Why Fear Of Rejection Prevents Us From Making Wise Decisions

By guest blogger David Robson When you have a disagreement with your boss, how do you respond? Do you consider that you might be at fault and try to consider the other’s viewpoint? Or do you dig in your heels and demand that other people come around to your way of thinking? In other words, do you make wise, practical decisions, or are you prone to being stubborn and petty in the face of criticism? As I describe in my recent book, The Intelligence Trap, a whole new field of “evidence-based wisdom” aims to measure these kinds of differences in people’s thinking and behaviour, and to understand the reasons for them. Taking inspiration from philosophers like Aristotle and Socrates, these psychologists argue that wise reasoning involves five qualities: intellectual humility (recognising the limits of your knowledge); a recognition of uncertainty about how a situation may unfold; a recognition of others’ perspectives; the use of an outsider’s viewpoint; and the search for compromise. There are now various measures of these ways of thinking, including self-report questionnaires and more involved laboratory experiments. And researchers have begun to study how wise reasoning is related to other individual differences: for instance, these measures appear to predict well-being above and beyond other cognitive traits (like IQ). Igor Grossmann at the University of Waterloo has been at the forefront of this work, and his latest paper, available as a preprint at PsyArxiv, ex...
Source: BPS RESEARCH DIGEST - Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Tags: Decision making guest blogger Intelligence Source Type: blogs