True Enough

Many of our beliefs and perspectives matter not because we know them to be objectively correct, but rather because they align with how we would prefer the world to be. That they aren’t factually right misses the point. What matters is that they feel right. They are, to coin a phrase, ‘wrongly right’. Factually inaccurate, yet compelling enough to influence how people think and act.

Consider a simple example. When psychologists asked people how much they would expect to pay to ship a modestly sized package from an address in London, England to Edinburgh, Scotland their willingness to pay was higher compared to sending the parcel from Edinburgh to London. Same package. Same distance. Same logistics. But London to Edinburgh, many figured, is ‘uphill’. Uphill feels more effortful so paying a higher price seems reasonable. Factually, of course, this is wrong. Your author checked with someone who knows about this stuff who confirmed the overall gradient between the two cities is 0.014%–an order so negligible as to be unnoticeable to humans. Yet given how our minds make sense of geography and space it feels right. The people in the study were wrong, yet their answer felt right.

Being wrong and feeling right

Many beliefs are full of confidently held convictions that bear little resemblance to reality. Yet they carry enormous persuasive weight because they fit intuitive models of how we believe the world should work. People might be concerned about the risk of AI replacing human judgement. This is inaccurate in a literal sense because AI (currently) lacks judgement. Yet it seems compelling in an emotional sense. Unlike a human’s bent towards uncertainty, AI’s unerring conviction only compounds this perception. For some AI might even start to feel like an authority. The incorrect but understandable belief that AI is in control might then spread faster than a more balanced and accurate point of view.

Or consider the commonly held belief of some bosses that remote working reduces productivity. The evidence is mixed and varies enormously by sector. Yet visual cues overpower statistical ones. Deserted offices signal diminished output resulting in the wrongly right belief that “busyness = productiveness”.

Politics offers its own wrongly right examples. A perennial one, continuously amplified during both of Donald Trump’s terms, is that a U.S. President can single-handedly run the economy. Yet most economists across the political spectrums recognise that economic outcomes stem from a complex mix of—to list just a few—Central Bank policy, money markets, global supply chains and demographic shifts. Presidential interventions may be salient, but they are also slight.

Yet the intuition remains irresistible. When a company performs well the CEO receives the credit. When it doesn’t, they get the blame. Trump is not the first leader to claim stock market rises and growing employment figures as his own personal accomplishments. He won’t be the last either.

Just because a belief fails a fact-check doesn’t mean it fails the gut-check. Coherent stories beat accurate ones. Familiar metaphors beat complicated explanations. And an idea that fits our mental geometry—that going north equals going uphill—feels true before we bother to examine whether it is. All this raises significant challenges for anyone endeavouring to influence, persuade and foster change.

It can be helpful to remember that correcting people won’t necessarily lead to convincing them. “No one ever reasoned a man out of something he wasn’t reasoned into” observed the lyricist and Gulliver’s Travels author Jonathan Swift. The best persuaders don’t tend to ridicule the wrongly held beliefs of others but rather seek to understand their origin and offer alternatives. They recognise that people find it hard to abandon a story until a more compelling one comes along. In a battle for minds they know that metaphors beat metrics and stories trump statistics.

The uncomfortable truth is that all of us are wrongly right about lots of things. Our minds prioritise coherence and emotion over logic and accuracy. The opportunity for leaders and communicators is not to eliminate the tendency, but rather to work with it. As facts increasingly become a less effective tool of persuasion, leaders need a different starting point.

In the same way a trip from London to Edinburgh feels uphill, so too can change feel an uphill endeavour. The job of the leader is to avoid presenting change as an effort and instead lean into momentum.

Persuasion is rarely about adding information but rather swapping out the story people already believe with a more compelling one. The stories likely to win won’t always be the most accurate ones, but rather the ones that feel true enough.

Steve Martin is a Royal Society-nominated author and leading voice on the psychology of influence, persuasion and change. He is Chief Executive Officer of Influence at Work and a Faculty Director at Columbia Business School, Executive Education.