What forecasters do in tournaments is good practice in life. When you form an opinion, ask yourself what would have to happen to prove it false. Then keep track of your views so you can see when you were right, when you were wrong, and how your thinking has evolved. “I started out just wanting to prove myself,” Jean-Pierre says. “Now I want to improve myself—to see how good I can get.”

It’s one thing to admit to ourselves that we’ve been wrong. It’s another thing to confess that to other people. Even if we manage to overthrow our inner dictator, we run the risk of facing outer ridicule. In some cases we fear that if others find out we were wrong, it could destroy our reputations. How do people who accept being wrong cope with that?

In the early 1990s, the British physicist Andrew Lyne published a major discovery in the world’s most prestigious science journal. He presented the first evidence that a planet could orbit a neutron star—a star that had exploded into a supernova. Several months later, while preparing to give a presentation at an astronomy conference, he noticed that he hadn’t adjusted for the fact that the Earth moves in an elliptical orbit, not a circular one. He was embarrassingly, horribly wrong. The planet he had discovered didn’t exist.

In front of hundreds of colleagues, Andrew walked onto the ballroom stage and admitted his mistake. When he finished his confession, the room exploded in a standing ovation. One astrophysicist called it “the most honorable thing I’ve ever seen.”

Andrew Lyne is not alone. Psychologists find that admitting we were wrong doesn’t make us look less competent. It’s a display of honesty and a willingness to learn. Although scientists believe it will damage their reputation to admit that their studies failed to replicate, the reverse is true: they’re judged more favorably if they acknowledge the new data rather than deny them. After all, it doesn’t matter “whose fault it is that something is broken if it’s your responsibility to fix it,” actor Will Smith has said. “Taking responsibility is taking your power back.”

When we find out we might be wrong, a standard defense is “I’m entitled to my opinion.” I’d like to modify that: yes, we’re entitled to hold opinions inside our own heads. If we choose to express them out loud, though, I think it’s our responsibility to ground them in logic and facts, share our reasoning with others, and change our minds when better evidence emerges.

This philosophy takes us back to the Harvard students who had their worldviews attacked in that unethical study by Henry Murray. If I had to guess, I’d say the students who enjoyed the experience had a mindset similar to that of great scientists and superforecasters. They saw challenges to their opinions as an exciting opportunity to develop and evolve their thinking. The students who found it stressful didn’t know how to detach. Their opinions were their identities. An assault on their worldviews was a threat to their very sense of self. Their inner dictator rushed in to protect them.

Take it from the student with the code name Lawful. He felt he had been damaged emotionally by the study. “Our adversary in the debate subjected us to various insults,” Lawful reflected four decades later. “It was a highly unpleasant experience.”

Today, Lawful has a different code name, one that’s familiar to most Americans. He’s known as the Unabomber.

Ted Kaczynski became a math professor turned anarchist and domestic terrorist. He mailed bombs that killed three people and injured twenty-three more. An eighteen-year-long FBI investigation culminated in his arrest after The New York Times and The Washington Post published his manifesto and his brother recognized his writing. He is now serving life in prison without parole.

The excerpt I quoted earlier was from Kaczynski’s manifesto. If you read the entire document, you’re unlikely to be unsettled by the content or the structure. What’s disturbing is the level of conviction. Kaczynski displays little consideration of alternative views, barely a hint that he might be wrong. Consider just the opening:

The Industrial Revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race. . . . They have destabilized society, have made life unfulfilling. . . . The continued development of technology will worsen the situation. It will certainly subject human beings to greater indignities and inflict greater damage on the natural world. . . . If the system survives, the consequences will be inevitable: There is no way of reforming or modifying the system. . . .

Kaczynski’s case leaves many questions about his mental health unanswered. Still, I can’t help but wonder: If he had learned to question his opinions, would he still have been able to justify resorting to violence? If he had developed the capacity to discover that he was wrong, would he still have ended up doing something so wrong?

Every time we encounter new information, we have a choice. We can attach our opinions to our identities and stand our ground in the stubbornness of preaching and prosecuting. Or we can operate more like scientists, defining ourselves as people committed to the pursuit of truth—even if it means proving our own views wrong.

CHAPTER 4

The Good Fight Club

   The Psychology of Constructive Conflict

    Arguments are extremely vulgar, for everybody in good society holds exactly the same opinions.

—Oscar Wilde

As the two youngest boys in a big family, the bishop’s sons did everything together. They launched a newspaper and built their own printing press together. They opened a bicycle shop and then started manufacturing their own bikes together. And after years of toiling away at a seemingly impossible problem, they invented the first successful airplane together.

Wilbur and Orville Wright first caught the flying bug when their father brought home a toy helicopter. After it broke, they built one of their own. As they advanced from playing together to working together to rethinking human flight together, there was no trace of sibling rivalry between them. Wilbur even said they “thought together.” Even though it was Wilbur who launched the project, the brothers shared equal credit for their achievement. When it came time to decide who would pilot their historic flight at Kitty Hawk, they just flipped a coin.

New ways of thinking often spring from old bonds. The comedic chemistry of Tina Fey and Amy Poehler can be traced back to their early twenties, when they immediately hit it off in an improv class. The musical harmony of the Beatles started even earlier, when they were in high school. Just minutes after a mutual friend introduced them, Paul McCartney was teaching John Lennon how to tune a guitar. Ben & Jerry’s Ice Cream grew out of a friendship between the two founders that began in seventh-grade gym class. It seems that to make progress together, we need to be in sync. But the truth, like all truths, is more complicated.

One of the world’s leading experts on conflict is an organizational psychologist in Australia named Karen “Etty” Jehn. When you think about conflict, you’re probably picturing what Etty calls relationship conflict—personal, emotional clashes that are filled not just with friction but also with animosity. I hate your stinking guts. I’ll use small words so that you’ll be sure to understand, you warthog-faced buffoon. You bob for apples in the toilet . . . and you like it.

But Etty has identified another flavor called task conflict—clashes about ideas and opinions. We have task conflict when we’re debating whom to hire, which restaurant to pick for dinner, or whether to name our child Gertrude or Quasar. The question is whether the two types of conflict have different consequences.

A few years ago I surveyed hundreds of new teams in Silicon Valley on conflict several times during their first six months working together. Even if they argued constantly and agreed on nothing else, they agreed on what kind of conflict they were having. When their projects were finished, I asked their managers to evaluate each team’s effectiveness.

The teams that performed poorly started with more relationship conflict than task conflict. They entered into personal feuds early on and were so busy disliking one another that they didn’t feel comfortable challenging one another. It took months for many of the teams to make real headway on their relationship issues, and by the time they did manage to debate key decisions, it was often too late to rethink their directions.

What happened in the high-performing groups? As you might expect, they started with low relationship conflict and kept it low throughout their work together. That didn’t stop them from having task conflict at the outset: they didn’t hesitate to surface competing perspectives. As they resolved some of their differences of opinion, they were able to align on a direction and carry out their work until they ran into new issues to debate.