![]() Scouts are not invulnerable to fear, anxiety, insecurity, despair or any of the other emotions that give rise to motivated reasoning, and they rely on coping strategies just like anyone else. He once wrote, “ Whenever I have found out that I have blundered, or that my work has been imperfect, and when I have been contemptuously criticized, and even when I have been overpraised, so that I have felt mortified, it has been my greatest comfort to say hundreds of times to myself that ‘I have worked as hard and as well as I could, and no man can do more than this.'” He drew strength from this comforting and true thought - that he was doing his best. (“I am very poorly today & very stupid & hate everybody & everything,” he moaned to a friend in one especially relatable letter.)īut it was important to Darwin to avoid self-deception and not to shut his eyes to legitimate criticism or to his own mistakes. He suffered from bouts of crippling anxiety, especially when his book was being attacked by critics. When a negative emotion strikes, we don’t pay much attention to the kind of coping strategy we pull out and whether it involves self-deception or not. But is it really true? Surely we can find a way to bounce back from our setbacks that don’t require us to stew in regret or blame them on other people. People generally take for granted that coping requires self-deception. In response, we reach for a thought that will keep negative emotions at bay - a coping strategy. Someone criticizes us or we face an unpleasant choice or we fail at something. But even though we rarely have to deal with threats to our lives, we very often have to deal with threats to our mood and self-esteem. Thankfully, the stakes we face in everyday life are seldom that high. That’s why most people in an emergency resort to various forms of motivated reasoning, like denial, wishful thinking and rationalizing. In a life-or-death situation, of course, this need is especially hard to satisfy. One of the most fundamental human needs is to feel like things are basically OK - that we’re not failures, that the world isn’t a horrible place, and that whatever life throws at us, we’ll be able to handle it. In this excerpt, she shares a few to try. As she puts it, it requires “a vitally important yet underappreciated skill: Being able to see things as they are, not as you wish they were.” In the face of failure or difficult times, many people resort to self-delusion to handle their uncomfortable feelings. In her new book The Scout Mindset, Galef delves into what it takes to be a scout. “ If we really want to improve our judgment as individuals and as societies, what we need most is … a scout mindset,” she concluded. ![]() There are the soldiers, rigid types who crave certainty at all costs, and then there are the scouts, open-minded types who are drawn to clarity and accuracy. In her popular TEDxPSU Talk - titled “Why you think you’re right even when you’re wrong” - writer and podcaster Julia Galef identified two types of people. ![]() This post is part of TED’s “How to Be a Better Human” series, each of which contains a piece of helpful advice from people in the TED community browse through all the posts here. ![]()
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