Conviction or Stuck?
Are you maintaining your conviction or just stuck in your thesis or narrative?
How to know difference.
I know I always question myself especially with investments or businesses. Should I hold this stock through the down turns or is it a losing proposition and I am just stuck in confirmation bias?
It really depends on how you approach the evidence and arguments that challenge your beliefs.
According to the conviction narrative theory (CNT), conviction is a subjective sense of certainty that guides one’s actions in situations of radical uncertainty, where the outcomes and probabilities are unknown or unknowable. Conviction is based on a narrative that links one’s goals, values, and identity to a coherent and plausible story about the world.
Being stuck in your thesis or narrative, on the other hand, is when you ignore, dismiss, or rationalize any evidence or arguments that contradict your beliefs, even when they are valid and relevant. This can lead to confirmation bias, cognitive dissonance, and motivated reasoning, which can impair your ability to learn from new information and adapt to changing circumstances.
Therefore, I would say that maintaining conviction is a positive and adaptive way of coping with radical uncertainty, as long as you are open to revising your narrative based on new evidence and arguments. Being stuck in your thesis or narrative is a negative and maladaptive way of coping with radical uncertainty, as it prevents you from updating your beliefs and actions based on new evidence and arguments.
Always remain open minded and flexible to new ideas and change. Adjust your decisions accordingly. Our goal is to improve the accuracy of our judgements to maximize the expected value of our choices.
Let’s explore a few key points that present challenges for you to remain flexible. Awareness of these is key in order to avoid them:
Cognitive dissonance is the mental discomfort that results from holding two conflicting beliefs, values, or attitudes. People tend to seek consistency in their attitudes and perceptions, so this conflict causes unpleasant feelings of unease or discomfort. The inconsistency between what people believe and how they behave motivates them to engage in actions that will help minimize feelings of discomfort. People attempt to relieve this tension in different ways, such as by rejecting, explaining away, or avoiding new information.
Confirmation bias is the tendency to search for, interpret, favor, and recall information in a way that confirms or supports one’s prior beliefs or values. People display this bias when they select information that supports their views, ignoring contrary information, or when they interpret ambiguous evidence as supporting their existing attitudes.
This biased approach to decision making is largely unintentional and results in a person ignoring information that is inconsistent with their beliefs.
Motivated reasoning is a cognitive and social response in which individuals, consciously or unconsciously, allow emotion-loaded motivational biases to affect how new information is perceived. Individuals tend to favor evidence that coincides with their current beliefs and reject new information that contradicts them, despite contrary evidence.
Motivated reasoning overlaps with confirmation bias. Both favor evidence supporting one’s beliefs, at the same time dismissing contradictory evidence. However, confirmation bias is mainly an unconscious (innate) cognitive bias. In contrast, motivated reasoning (motivational bias) is an unconscious or conscious process by which one’s emotions control the evidence supported or dismissed.
Self-awareness is key. Check in with yourself and your emotions. Distinguish emotional impulses from intuition. Know yourself and trust yourself. You can objectively make decisions while minimizing biases and heuristics. Awareness is always key.