Accuracy Motivated Reasoning (Scout Mindset)

“IS IT TRUE?”

The Dreyfus affair polarized a nation and stunned the world. But to me, its most intriguing aspect is the psychology of its unlikely hero, Colonel Picquart. Like his colleagues, Picquart had plenty of motives to believe Dreyfus was guilty. He didn’t trust Jews, and he disliked Dreyfus as a person. Plus, he knew that if he discovered Dreyfus was innocent, it would have significant costs: a massive scandal for the army and a blow to his own career for causing that scandal. But unlike in the case of his colleagues, those motives didn’t distort Picquart’s ability to discern true from false, plausible from implausible.

Picquart’s process of coming to realize that Dreyfus was innocent is a striking example of what cognitive scientists sometimes call accuracy motivated reasoning. In contrast to directionally motivated reasoning, which evaluates ideas through the lenses of “Can I believe it?” and “Must I believe it?,” accuracy motivated reasoning evaluates ideas through the lens of “Is it true?”

When Picquart went searching for additional evidence against Dreyfus, expecting and hoping to discover it, he couldn’t find anything that seemed convincing. When he examined Esterhazy’s handwriting, he was able to recognize its resemblance to the memo supposedly written by Dreyfus. When he was offered a convenient excuse to explain away the new evidence (“The new spy was probably just trained to imitate Dreyfus’s handwriting”), he was unable to find it plausible enough to accept. And when he studied the folder of evidence against Dreyfus, which he had always assumed was damning, he was able to see that it was not damning at all.

If directionally motivated reasoning is like being a soldier fighting off threatening evidence, accuracy motivated reasoning is like being a scout forming a map of the strategic landscape. What’s beyond that next hill? Is that a bridge over the river or are my eyes deceiving me? Where are the dangers, the shortcuts, the opportunities? What areas do I need more information about? How reliable is my intel?

The scout isn’t indifferent. A scout might hope to learn that the path is safe, that the other side is weak, or that there’s a bridge conveniently located where his forces need to cross the river. But above all, he wants to learn what’s really there, not fool himself into drawing a bridge on his map where there isn’t one in real life. Being in scout mindset means wanting your “map”—your perception of yourself and the world—to be as accurate as possible.

Of course, all maps are imperfect simplifications of reality, as a scout well knows. Striving for an accurate map means being aware of the limits of your understanding, keeping track of the regions of your map that are especially sketchy or possibly wrong. And it means always being open to changing your mind in response to new information. In scout mindset, there’s no such thing as a “threat” to your beliefs. If you find out you were wrong about something, great—you’ve improved your map, and that can only help you.