Interdependent Beliefs

An Example of Interdependent Beliefs

Joshua Harris, the author of I Kissed Dating Goodbye, began to hear from readers claiming his book had messed up their lives. The first time it began to dawn on him that his critics might have a point was in 2015. That’s when it came out that several members of his church, the Covenant Life Church in Gaithersburg, Maryland, were guilty of sexually abusing minors in the congregation. Harris wasn’t personally involved in the abuse, but he had known about it, and had not encouraged the victims to speak to the police.

The upsetting realization that he had mishandled that crisis rippled through Harris’s web of beliefs. “That was the first time that I started realizing, you know what? You can have good intentions, and think you’re making good decisions, but the effect in people’s lives can be very different than you’d planned,” Harris said later. That realization, in turn, sparked the thought, “Maybe there are problems with my book.”

During all of those years in which Harris had listened to disagreement about his book, his ability to change his mind had been bottlenecked by an unstated premise: It’s not possible to cause harm if you’re well-intentioned. Maybe he wouldn’t have endorsed that belief explicitly if someone had asked, but it was there in the background all the same. And until that belief was changed, even a steady stream of complaints about his book wouldn’t be enough to change the associated belief in his web: My book isn’t harmful.

---

These three chapters have each presented an inversion of the way we typically think about changing our minds.

In chapter 10 (“How to Be Wrong”), we saw how most people implicitly assume that their “map” of reality is supposed to be already correct. If they have to make any changes to it, that’s a sign that they messed up somewhere along the way. Scouts have the opposite assumption. We all start out with wildly incorrect maps, and over time, as we get more information, we make them somewhat more accurate. Revising your map is a sign you’re doing things right.

Chapter 11 (“Lean In to Confusion”) was about what to do when the world violates your theories, when other people are behaving “irrationally,” or when you aren’t getting the results you expected or you’re surprised that someone disagrees with you. Instead of trying to smooth out the details that don’t fit your worldview, like snags in a fabric, tug on them to see what they unravel.

And in this chapter, we saw how people expect it to be easy to understand disagreements and are unpleasantly surprised when they fail. But the reality is that it’s hard even under the best conditions, and you should be pleasantly surprised when you actually succeed. Listening to views you disagree with, and taking them seriously enough to have a shot at changing your mind, requires mental effort, emotional effort, and, above all, patience. You have to be willing to say to yourself, “It seems like this person is wrong, but maybe I’m misunderstanding him—let me check,” or “I still don’t agree, but maybe over time I’ll start to see examples of what she’s talking about.”