Armchair Speculation

One day, I walked into my college decision science class and found my seat. Opening the class, the professor declared, “Disconfirming information is the most valuable kind of information!” And he encouraged us to seek it out every chance we can. I felt intrigued.

Disconfirming information, he explained, is information that goes against our current beliefs. It tells us why we might be wrong. 

Confirming information, on the other hand, tells us why our current beliefs are right. 

No matter how much confirming information we obtain, it won’t inspire us to change our minds. We don’t do anything differently. Thus, it’s a waste of time to pursue confirming information.

The value of information, in short, is based on its propensity to change our minds. And only disconfirming information can change our minds.

This insight blew my mind.

Since then, I’ve tried to put this insight into practice to improve my decisions big and small.

Disconfirming Information Applied

On an everyday basis, this insight changed how I research online purchases on Amazon and restaurants on Yelp. I begin by seeking out highly rated products or restaurants that catch my eye. After reading a few 5-star reviews, I ask myself, “Why should I not choose this?” That question motivates me to read the 2- and 3-star reviews. Reading more 5-star reviews doesn’t change my mind. 1-star reviews may be too negative. The 2- and 3-star reviews generally balance out positive points with honest critiques. Factoring in 2- and 3-star reviews has helped me make more informed decisions.

For more consequential decisions – such as changing jobs, continuing to date a significant other, or buying a house – this insight pushed me to focus on reasons to not do what I immediately want to do. I ask myself, “While I would like to do X, why should I not do X?” It may sound negative (and unromantic in the context of dating), but I found that doing so made me more confident in my ultimate decision. 

If I feel my ego threatened – when someone critiques my work or corrects my behavior – thinking about this insight makes the negative feedback easier to take. I remind myself that, in order to become a better person, I need to accept disconfirming information. I ask myself, “What am I not seeing in this situation? And how is that causing me to act poorly?” And I remind myself that I just need to understand that such a perspective exists, but I don’t need to agree with it or act upon it.

The Cost of Information

Obtaining this disconfirming information, however, is not without cost. In some cases, we must spend time searching the internet and reading reviews. In others, we need to spend money to purchase access to information or pay people to do research on our behalf.

How much time and money should we spend preparing for a decision? And how much is too much? We could spend a lifetime reading online reviews for every purchase we make!

For starters, we intuitively grasp how major or minor a decision is. If we want to be more rigorous, we can push ourselves to explicitly state whether the decision we’re facing is big or small. Doing so forces us to be honest with ourselves. This can be particularly useful if we’re unconsciously putting off making the decision.

We can also “time box” our decision-making process, stating the amount of time we’re willing to spend on gathering disconfirming information. Such a time limit can focus us to prioritize answering only the most impactful questions and reading the most promising information sources. 

We can also consider how easy or hard it is to undo a decision. We should spend considerable time on harder-to-undo decisions, but very little time on easier-to-undo decisions, argues Jeff Bezos in Invent and Wander. Bezos categorizes easy-to-undo decisions as “two-way doors”  and hard-to-undo decisions as “one-way doors.” Buying a house is a “one-way door” decision, because undoing it requires us considerable time and expense to sell the house. Renting a house, in contrast, is a “two-way door” decision. To undo it, we either pay the lease-break fee or wait for the lease to end. While not costless, it’s vastly less expensive than selling a house. (Note, linked books contain my Amazon affiliate link.)

Sometimes we want to be more precise in determining how much time and money to spend. In these cases, we can consider how the information might change the expected outcome of a decision (or its “expected value” in economic jargon). In the aforementioned college lecture, my professor laid out a hypothetical investment of $1,000,000. The investment has two discrete outcomes. If it succeeds, we double our money to $2,000,000. If it fails, we lose all of our money. Let’s say that we believe the investment has a 60% chance to succeed. This means its expected value is $200,000 ($2,000,000 * 60% chance of success + $0 * 40% chance of failure – $1,000,000 investment). If we learned about a research report that we think may alter our belief that the likelihood of success is only 40%, we should be willing to pay up to $400,000 for it (but hopefully much less) because it changes our expected value by that amount. The math works out as follows:

• Expected Value (EV) = Payout for Success * Probability of Success – Payout for Failure * Probability of Failure – Initial Investment
• Initial EV = ( $2,000,000 * 60% ) + ( $0 * 40%) – $1,000,000 = $200,000
• New EV after New Info = ( $2,000,000 * 40% ) + ( $0 * 60%) – $1,000,000 = – $200,000
• Value of Info = Change in EV Based on Info = Initial EV – New EV
  • Value of Info = $200,000 – (-$200,000 ) = $400,000

After getting the information from this research report, we would choose not to invest.

As an aside, I wondered where these probabilities came from. They’re generally based on the best guesses of experts. They may not be precise, but in most cases they’re directionally accurate. And, in real-life situations where things are uncertain, they’re the best estimates you can get.

Overcoming Barriers to Obtaining and Acting Upon Disconfirming Information

To properly obtain disconfirming information and act upon it, I find that a few major barriers exist. I’ll discuss two barriers below, and share thoughts on how to overcome them.

Social Barriers: People Feel Uncomfortable Giving Negative Feedback

Where we seek others’ perspectives, social barriers may exist. People feel uncomfortable sharing their honest disagreements and critiques. To overcome these social barriers, we need to give people permission to share critiques. 

We might frame it as asking for advice about what they would do in your shoes, to reduce the feeling that the other person is challenging you.

Another method is to have a “pre-mortem discussion,” as psychologist Daniel Kahneman suggests. We can set the stage of the discussion by saying, “Let’s pretend we made this decision and it failed. We’re sitting here a year later having a post-mortem meeting. What are some reasons that the decision may have failed?”

Once people share this information, we can thank them sincerely. Doing so provides positive reinforcement for them to continue providing us this valuable information in the future. 

Self-Imposed Barriers: Disarming the Ego

Once I have obtained the disconfirming information, I may have to overcome my self-imposed psychological barriers to act upon it, namely my ego. I’ve found several ideas that make it easier for me to work around my ego. 

As a younger person, I viewed disconfirming information as a challenge to my value as a person. Under the spell of perfectionism, I unconsciously wanted to always have the right answer. Being wrong meant I was imperfect. And if I was imperfect, I was bad, I assumed. But that belief simply made me cling to my answer, closing off my mind to new and better ideas.

Being aware of this, I’m able to be skeptical about my own motives for wanting to believe or disbelieve a new piece of information. I unconsciously want to believe whatever I want to believe, truth be damned. As physicist Richard Feynman famously observed, “You must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool.” I need to check myself before accepting or rejecting new information.

Perhaps most impactful for disarming my ego has been changing my conception of “being right.” My business professor Harry Kramer said, “You don’t want to be the person in the meeting who has to be right. You want to be the person who has to get the team to the right answer, whether or not it’s yours!” The idea of getting my team to the right answer instantly appealed to me.

Another way to defuse my ego is to depersonalize the information. Instead of treating discussions as personal inquisitions, I see them as information gathering exercises. When I feel upset after hearing a different opinion, I remind myself that I don’t have to agree with the person. If nothing else, I’ve learned that this different opinion exists and someone holds it. 

I then ask myself a few questions: Why did I feel upset about that opinion? What can I learn from this different perspective? And how might I be wrong?

For further reading on accepting feedback, I’ve found the book Thank You for the Feedback to provide useful ideas.

Conclusion

Since that college lecture, I’ve continually pushed myself to seek out disconfirming information to improve my decisions and become a better person. To better do so, I’ve used the above-mentioned techniques to overcome social barriers to obtain disconfirming information and lower my ego to be open to the information. But I’m continually working to improve how I do so.

I hope this essay has given you new ideas about the usefulness of disconfirming information. I’d love to hear your responses and any tricks you have.