Why We Can’t Help Jumping to Conclusions
We all jump to conclusions. It isn’t something we think about; we just do it. Yet, there’s an abundance of advice that cautions against jumping to conclusions. Instead, the advice goes, we should carefully evaluate the facts and the evidence and refrain from latching onto the first explanation that comes to mind.
Unfortunately, this advice is almost impossible to follow because quickly making meaning of what we observe or experience evolved as a survival strategy. Our ancestors wisely jumped to conclusions about an approaching saber-toothed cat rather than methodically evaluating the facts and, in the process, becoming its tasty lunch. Now, eons later, we continue to jump.
Still, I used to think we should be able to put a pause button between a situation we encounter and our forming a conclusion about it. I changed my mind when I read The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. Taleb’s view is that it takes a huge amount of effort to see facts and withhold judgment about them. He maintains that we always interpret, often without even being conscious of it, and, in fact, our brains are incapable of seeing anything in raw form. The reason, he says, is that our brains function outside our awareness to a large extent, just like our breathing.
Brain scans by neuroscientists suggest that we are most likely to jump to conclusions when we’re uncertain about a situation. That could be, although I’ve seen situations in which people jumped to a conclusion about something they were certain about—and turned out to be totally wrong. In any case, Taleb says that because most of our interpreting takes place outside our awareness, the only way to keep from interpreting is to stay in a continuous state of active vigilance. In other words, not jumping to conclusions would be exceedingly difficult and tiring.
Still, even if we can’t avoid jumping to conclusions, perhaps we can become more mindful of some of our conclusions once we’ve reached them. After having made an interpretation, we should occasionally pause and question it. In these situations, we might consider alternative interpretations of the situation or ask questions of others to help us confirm or reject our interpretations. We might also replay the situation in our minds to gauge if we’ve misjudged it. Any of these tactics would be the next best thing to jumping back to the starting point.
