“Many receive advice, few profit by it.”

Publilius Cyrus

Can you recall a moment when someone came to you for advice on an idea or situation? 

You thought deeply and drew upon your experience to provide the best and most relevant advice you could muster. Mid conversation, you noticed that the other person wasn’t really listening to you. They end up ignoring your advice and going with their solution. 

Why aren’t they listening? After all, didn’t they come to you for advice?

It wasn’t the advice they wanted to hear. The person wanted their solution validated.

Aren’t we all guilty of this? What is going on here?

Humans are susceptible to confirmation bias.

“Confirmation bias is our tendency to cherry-pick information that confirms our existing beliefs or ideas.”

Farnam Street

When people come for advice, much of the time they don’t want real advice. They want supporting information that validates their ideas or ingrained beliefs. 

It becomes personal to them, and things can get emotionally heated if you push an opposing view.

This failure to take on new information or advice can lead to errors in judgement and consequences.

It’s good to be cautious of misleading information, but we should also try to recognise when we are taking this too far, or only using it as an excuse not to question our ideas.

What should we do?

Self-awareness

By being aware of this bias towards our views, we can look out for when it arises in our daily interactions.

Open-mindedness

By keeping an open mind towards new and contradictory data, we could learn new information that improves upon our ideas, or changes our minds for the better.

After all, what is the goal? To be right? Or to improve?

Reflection

Pay attention in today’s conversations:

• Where do I find myself ignoring information?
• What information do I quickly agree with?
• Sit with one contradictory idea and seriously consider it.