There is a concept related to scout mindset and soldier mindset (helpful outline) that I’d like to explore. Let’s call it an “adversarial mindset”.
From what I gather, both scout mindset and soldier mindset are about beliefs. They apply to people who are looking at the world through some belief-oriented frame. Someone who takes a soldier mindset engages in directionally motivated reasoning and asks “Can/must I believe?” whereas a scout asks “Is it true?”.
On the other hand, someone who is in an adversarial mindset is looking through some sort of “combat-oriented frame”. If you say “I think your belief that X is true is wrong” to someone in an adversarial mindset, they might infer subtext of something like “You’re dumb”.
But despite being in this frame, they likely won’t respond by saying “Hey, that was mean of you to say I’m dumb. I’m not dumb, I’m smart!” Instead, they’ll likely respond by saying something closer to the object level like “Well I’m pretty sure it’s right”, but the subtext will be something more combative like “I won’t let you push me around like that!”.
Adversarial mindset isn’t about beliefs, it’s about self-esteem. Maybe?
There are various phenomena that make me think that a person is in an adversarial mindset. One such phenomenon is when someone is more likely to update their belief when you phrase your critique softly.
For example, imagine that instead of saying “I think your belief that X is true is wrong” you said “Hey, I could totally be off here, but do you think there’s a chance that your belief about X might not be completely accurate?”. And imagine that the person updated their belief in response to the soft phrasing but not the “hard” phrasing. If so, it seems to me that it isn’t the belief in X that they are defending against. It’s their identity of someone who isn’t dumb (or something).
A related possibility is that instead of inferring subtext that is aimed at attacking them (“You’re dumb”), they might adopt a dominance-oriented frame and infer subtext of “I’m dominant over you. Submit to me by conceding.”, or something. I ran into a situation once where I got into an argument with a therapist of mine that wasn’t productive, and I suspect that the reason why it wasn’t productive is because she adopted a dominance-oriented frame.
It began by me mentioning that I think beliefs influence feelings. She said something along the lines of “if that were true my job would be a whole lot easier”. I clarified that I don’t think beliefs are the only thing that influences feelings—at least not conscious, verbal beliefs as opposed to “emotional learnings”—but, in some sort of pragmatic sense that I can’t fully articulate, they play a role.
I came up with an example where Alice thinks it’s a sunny day, is excited to go for a walk, opens the blinds, sees that it’s raining, and then feels disappointed. And I explained that in this example I think moving from “belief that it is sunny” to “belief that it is raining” heavily influenced Alice’s emotions to shift from excited to disappointed. I expected that the therapist would nod and agree, and then proceed to add nuance to her position that beliefs don’t influence feelings. Instead, she dug her heels in and doubled down. I think there are many potential explanations for this other than a dominance-oriented mindset, but a dominance-oriented mindset feels pretty plausible to me here.
Coming back to Julia Galef’s book The Scout Mindset and even to the art of rationality more broadly, I suspect that the adversarial mindset and other soldier-adjacent mindsets lead to a lot of “stuckness” and just generally get in our way. And I’m not just referring to “normies” here, I’m including the “rats”, including myself!
This claim I’m trying to gesture at seems pretty “important if true”. One of my favorite quotes:
My path to this book began in 2009, after I quit graduate school and threw myself into a passion project that became a new career: helping people reason out tough questions in their personal and professional lives. At first I imagined that this would involve teaching people about things like probability, logic, and cognitive biases, and showing them how those subjects applied to everyday life. But after several years of running workshops, reading studies, doing consulting, and interviewing people, I finally came to accept that knowing how to reason wasn’t the cure-all I thought it was.
Knowing that you should test your assumptions doesn’t automatically improve your judgement, any more than knowing you should exercise automatically improves your health. Being able to rattle off a list of biases and fallacies doesn’t help you unless you’re willing to acknowledge those biases and fallacies in your own thinking. The biggest lesson I learned is something that’s since been corroborated by researchers, as we’ll see in this book: our judgment isn’t limited by knowledge nearly as much as it’s limited by attitude.
- The Scout Mindset
I don’t get the sense that we have a great understanding of why people adopt adversarial mindsets though, or how one can resist adversarial mindsets from slipping in. Seems like a topic worthy of more attention.
Yes, it seems like there is a difference between “inwards stubbornness” and “outwards stubbornness”, whether people refuse to change their minds for reasons private or social.
I know some people such that if you tell them they are wrong, they will double down and get angry at you… but if you meet them a few days later, they have updated their opinion. So it seems like they are willing to update, but not to admit that they did.
Similarly, you tell some people a good idea, and they will tell you that it is stupid. The next day, they will come and propose the same idea as their own. I think many books on manipulation social skills recommend that the best way to change someone’s mind about something is to let them believe that it was their own idea.
Then again, maybe this is a smaller difference than it seems, and some people are just better at remembering what was their opinion yesterday, or better at convincing themselves that yesterday was different.
Ah yeah, the phenomena you mention resonate with me and seem like evidence in favor of this idea that there is a distinction between soldier-oriented mindsets that fight against new ideas and ones that fight against something more social.
There is a concept related to scout mindset and soldier mindset (helpful outline) that I’d like to explore. Let’s call it an “adversarial mindset”.
From what I gather, both scout mindset and soldier mindset are about beliefs. They apply to people who are looking at the world through some belief-oriented frame. Someone who takes a soldier mindset engages in directionally motivated reasoning and asks “Can/must I believe?” whereas a scout asks “Is it true?”.
On the other hand, someone who is in an adversarial mindset is looking through some sort of “combat-oriented frame”. If you say “I think your belief that X is true is wrong” to someone in an adversarial mindset, they might infer subtext of something like “You’re dumb”.
But despite being in this frame, they likely won’t respond by saying “Hey, that was mean of you to say I’m dumb. I’m not dumb, I’m smart!” Instead, they’ll likely respond by saying something closer to the object level like “Well I’m pretty sure it’s right”, but the subtext will be something more combative like “I won’t let you push me around like that!”.
Adversarial mindset isn’t about beliefs, it’s about self-esteem. Maybe?
There are various phenomena that make me think that a person is in an adversarial mindset. One such phenomenon is when someone is more likely to update their belief when you phrase your critique softly.
For example, imagine that instead of saying “I think your belief that X is true is wrong” you said “Hey, I could totally be off here, but do you think there’s a chance that your belief about X might not be completely accurate?”. And imagine that the person updated their belief in response to the soft phrasing but not the “hard” phrasing. If so, it seems to me that it isn’t the belief in X that they are defending against. It’s their identity of someone who isn’t dumb (or something).
A related possibility is that instead of inferring subtext that is aimed at attacking them (“You’re dumb”), they might adopt a dominance-oriented frame and infer subtext of “I’m dominant over you. Submit to me by conceding.”, or something. I ran into a situation once where I got into an argument with a therapist of mine that wasn’t productive, and I suspect that the reason why it wasn’t productive is because she adopted a dominance-oriented frame.
It began by me mentioning that I think beliefs influence feelings. She said something along the lines of “if that were true my job would be a whole lot easier”. I clarified that I don’t think beliefs are the only thing that influences feelings—at least not conscious, verbal beliefs as opposed to “emotional learnings”—but, in some sort of pragmatic sense that I can’t fully articulate, they play a role.
I came up with an example where Alice thinks it’s a sunny day, is excited to go for a walk, opens the blinds, sees that it’s raining, and then feels disappointed. And I explained that in this example I think moving from “belief that it is sunny” to “belief that it is raining” heavily influenced Alice’s emotions to shift from excited to disappointed. I expected that the therapist would nod and agree, and then proceed to add nuance to her position that beliefs don’t influence feelings. Instead, she dug her heels in and doubled down. I think there are many potential explanations for this other than a dominance-oriented mindset, but a dominance-oriented mindset feels pretty plausible to me here.
Coming back to Julia Galef’s book The Scout Mindset and even to the art of rationality more broadly, I suspect that the adversarial mindset and other soldier-adjacent mindsets lead to a lot of “stuckness” and just generally get in our way. And I’m not just referring to “normies” here, I’m including the “rats”, including myself!
This claim I’m trying to gesture at seems pretty “important if true”. One of my favorite quotes:
I don’t get the sense that we have a great understanding of why people adopt adversarial mindsets though, or how one can resist adversarial mindsets from slipping in. Seems like a topic worthy of more attention.
Yes, it seems like there is a difference between “inwards stubbornness” and “outwards stubbornness”, whether people refuse to change their minds for reasons private or social.
I know some people such that if you tell them they are wrong, they will double down and get angry at you… but if you meet them a few days later, they have updated their opinion. So it seems like they are willing to update, but not to admit that they did.
Similarly, you tell some people a good idea, and they will tell you that it is stupid. The next day, they will come and propose the same idea as their own. I think many books on
manipulationsocial skills recommend that the best way to change someone’s mind about something is to let them believe that it was their own idea.Then again, maybe this is a smaller difference than it seems, and some people are just better at remembering what was their opinion yesterday, or better at convincing themselves that yesterday was different.
Ah yeah, the phenomena you mention resonate with me and seem like evidence in favor of this idea that there is a distinction between soldier-oriented mindsets that fight against new ideas and ones that fight against something more social.