Simone Stolzoff

And so updating your belief isn't just changing your mind.

It is potentially undermining your own self-image.

And so for these stockbrokers who made picks that were out there on the limb, they didn't want to update their worldview because it would mean admitting that they were wrong.

The same thing is happening for people who easily cling towards disinformation or conspiracy theories.

They want to find a certain view of the world that makes everything make sense.

I think at the beginning of COVID, we saw a ton of this.

If I only find the right type of bleach, then I can make all of this go away.

And that need for certainty gets them to both cling on to a silver bullet and be less willing to update their perspective because they're tying their identity to this silver bullet they're choosing.

The term in psychology is escalating commitment to a negative course of action.

You might be going down a path and then rather than updating your belief when presented with new information, you end up doubling down.

Like with multi-level marketing.

Totally.

Like the canonical example is doomsday cults that think the world is going to end on a very particular day.

And then that day comes and then the majority of people hopefully leave the cult.

But then some people double down and they're like, because of our prayer, we prevented the doomsday from coming.

And then they're further deep in the rabbit hole.

So in the book, I talk about these three different certainty traps.

The first is comfort.

The second is hubris.

And the third is control.