If you're not changing your mind, you're doing something wrong

IF YOU’RE NOT CHANGING YOUR MIND, YOU’RE DOING SOMETHING WRONG

David Coman-Hidy is the head of the Humane League, an organization that’s been called one of America’s most important animal rights groups.11 One thing that makes the Humane League unusual is their commitment to the premise that they’re always at least a little bit wrong. Whenever a new employee joins the organization, Coman-Hidy tells them that the Humane League isn’t defined by any particular “type” of activism. They’re not committed to any particular battle or project or tactical approach. Their mandate is to follow the evidence and do whatever it suggests is most effective at helping animals. “If we’re not doing something totally different in five years than what we’re doing now, then we failed,” Coman-Hidy says. “There has to be something better than what we’re doing right now, and our goal is to find it.”

Sometimes that means switching from one type of strategy or cause to another. In its early years, the Humane League concentrated on flashy demonstrations like picketing the homes of scientists involved in animal testing. But they found that this strategy was too alienating to be effective, and the number of animals it could save even in a best-case scenario wasn’t very high. That’s why they ultimately shifted their focus from lab animals to farm animals, and persuaded Unilever, which supplies 95 percent of the United States’ eggs, to agree to stop killing male chicks. (The standard practice in the industry is to toss newborn male chicks into a grinder, since they won’t be able to lay eggs.) That’s billions of chickens saved from a painful death.

Sometimes the Humane League’s commitment to following the evidence means abandoning an initiative that isn’t working, even if they’ve already poured a lot of effort into it. In 2014, they saw some exciting preliminary results from a program called “Meatless Mondays,” in which large schools give up meat on their cafeteria menus one day per week. Based on those initial results, they spent four months pouring most of their organizational resources into convincing schools across the country to sign up for Meatless Mondays. Unfortunately, their follow-up research revealed that the program didn’t stick, at least not without a lot of ongoing support (hiring chefs, running training programs, and so on) that they weren’t equipped to provide. Realizing it wasn’t a cost-effective strategy for them after all, the Humane League had to say, “Okay, everyone, great job—but stop what you’re doing. We’re going back to what we were doing before.”

Knowing that you’re fallible doesn’t magically prevent you from being wrong. But it does allow you to set expectations early and often, which can make it easier to accept when you are wrong. Coman-Hidy says, “My intuition is that if you bring up these biases a lot—that we are always going to think that we’re right, that we’re always thinking what we’re doing is the best and most important thing to be doing . . . it makes it an easier pill to swallow when inevitably something better comes along. Because you’ve kind of inoculated yourself against the ‘horror’ of having been suboptimal for some period of time.”

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Hopefully this chapter has helped inoculate you against the “horror” of being wrong, and left you with a new attitude toward error. Discovering you were wrong is an update, not a failure, and your worldview is a living document meant to be revised. In the next chapter we’ll explore another key facet of changing your mind. Now that you’ve gotten good at being wrong, it’s time to get good at being confused.