentially get on the same page about a number of different things without automatically conceding our position or automatically changing what we're doing in our day-to-day life.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: In most domains of our lives, moderation is important. We had a question from a listener named Isabel about the potential risks of going overboard when it comes to embracing another person's critiques. Here's Isabel.

ISABEL: Is there any research or studies or even advice on any runoff feelings of, I'm a failure, I'm just sinking into that feedback and criticism that my loved one, partner, friend, family gave me without the defensive border, but just immediately jumping into the kind of failure thought process? So Isabel points out something interesting here, Emily.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: >It seems fairly easy for some people to jump from accepting someone's critical feedback to accepting the message, I'm a failure. How can we accept the criticism that comes our way without letting it affect our self-esteem?

EMILY FALK: I think that Isabel's question and comment highlight something that's really important about the ways that we take feedback on board for things that might be very important to us versus things that might be less important to us. So research from Brent Hughes' lab has looked at the way that we construct our sense of self, and there's kind of a hierarchy of traits, where some of them are much more core to our sense of who we are, maybe thinking about the ways that we're kind or honest or loyal to our friends and family. Those things might be more core, and other kinds of things might be more peripheral, the things that are more specific or less of the most important values to us. In his team's research, what they found is that when people were given feedback about their performance on a particular task from supposedly a group of experts, first, people were much quicker to take on board the positive feedback than the negative feedback. When they said, wow, this person looks like they're really smart, or this person looks like they're really funny or really engaging, then that's easier to say, wow, I didn't think of myself as somebody who is a particularly engaging speaker, but I guess if this audience thinks I am, if this set of evaluators thinks I am, then that must be true. On average, for the typical person in the study, they were a little bit more hesitant to take on board that negative input. That was particularly true for people who came into the study with higher self-esteem and lower levels of depression. And so, you know, Isabel's story makes me think a little bit about some of those base differences in how we're navigating our day-to-day lives, where if we're finding that it's very easy for us to absorb other people's negative evaluations, that might be a situation where we want to take a step back and figure out if we could get some support to bolster our own sense of self, our own sense of self-esteem and well-being, because that could be a flag.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: We heard from a listener named Soma, who is a writer. Soma says that at times she has struggled to accept suggestions from editors. She knows that they are there to help her, but she also feels attached to what she has written. But one day she got this tip from a friend who was going through an illness.

SOMA: I had a friend who had non-Hodgkin's lymphoma and some other health, serious health complications, who has since passed, and how did she stand all the pain, keep going through the treatments, the moods that they caused. >She said, well, it's all just weather, and you know, it's like a cloudy day, you know, it's going to rain, and you just accept it. >But you don't get mad at the sky for like the weather, you don't get furious that the rain is making you wet, you just find your way through it, knowing that after rain is sunshine and dry weather. >And so that's what I've tried to do in much less serious situations than, you know, health complications, including getting defensive, initially defensive, when someone gives me edits. >I just know that that's part of the weather of writing, and that weather changes. >I hope that's useful.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: So while we're not all writers or artists, Emily, I think there's something powerful in what Soma is saying. We're all going to get feedback and criticism at various points in our lives. Can being more philosophical about it help us to absorb it better?

EMILY FALK: What Soma is describing sounds a lot to me like mindfulness. So the idea that we can notice what's happening, kind of like we notice the weather, and that we can accept it in a non-reactive way or even with a somewhat distanced perspective, like we've been talking about. And Soma's friend's experience of navigating terminal diagnosis and illness is a really beautiful story, and I'm so sorry to hear that Soma lost her friend. And it also makes me think about my dear friend, Emile Bruneau, who ran Penn's Peace and Conflict Neuroscience Lab. And he got a diagnosis seven years ago about of a glioblastoma brain tumor. And so he understood that that meant that there was really a finite amount of time. Typically when people have this kind of brain cancer, they have a fairly short amount of time to live. And in that context, you know, the little things, the things that might be frustrating or annoying or whatever on a day-to-day basis would just roll off his back in a totally different way. And he reflected on that, like how that diagnosis and that opportunity to pay attention to the fact that we have a finite number of days and minutes and hours together really, you know, put a fine point on the things that really matter and the things that don't. And he really let go of so much defensiveness. And became an even more open version of himself in such a beautiful way. And so, you know, I really love Soma's story because I think it also speaks to the ways that when we see other people go through those kinds of experiences with grace, it can also model for us ways that we might move through the world in a slightly less defensive or slightly more open way. And then have those effects on other people as well. Because that kind of way of being is contagious.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: Emily Falk is a psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania. She's the author of What We Value, The Neuroscience of Choice and Change. Emily, thank you so much for joining me today on Hidden Brain.

EMILY FALK: Thanks for having me back, Shankar.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: Hidden Brain is produced by Hidden Brain Media. Our audio production team includes Annie Murphy Paul, Kristin Wong, Laura Kwerel, Ryan Katz, Autumn Barnes, Andrew Chadwick and Nick Woodbury. Tara Boyle is our executive producer. I'm Hidden Brain's executive editor. If you like this episode, please take a moment and think of someone else who might benefit from hearing it. Do you have a friend or a partner or a coworker who struggles with feedback? Please share this episode with two or three people you know. Word of mouth recommendations are the way most people find themselves to our show. I'm Shankar Vedantam. See you soon.