The Dangers of Conclusion Jumping

tl;dr: Turns out it’s a habit. One worth changing.

“One in five Americans spends more time planning their upcoming vacation than they do their?financial future” according to Carmen Sanchez, the professor who wrote?People Who Jump to Conclusions Show Other Kinds of Thinking Errors.

It was one of many surprising and valuable stats that were listed in the article, which was basically a call to attention for “System 2” thinking recognizing that “System 1” thinking exists. (For more on this, read the book?Thinking Fast and Slow)

The proposed solution??Metacognitive training.?You can think of it as the concentrated effort, with the assistance of a trainer, to “reprogram” or “rewire” the neural pathways in your brain to recognize that there’s an alternate path in your thinking processes.

Over years of thinking the same way, our minds become like paths through the woods that have been walked on by many hikers. First, there’s no path, but as we walk on it more, the grass gets worn down until the trail is obvious.

Our brains, apparently, work the same way and when we encounter a “familiar” situation, we “know” how to react and we go down the exact same path….which is the most expedient way to get from Point A to Point B.

This is thinking fast.

It also results in the?Dunning–Kruger effect

It’s also jumping to conclusions.

The point of MCT, an exercise which I went through recently with the help of a trainer (and which I suspect is going to be an industry in the future), is to first recognize that you are about to unconsciously start walking down the same path and the then consciously choose another path.

Then, to repeat that process over and over again until, slowly but surely, there’s another, albeit slightly less worn path in the woods (brain) that you can at least see which forces you, when you come to the path to choose the one less traveled by, which might make all the difference (HT: Robert Frost).

As I’ve assumed more leadership responsibility professionally, I’ve become more and more conscious of the need for “thinking slow” and not jumping to conclusions. It’s not easy to do that, of course, but it’s the right and fair thing to do.

I’ve also become a lot more aware of when I see others jumping to conclusions.

This has happened a ton when it comes to Bitcoin and crypto, for sure, but I distinctly remember a situation in the past two weeks where I was debating how to handle a situation and someone I was talking to, who didn’t know the actors involved, said, “oh, they are definitely going to do X.”

Turns out he was totally, 100% wrong. Not even close. He had jumped to conclusions.

I’m highlighting this, mostly for myself, as a reminder that I do the exact same thing way too frequently (particularly with my kids) and my hope is that reading articles like this and writing about them will raise my own awareness to the situation, which means I may do it less.

We’ll see.