Doubling Down When You’re Wrong

As the famous quote often falsely attributed to Charles Darwin goes, “It’s not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is most adaptable to change.”3 Even though it’s a misquotation, it’s not useless just because it’s not Darwin.

When circumstances change, we need to adapt. But inertia closes minds and stifles the motivation to change how we’ve been doing things. It makes it harder to imagine alternative methods, and discourages experimentation and course correction.

For instance, public statements can create inertia. Putting something on the record establishes expectations along with social pressure to meet those expectations. When new information challenges one of our statements, we might instinctively dismiss it and emphasize the old information that supported it. We want to be consistent with what we said. Changing our minds becomes increasingly difficult. We witness how, say, people label a politician a “flip-flopper” instead of “intelligent” when they change their position in response to the facts, and our fear of the social implications of changing our minds continues to grow.

Inertia also prevents us from doing hard things. The longer we avoid the hard thing we know we should do, the harder it becomes to do. Avoiding conflict is comfortable and easy. The longer we avoid the conflict, however, the more necessary it becomes to continue avoiding it. What starts out as avoiding a small but difficult conversation quickly grows into avoiding a large and seemingly impossible one. The weight of what we avoid eventually affects our relationship.

Groups create inertia of their own. They tend to value consistency over effectiveness, and reward people for maintaining the status quo. Inertia makes deviating from group norms difficult. The threat of standing out in a negative way too often keeps people in line. As a result, group dynamics end up favoring people who don’t deviate from the defaults.

Group inertia is partly responsible for why a friend of mine, and I suspect a host of others, got married in the first place. According to him, in hindsight, “All the signs were there that it might not work out, but it seemed like a lot to start over with someone new, and everyone around us was getting engaged, so that’s what we did.”

The influence of inertia isn’t just troubling in our work and relationships, it can also be bad for our health. In 1910, America’s leading expert on industrial toxicology, Alice Hamilton, was appointed to head a survey on industrial illness in the state of Illinois. Over the next few years, she provided definitive evidence of the dangers of lead exposure in the workplace and of lead-tainted exhaust fumes from automobiles. But despite the evidence, General Motors and other car manufacturers continued producing lead-fueled vehicles. It wasn’t until the 1980s that the US finally banned leaded fuel. Even today, lead continues to be used for other applications, despite the availability of nontoxic options at a similar price.4

Inertia keeps us doing things that don’t get us what we want. It operates in our subconscious largely undetected until its effects are too hard to counter. Keep the following in mind: if you find yourself biting your tongue in group situations, if you find yourself or your team resisting change or continuing to do something in one way simply because that’s how you’ve always done it in the past—be on your guard! The inertia default is likely at work.