YOUR MINDSET CAN MAKE OR BREAK YOUR JUDGMENT

Life is made up of judgment calls, and the more you can avoid distorting your perception of reality, the better your judgment will be.

Scout mindset is what keeps you from fooling yourself on tough questions that people tend to rationalize about, such as: Do I need to get tested for that medical condition? Is it time to cut my losses or would that be giving up too early? Is this relationship ever going to get better? How likely is it that my partner will change their mind about wanting children?

At work, those tough questions might include: Do I really have to fire that employee? How much do I need to prepare for that presentation tomorrow? Is it best for my company to raise a lot of funding now or am I just tempted by the instant validation that raising funds would give me? Do I really need to keep improving this product before releasing it or am I just looking for reasons to put off taking the plunge?

Scout mindset is what prompts us to question our assumptions and stress-test our plans. Whether you're proposing a new product feature or a military maneuver, asking yourself, "What are the most likely ways this could fail?" allows you to strengthen your plan against those possibilities in advance. If you're a doctor, that means considering alternate diagnoses before settling on your initial guess. As one master clinician used to ask himself—if he suspected a patient had pneumonia, for example—"If this could not be pneumonia, what else would it be?"

Even jobs that don't seem to depend on scout mindset usually do once you look closer. Most people associate being a lawyer with arguing for a side, which sounds like soldier mindset. But when a lawyer is choosing cases and preparing for trial, they need to be able to form an accurate picture of the strengths and weaknesses of their case. Overestimate your own side and you're setting yourself up for a rude awakening in the courtroom. That's why experienced lawyers often cite objectivity and self-skepticism as among the most important skills they had to learn over their career. As one leading lawyer says: "When you're young, you want to help your client so badly you tell yourself, 'There's really not an elephant in the room, there's really not a big gray elephant over there with a pink ribbon on it . . .'"

In our relationships with other people, we construct self-contained narratives that feel, from the inside, as if they're simply objective fact. One person's "My partner is coldly ignoring me" can be another person's "I'm respectfully giving him space." One person's "authentic" can be another person's "rude." To be willing to consider other interpretations—to even believe that there could be other reasonable interpretations besides your own—requires scout mindset.

Being the kind of person who welcomes the truth, even if it's painful, is what makes other people willing to be honest with you. You can say that you want your partner to tell you about any problems in your relationship, or that you want your employees to tell you about any problems in the company, but if you get defensive or combative when you hear the truth, you're not likely to hear it very often. No one wants to be the messenger that gets shot.

At its core, the difference between the two mindsets comes down to the fundamental question guiding your thinking. In soldier mindset, our thinking is guided by the question "Can I believe it?" about things we want to accept, and "Must I believe it?" about things we want to reject. We use soldier mindset to help us maintain beliefs that boost our self-esteem, give us comfort, preserve our morale, persuade other people, cultivate an attractive image, and help us fit in to our social groups. In scout mindset, by contrast, our thinking is guided by simply asking, "Is it true?"

Soldier Mindset	Scout Mindset
Reasoning is like defensive combat.	Reasoning is like mapmaking.
Decide what to believe by asking either "Can I believe this?" or "Must I believe this?" depending on your motives.	Decide what to believe by asking, "Is this true?"
Finding out you're wrong means suffering a defeat.	Finding out you're wrong means revising your map.
Seek out evidence to fortify and defend your beliefs.	Seek out evidence that will make your map more accurate.
Related concepts: Directionally motivated reasoning, rationalizing, denial, self-deception, wishful thinking	Related concepts: Accuracy motivated reasoning, truth-seeking, discovery, objectivity, intellectual honesty

We use scout mindset to see things clearly for the sake of our judgment, so that we can fix problems, notice opportunities, figure out which risks are worth taking, decide how we want to spend our lives, and, sometimes, better understand the world we live in for the sake of sheer curiosity. Truth is more valuable than we tend to realize—it's the foundation for every good decision we make.

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The scout and the soldier are archetypes. In reality, nobody is a perfect scout, just as nobody is a pure soldier. We fluctuate between mindsets from day to day, and from one context to the next.

A trader might be especially scoutlike at work, happy to test their own assumptions and discover they were wrong about the market . . . and then come home and be a soldier in their personal life, unwilling to acknowledge problems in their marriage or consider the possibility that they might be wrong. An entrepreneur could be in scout mindset while talking to a friend about her company, wondering aloud whether her current plan is a mistake . . . and then shift into soldier mindset the next day at the office, defending her plan reflexively when her cofounder criticizes it.

We're all a mixture of scout and soldier. But some people, in some contexts, are better scouts than most. They're more desirous of the truth, even if it's not what they were hoping for, and less willing to accept bad arguments that happen to be convenient. They're more motivated to go out, test their theories, and discover their mistakes. They're more conscious of the possibility that their map of reality could be wrong, and more open to changing their mind.

Becoming a better scout requires more than just good intentions. When you try to catch your own bias, it's not as simple as just asking yourself, "Am I biased?" You need concrete tools that make it easier to see clearly. For example, thought experiments like the outsider test, the selective skeptic test, and the conformity test can help you examine your reasoning about what you believe and what you want. When you need to pin down how certain you actually are about a belief, specific introspection techniques can help you gauge your certainty from 0 to 100 percent and train you to recognize what it feels like when you're making a claim you don't really believe. And if you've ever tried to listen to the "other side" of an issue and found yourself getting frustrated or angry, that might be because you're approaching it the wrong way—certain approaches make it much easier to learn from opposing perspectives without getting defensive. These tools help us examine beliefs we have a reason to defend and practice responding to evidence.