The Misconception: Problems are easier to solve when a group of people get together to discuss solutions.
The Truth: The desire to reach consensus and avoid confrontation hinders progress.
When a group of people come together to make a decision every demon in the psychological bestiary will be summoned.
Conformity, rationalization, stereotyping, delusions of grandeur – they all come out to play, and no one is willing to fight them back into hell because it might lead to abandoning the plan or a nasty argument.
Groups survive by maintaining harmony. When everyone is happy and their egos free from harm it tends to increase productivity. This is true whether you are hunting buffalo or selling televisions.
Team spirit, morale, group cohesion – these are golden principles long held high by managers, commanders, chieftains and kings. You know instinctively that dissent leads to chaos, so you avoid it.
This is all well and good until you find yourself in a group your brain isn’t equipped to deal with – like at work.
When you are in a group, you are observing the other members in an attempt to figure out what the consensus opinion is. Meanwhile, you are simultaneously weighing the consequences of disagreeing.
The problem is, every other person in the group is doing the same thing, and if everyone decides it would be a bad idea to risk losing friends or jobs, a false consensus will be reached and no one will do anything about it.
Often, after these sorts of meetings, two people will go somewhere private and reveal they think a mistake is being made. Why didn’t they just say so in the meeting?
Social psychologist Irving Janis mapped out this behavior through research after reading about the U.S. decision to invade southern Cuba – The Bay of Pigs.
In 1961, President John F. Kennedy tried to overthrow Fidel Castro with a force of 1,400 exiles.
They weren’t professional soldiers. Cuba knew they were coming. There weren’t many of them. They were slaughtered. It took three days.
This led to Cuba getting friendly with the U.S.S.R and almost led to nuclear apocalypse.
John F. Kennedy and his advisers were brilliant people with nearly unlimited resources who had gotten together and planned something incredibly stupid. After it was over, they couldn’t explain why they did it.
Janis wanted to get to the bottom of it, and his research led to the discovery of groupthink, a term coined earlier by William H. White in Fortune magazine.
It turns out, for any plan to work, every team needs at least one asshole who doesn’t give a shit if he gets fired or exiled or excommunicated. For a group to make good decisions, they must allow dissent and convince everyone they are free to speak their mind without risk of punishment.
It seems like common sense, but it isn’t. You are not so smart.
How many times have you settled on a bar or restaurant no one really wanted to go to? How many times have you given advice to someone you knew wasn’t really your honest opinion? How many times does everyone decide to do Secret Santa and everyone gets crappy presents?
True groupthink depends on three conditions:
- A group of people who like each other
- Isolation
- A deadline for the decision
The recent housing market collapse, the failure to prevent the attack at Pearl Harbor, the sinking of the Titanic, the invasion of Iraq – all of these can be attributed to situations in which groupthink led to awful decisions.
When groups get together to make a decision, an illusion of invulnerability can emerge in which everyone feels secure in the group. People begin to rationalize other people’s ideas and don’t reconsider their own.
You want to defend the group’s cohesion from all harm, so you supress doubts, you don’t argue, you don’t offer alternatives – and since everyone is doing this, the leader of the group falsely assumes everyone is in agreement.
This situation can be avoided if:
- The boss is not allowed to express his or her expectations.
- The group breaks into pairs every once in a while to discuss the issue.
- Outsiders are invited periodically to evaluate the group’s decisions.
- One person is assigned the role of asshole who finds faults in the plan.
- Before a final decision is made, a cooling off period is allowed.
The research shows groups of friends who allow members to disagree and still be friends are more likely to come to better decisions. So, the next time you are in a group of people trying to reach consensus, be the asshole. Every group needs one, and it might as well be you.
Links:
Using physics to predict groupthink
The Misconception: Burglar alarms deter thieves and catch robbers in the act.
The Truth: Car alarms are ignored, and robbers can escape a home alarm before the police arrive.
First, let’s briefly discuss the car alarm.
Have you ever heard a car alarm and thought, “Oh dear, a criminal is afoot. I should investigate and call the authorities.”
No, you haven’t. You ignored it.
Everyone ignores them. They do not deter criminals.
Ok, moving on to burglar alarms…
According to a study conducted by the U.S. Department of Justice, 98 percent of all calls to the police from alarm systems are false.
This technology has been around for over 30 years, plenty of time for all police officers to learn their lesson – 98 percent of the time, burglar alarm calls are a waste of time and money.
The cost to investigate these alarm calls in 2005 was $1.8 billion, according to a Temple University study.
In addition, the study concluded 20 percent of all patrol officer’s time that year was spent checking out false alarms.
Even if an officer does investigate, it takes an average of 20 minutes to get to the scene, which is plenty of time to smash, grab and escape.
Those little signs you can put in your yard? Well, if they’re the fake ones, a good burglar will know the difference. If they are real, it just tells them how fast they have to be. Either way, they advertise you have nice things you don’t want stolen.
Over the years, police have tried all sorts of things. Municipalities tried fining people for false alarms; some tried to only respond to calls from respected companies. These and other efforts were all derailed by home owners and businesses who would rather be safe than sorry.
This has led to a new strategy – only dispatch units when the alarm has been verified.
Indeed, this strategy works. Some departments reported reductions in false alarms by more than 75 percent once they only sent the cops after the alarm company told them it had been verified.
The only problem with this strategy is that someone has to verify the alarm. Most companies call a list of numbers and ask for passwords or codes.
If you are not home, you will tell the alarm company to send the police. If you are home, and there really is someone in your house, the cops are still going to take 20 minutes to get there.
So, in the end, if you place your trust in either a car alarm or a burglar alarm, you are not so smart.
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The Misconception: You are a strong individual who doesn’t conform unless forced to.
The Truth: It takes little more than an authority figure or social pressure to get you to obey.
Take a look at these lines.
Which one of the lines in the second box is the same length as the one in the first box?
Psychologist Solomon Asch used to perform an experiment where he would get a group of people together and show them cards with images just like these.
He would then ask the group the same question I just asked you. Sometimes he would ask them to say which line was longer or shorter.
Let’s imagine you were in a room with ten other people, and when he asked which line was the same length, everyone in the room said the answer was B.
What would you do?
Most people think they would go against the grain and say, ‘There’s no way. The answer is obviously C.”
Most people did, but 37 percent of people didn’t. Over a third of people in his experiments conform with the group even when it is obviously the wrong answer.
In his experiments, everyone in the room except the subject was in on the trick. They agreed beforehand to pick wrong answers on purpose and stick to them, to defend their answers.
There were no rewards or punishments for not conforming, yet intelligent people just like you still caved in.
Up against such tremendous social pressure, there is a good chance – 37 percent – you will crack.
The most famous conformity experiment was performed by Stanley Milgram in 1963.
He had people sit in a room and take commands from a scientist in a lab coat.
These people were told they would be teaching word pairs to another subject in the next room, and each time they got an answer wrong they were to shock them.
The control panel clearly indicated at what point the electric shocks became dangerous, and at the end of the scale it read “XXX” which implied death.
The guy in the lab coat would prompt the guy pressing the buttons to shock the guy in the next room. Screams would then emanate from next door.
With each shock, the guy in the lab coat would ask the subject to increase the voltage. The screams would get louder, and then the guy in the other room would begin pleading for his life and asking the experimenter to end the experiment.
Most people asked if they could stop. They didn’t want to shock the poor man in the next room, but the scientist would urge them to continue, telling them not to worry.
The scientist said only these four things:
- “Please continue.”
- “The experiment requires that you continue.”
- “It is absolutely essential that you continue.”
- “You have no other choice; you must go.”
To everyone’s surprise, 65 percent of people could be prompted to go all the way to right below the “XXX.”
In reality, there were no shocks, and the other person was just an actor.
The experiment has been repeated many times, and the same number keeps coming back – 65 percent.
Again, there is no reward or punishment involved, just simple conformity.
When you can see your actions as part of just following orders, especially from an authority figure, there is a 65 percent chance you would go to the brink of murder. Add the risk of punishment, or your own harm, and the number goes up.
Experiments show you are likely to run for help if you see smoke wafting into a room from underneath the door. If you are surrounded by others who seem not to notice the smoke, and object to action when you bring it up, you’ll just sit there.
The next time you see a line of people waiting to get into a classroom or a movie or a restaurant, go check the door and look inside. You know you are not so smart, so don’t conform.
Links
The Misconception: The best way to judge if one product tastes better than another is to hide the packaging.
The Truth: Most competing products have the same flavor and you pick your favorites based on other cues – like the packaging.
When it comes to taste – you are not so smart.
Wine, coffee, cigarettes, soda – your palette isn’t sophisticated enough to tell much of a difference between competing brands. Yet, you still have preferences.
Why?
In the early ’80s, Pepsi ran a marketing campaign where they touted the success of their product over Coca-Cola in blind taste tests. They called this The Pepsi Challenge.
Psychologists had already determined you choose your favorite products often not by their inherent value, but because the marketing campaigns and logos and such have cast a spell over you called brand awareness.
You start to identify yourself with one marketing campaign over another. That’s what happened in the all the taste tests up until the Pepsi Challenge. People liked Coca-Cola’s advertising more than Pepsi’s, so even though they tasted pretty much the same, when they saw that bright red can with a white ribbon people always chose Coke.
So, for the Pepsi Challenge, they removed the logos.
At first, the researchers thought they should put some sort of label on the glasses. So, they went with M and Q.
People said they liked Pepsi, labeled M, better than Coke, labeled Q.
Irritated by this, Coca-Cola did their own study and put Coke in both glasses. Again, M won the contest.
It turns out, it wasn’t the soda; people just liked the letter M better than the letter Q.
To make sense of the world, we look for cues from our environment whenever we find things we like. The process here is to get back to the good stuff by recognizing the cues which end in reward.
For the testers, the two products tasted pretty much the same. So, forced to make a choice, they moved to another set of cues to make their decision – which letter was more pleasant. Branding hijacks your natural affinity for visual shortcuts.
Miffed, Pepsi did the tests again. This time, no labels.
In these tests, people once again generally said they preferred Pepsi because it was slightly sweeter.
Undaunted, Coke again debunked their rival by showing the reactions were based on sips and not full glasses. When given a full glass, the tests went the other way with Coke as the champion.
If you only sample something in small quantities, in turns out, you will have a different opinion than if you were to taste larger amounts.
Do you smoke? Do you have a favorite brand?
In blind taste tests, long-time smokers can’t tell their brand from any of the competitors.
Do you like wine? Think expensive is better? In blind taste tests, even wine connoisseurs can’t tell $200 bottles from $20 ones.
Do you like fine dining? When presented microwaved food from the frozen food section in a fine restaurant, most people never notice.
Taste is subjective, which is another way of saying you are not so smart when it comes to choosing one product over another.
All things equal – you refer back to the advertising or the packaging or conformity with your friends and family.
Presentation is everything.
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The Misconception: When you are joined by others in a task, you work harder and get more accomplished.
The Truth: Once part of a group, you tend to put in less effort because you know your work will be pooled together with others’.
Alan Ingham ruined tug of war forever.
He had people put on a blindfold and grab a rope.
They were told many other people were also holding the rope on their side, and he measured their strength. Then, he told them they would be pulling alone, and again he measured.
Of course, they were alone both times, but when they thought they were in a group, they pulled 18 percent less hard on average.
When that guy at the concert asks you to scream as loud as you can, and then he asks again going, “I can’t hear you! You can do better than that!” have you ever noticed the second time is always louder?
Some really cool scientists actually tested this – Latane, Williams and Harkins. They had people shout as loud as they could in a group and then alone, or vice versa. Sure enough, the overall loudness of a small group of people is less than any one of them by themselves.
You can even chart this on a graph. The more people you add, the less effort any one person does. It arches away like a perfect ski slope.
You do this all the time, but you don’t do it on purpose, well except when you just mouth the words to the song everyone is singing.
In all of these experiments, the trick was to keep people from realizing what was going on. As long as you think you are part of a group, you unconsciously put in less effort. No one realizes it, and no one admits to it.
This behavior is more likely to show up when the task at hand is simple. With complex tasks, it is usually easy to tell who isn’t pulling their weight. Once you know your lazyness can be seen, you try harder.
You do this because of another behavior called evaluation apprehension, which is just a fancy way of saying you care more when you know you are being singled out.
Your anxiety levels decrease when you know your effort will be pooled with others. You relax. You coast.
Sports scientists over the years have informed coaches of this behavior, so now most major teams evaluate each player, going so far as to film them individually with different cameras so they won’t fall prey to social loafing.
This phenomenon has been observed in every possible situation involving group effort. Communal farms always produce less than individually owned farms. Factories where people do repetitive tasks with no supervision are less productive than ones where each person has a quota to reach.
Be aware, most organizations know all about social loafing these days; somewhere up the chain a psychologist has ratted you out. So, it’s likely, epecially if you work for a corporation, your output is being monitored in some way and you are being told about it so you’ll work harder.
They know when it comes to group effort, you are not so smart.
The Misconception: If you are in a bad situation, you will do whatever you can do to escape it.
The Truth: If you feel like you aren’t in control of your destiny, you will give up and accept whatever situation you are in.
In 1965, a scientist named Martin Seligman started shocking dogs.
He was trying to expand on the research of Pavlov – the guy who could make dogs salivate when they heard a bell ring.
Seligman wanted to head in the other direction, and when he rang his bell instead of providing food he zapped them with electricity. To keep them still, he restrained them in a harness during the experiment.
After they were conditioned, he put these dogs in a big box with a little fence dividing it into two halves.
They figured if they rang the bell, the dog would hop over the fence to escape, but it didn’t. It just sat there and braced itself.
They decided to try shocking them after the bell. The dog still just sat there and took it.
When they put a dog in the box which had never been shocked before and tried to zap it – it jumped the fence.
You are just like these dogs.
If, over the course of your life, you have experienced crushing defeat or pummeling abuse or loss of control, you learn over time there is no escape, and if escape is offered, you will not act – you become a nihilist who trusts futility above optimism.
Studies of the clinically depressed show that when they fail they often just give in to defeat and stop trying.
The average person will look for external forces to blame when they fail the mid-term. They will say the professor is an asshole, or they didn’t get enough sleep.
Depressed people will blame themselves and assume they are stupid.
Do you vote?
If not, is it because you think it doesn’t matter because things never change, or politicians are evil on both sides, or one vote in several million doesn’t count?
Yeah, that’s learned helplessness.
When battered women, or hostages, or abused children, or long-time prisoners refuse to escape, they do so because they have accepted the futility of the attempt. What does it matter?
If those people do get out of their situation, they often have a hard time committing to anything which may lead to failure.
Any extended period of negative emotions can lead to you giving in to despair and accepting your fate. If you remain alone for a long time, you will decide loneliness is a fact of life and pass up opportunities to hang out with people.
The loss of control in any situation will lead to this state.
A study in 1976 by Langer and Rodin showed in nursing homes where conformity and passivity is encouraged and every whim is attended to, the health and wellbeing of the patients declines rapidly. If, instead, the people in these homes are given responsibilities and choices, they remain healthy and active.
This research was repeated in prisons. Sure enough, just letting prisoners move furniture and control the television kept them from developing health problems and staging revolts.
In homeless shelters where people can’t pick out their own beds or choose what to eat, the residents are less likely to try and get a job or find an apartment.
When you are able to succeed at easy tasks, hard tasks feel possible to accomplish. When you are unable to succeed at small tasks, everything seems harder.
Rats given the opportunity to escape electric shocks are twice half as likely to develop tumors than those who are forced to bear them. Rats already suffering from cancer will die faster if placed into the inescapable shock experiment.
Every day – your job, the government, your addiction, your depression, your money – you feel like you can’t control the forces affecting your fate. So, you stage microrevolts. You customize your ringtone, you paint your room, you collect stamps. You choose.
Choices, even small ones, can hold back the crushing weight of helplessness, but you can’t stop there. You must fight back your behavior and learn to fail with pride. Failing often is the only way to ever get the things you want out of life. Besides death, your destiny is not inescapable.
You are not so smart, but you are smarter than dogs and rats. Don’t give in yet.
Links:
A zillion scientific articles on the phenomenon
Video of a learned helplessness activity in a psychology class
The Misconception: You are too smart to join a cult.
The Truth: Cults are populated by people just like you.
Cults are a side effect of natural human tendencies, just like obesity.
You have an innate desire to belong to a group and to hang out with interesting people.
If you have ever admired someone you have never actually met – like a musician – you’ve experienced the seed of the cult phenomenon.
The word “cult” is slippery, because seen from far away, many organizations, institutions and religions could be seen as cults. It’s one of those failures of language because the lines between categories here is blurry.
For this reason, you are far more likely to end up in a cult than you think.
The research on cults suggests you don’t usually join for any particular reason; you just sort of fall into them the way you fall into any social group.
After all, when did you join your circle of friends?
Your circle of friends has likely changed a great deal over the years, but have you made many active choices concerning who you hang out with other than avoiding the ones who are a pain in the ass?
The sort of people who join cults are not all insecure or emotionally weak. You’d like to think that because you’d like to believe you aren’t the sort of person who could be beguiled by a charismatic leader with a clear vision – but you are not so smart.
Cults form around sparkly, interesting individuals – Jim Jones, David Koresh, L. Ron Hubbard, Charles Manson, Oprah – but people don’t usually follow the leader, they follow the ideals the leader proclaims to be serving.
These leaders seem to have things figured out, and you want to figure those things out too.
Gandhi, Jesus, Terrance McKenna, Socrates – great thinkers who seemed to have things figured out. Naturally, people followed them hoping to gain their mojo through osmosis.
Were their followers a cult? See, that’s where the definition falls apart. This is why you are susceptible to this sort of behavior.
As a primate, you are keenly aware of group dynamics. You are hardwired to want to hang out with people and associate yourself with groups. Your survival has depended on it for millions of years.
In addition, you don’t evaluate your behavior and choices and feelings in order to understand who you are. Instead, you have an idealistic vision of yourself, a character you’ve dreamed up in your mind, and you are always trying to become this character.
You seek out groups to affiliate with to better solidify who you are in the story you tell yourself – the story explaining why you do the things you do.
Marketers understand this, and that’s how they get people to become loyal to brands. Why do some people only buy Apple products and others only use Windows? Why do some people refuse to buy a Playstation 3 or a Ford or country music?
It isn’t the thing itself prompting the decision, it is the promise the product will help you become the person you think you are. Once you buy the product, especially if it is expensive, you’ll defend the decision to naysayers. You aren’t defending the product; you are defending your sense of self.
Cults start with a charismatic individual. Maybe this person believes they are special in some way, or maybe they are just naturally interesting. People start hanging out with them, and a spontaneous group forms with the charismatic person becoming an authority figure. If this person has an agenda, or a goal, or enemies they want eliminated, they will cultivate the goodwill of their fans into action. If they have difficult to reach goals, they will try to expand their group with recruitment or proselytizing, often hiding their true intentions so as not to scare away potential members.
Some leaders know what they are doing, but some just serve their instincts and accidentally form cults around them before they realize what they’ve done. How these people wield their power over others ultimately determines how history will label them.
If you have ever called yourself a fan of anyone- a musician, a director, a writer, a politician, a technological genius, a scientist – you are experiencing the first stage of cult indoctrination.
If you were to meet the person you most admire and be offered the chance to hang out with them on a regular basis – would you?
You would.
What happens next would depend on a chaotic series of variables, sometimes the result is a cult, and sometimes those cults live on beyond their leaders.
Cults aren’t designed. They form as a result of normal human tendencies going awry. The next time you find yourself subscribing to the ideas of another, take a step back and consider why.
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The Misconception: You are aware of everything coming into your brain from your eyes from moment to moment.
The Truth: The brain can’t keep up the total amount of information coming in from your eyes; your experience from moment to moment is edited for simplicity.
This is slightly different from inattentional blindness, where you are unable to see things happening just outside your attention.
With change blindness, you don’t notice when things around you are altered to be drastically different than they were a moment ago.
You often miss large changes to your visual world from one moment to the next because reality, as you experience it, is a virtual experience.
Ok, ready to go mad?
In this demonstration, one thing is changed from one photo to the other. You will see them back to back over and over again with a flash of white in between. Try to find it – but I warn you, this takes most people a long time to find.
Once you see, you can never go back to the state when you couldn’t see it.
Reality is generated by the brain based on the inputs coming in from your senses. You don’t get a raw feed from those inputs; instead, you get an edited version.
The best example of this is the person swap.
In an experiment conducted at Harvard, subjects had to approach a man and sign a consent form. He stood behind a tall desk, like at a hotel, and once they signed the form, the man behind the desk ducked under it to put away the form. Another man then stood up and handed them a packet of information. Most people, 75 percent, didn’t realize it was a different person.
Don’t think this only works with fast changes. Researchers at the University of Illinois are able to gradually add changes to photos which go unnoticed by most people.
When it comes to seeing changes to the world around you, even big ones, you are not so smart.
Links:
Video of the person swap experiment at Harvard
The Misconception: Kissing is an expression of love.
The Truth: Kissing transmits germs from the male to the female to bolster the female immune system before and during pregnancy.
Take a step back and pretend you’re watching animals in a zoo. Let’s go with wombats.
You see one wombat walk over to another one and stick its tongue in the other’s mouth. They flop their tongues around for a minute and then go about their wombat business.
Weird, huh?
Kissing, let’s face it, is sort of strange. Why so much passion? Why such overwhelming emotion?
Our mating behaviors are such an integral part of our behavior, we rarely consider why we think and feel the way we do. We know hamburgers are delicious, but why? We know we find breasts and biceps attractive, but why?
We love to kiss, and we do it instinctively. The urge to do it springs up from deep within – but why?
The answer is the cytomegalovirus.
It has been a hypothesis for a while, but recent research by Colin Hendrie from the University of Leeds has pinned it down:
“Female inoculation with a specific male’s cytomegalovirus is most efficiently achieved through mouth-to-mouth contact and saliva exchange, particularly where the flow of saliva is from the male to the typically shorter female.”
Sexy.
Sperm just don’t cut it when it comes to transmitting immunity.
Kissing transmits germs from man to woman, and after about six months of it she becomes immune to the bad stuff in the man’s body. By the time the baby is born, it is immune to the things the parents are immune to.
The behavior is so deeply evolved in our brains that homosexual men and women still kiss, and they get all the latent benefits – connection, love, ribald desire, immunity from the partner’s germs.
You kiss babies and pets, sacred objects, the ground.
When it comes to kissing, you are not so smart, but you are healthy.
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The Misconception: Predictions about your future are subject to forces beyond your control.
The Truth: Just believing a future event will happen can cause it to happen, if the event depends on human behavior.
The self fulfilling prophecy is a concept which goes far back into the history of storytelling and narrative fiction in just about all human cultures, but it isn’t fiction.
Research shows you are highly susceptible to this phenomenon because you are always trying to predict the behavior of others.
The future is the result of actions, and actions are the results of behavior, and behavior is the result of prediction.
This is called the Thomas Theorem:
If men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences.”
W. I. Thomas was a sociologist who noticed, when people are trying to predict future events, they make a lot of assumption about the present. If those assumptions are powerful enough, the resulting actions will lead to the predicted future.
The easiest example of this is the rumor of a shortage. If you believe there will be a shortage of toothpaste, you will go and try to buy some before the stores run out – just like everyone else. Sure enough, the shortage occurs.
This is closely associated with experimenter bias and labeling theory. When someone believes you are a certain kind of person, you live up to those expectations.
If your teacher thinks you are smart, they treat you like a smart person. You get extra help, extra attention, respect. You react with more effort, more drive, and the feedback loop leads to the fulfillment of your label.
In a 1978 experiment by William Crano and Phyllis Mellon, a set of random students were chosen in a an elementary class. The teachers were told these random students had been shown to be possible child geniuses based on an IQ test. The test, of course, didn’t exist, and the results were imaginary.
Sure enough, those students performed better.
Think of the stock market. When people predict it will fail, people stop investing and start selling. Others hear about the selling, and they sell. People start to try and predict the future, assume everyone is going to sell, and they sell too. Once the media starts reporting, stocks plummet.
Research shows if you believe someone is going to be an asshole, you will act hostile, thus causing them to act like an asshole.
This same research shows if someone thinks their partner doesn’t love them, they will interpret small slights as big hurts – this will then lead to a feeling of rejection which causes the partner to distance themselves. The feedback loop will build and build until the prophecy is fulfilled.
In an experiment performed by Steven Sherman in 1980, two sets of people were asked over the phone to donate three hours of time to a cancer drive.
One group was simply asked if they would do it. They said yes. Four percent showed up.
The other group was asked if they thought they would show up if they were to be asked. Most said they would show up. Almost all of them did.
The second group had made an assumption about their own personality, and once they had painted a portrait of what kind of person they were, they had to conform to the idea or risk cognitive dissonance.
When it comes to belief, you are not so smart, and the things you think are true will become reality if given enough time to fester.
If you want a better job, a better marriage, a better teacher, a better friend – you have to act as if the thing you want out of the other person is already headed your way. It doesn’t guarantee you’ll see a change, but it’s better than nothing.
The point is this: a negative outlook will lead to negative predictions, and you will start to unconsciously manipulate your environment to deliver those predictions.
Don’t go buying “The Secret” just yet.
No, you can’t just want something to be true and have it become so, but you can avoid the opposite scenario, which might be just enough to improve your life.
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