Hi there,
This morning I made the mistake of checking the news.
I wanted to check the score of something, and before you know it, I was lost inside my phone. Headlines assaulting me from all directions, trying to ruin my day:
Artificial intelligence is dismantling entire industries. We’re all being replaced.
Geopolitical conflicts that people said couldn’t get worse have, predictably, gotten worse. (and by ‘conflict’ I mean the pointless death of thousands of innocent people)
The economy is doing that thing where it reminds you that everything you thought was stable was actually just stable-adjacent.
And somewhere in there, a finance guy with a podcast is explaining why all of this is actually great news if you think about it correctly.
I put the phone down. I sat for a bit. I stared out the window.
And I realized something. Within a few minutes, my perspective on the world was significantly worse than it had been before. None of the news was surprising, but still, my reality was much worse. The world hadn’t just gotten worse. My perception had gotten worse, too.
Our brains are prediction machines. They need to know what’s coming. So when the world becomes genuinely unpredictable, they don’t slow down and get more careful. They speed up and get sloppy. They grab the nearest available explanation and hold on.
The problem is that most of what we grab isn’t a fact. It’s a belief. And most of our beliefs are borrowed from people who were doing the same thing.
This week, I want to show you exactly how that happens, why it matters, and what to do about it.
Psychologist Arie Kruglanski spent decades studying what happens to human reasoning under conditions of uncertainty. What he found was not reassuring.
He called it the need for cognitive closure. When we feel uncertain, our brains experience it as a kind of emergency. Ambiguity is cognitively expensive. Our brains want the answer. They want it now.
And they will accept a bad answer far more readily than they’ll accept no answer at all.
Under high uncertainty, you reach conclusions faster. You become more rigid once you reach them. You become more hostile to information that challenges those conclusions. The discomfort of not knowing is so intense that almost any certainty feels like relief. This is why scary times are also gullible times.
To thrive in uncertainty, you need to resist falling into the certainty trap, disrupt the tendency to confuse facts and ideas, and understand the process by which you convince yourself of things, so you can stop falling for dumb ideas. Finally, the key is to change how you think about beliefs and your capacity to update them.
Let’s start with the certainty trap.
Resisting the certainty trap
When the news is bad, when the future is unclear, when the world feels genuinely unstable, your epistemological standards quietly collapse. You’ll believe something far more easily simply because believing it makes the uncertainty go away.
And that’s just the first problem.
Your brain is also a pattern-finding machine. Under uncertainty, it finds patterns whether they exist or not. Psychologists call this apophenia: the tendency to perceive meaningful connections between unrelated things. It’s why conspiracy theories flourish in chaotic times. Why superstitions spike during wars. Why people see faces in static and divine meaning in coincidence.
We weren’t built for a world where things happen for no reason. So we manufacture reasons.
This is your brain trying to protect you.
But it is also your brain making you significantly worse at understanding what’s actually going on.
The next time you feel a surge of certainty about something in the middle of a chaotic news cycle, treat that certainty as a signal, not a conclusion. Your brain may be closing a cognitive door because it’s overwhelmed, not because the answer is correct. Ask yourself:
Am I sure about this because I’ve thought it through, or because thinking it through feels too uncomfortable right now?
That pause is harder than it sounds.
But it’s also the whole game.
Disrupting the belief supply chain
There’s a meaningful difference between an idea, an opinion, a belief, and a fact.
An idea is a possibility someone raises.
An opinion is an idea in the form of a judgment.
A belief is an idea we feel certain about.
A fact is something we can verify.
The problem is that we treat these as interchangeable. Someone raises an idea in conversation. Someone else adds an opinion. This turns into a belief. By the third or fourth conversation, it has quietly been promoted to fact. And once enough people around you believe it is true, it becomes true for you too, whether you ever examined it or not.
The problem is that you don’t even need a person to express their opinion. Often, you will develop a belief based on what you believe other people believe!
Jerry Harvey, an organizational theorist, described this perfectly in what he called the Abilene paradox. His family drove to Abilene, Texas, on a blazing hot day for a meal none of them enjoyed. When they got back, they discovered that nobody had actually wanted to go. Each person had assumed everyone else wanted to go, and so they went along. Nobody made the decision. They all just assumed someone else had.
We do this constantly with ideas. We assume someone else has done the hard work of working out whether something is true. We see a nod of agreement, hear a confident assertion, or encounter a headline enough times, and we quietly promote the idea to fact without ever having examined it ourselves.
What makes this worse is that you don’t need to be part of an official group for it to happen. You absorb beliefs from your partner, your colleagues, and that one person at work who says something once with total conviction. You pick up fragments of other people’s reasoning and treat them as your own. Before long, you’re defending positions you never actually arrived at.
You are surrounded by borrowed beliefs. You probably don’t even know which ones they are.
The key to disrupting this belief supply chain is by labeling ideas as you encounter them. When someone tells you something, ask yourself which category it belongs to.
Is this a fact they can verify?
An opinion they’re presenting as a fact?
An idea they’re exploring?
The moment you start making this distinction, you’ll notice how often things get quietly upgraded in transit from one person to the next.
It takes just a few seconds and dramatically slows the rate at which other people’s half-formed thoughts become your firmly held convictions. But why does this occur in the first place?
Why repetition feels like evidence
In 1977, researchers Lynn Hasher, David Goldstein, and Thomas Toppino published a study that would become one of the most cited findings in cognitive psychology. They discovered that people rated statements as more likely to be true simply because they had encountered them before. Even when participants were told some of the statements were false, familiarity still increased perceived truth.
This became known as the illusory truth effect.
Hearing something multiple times feels like evidence. It shouldn’t. But it does. This is how misinformation spreads. This is how organizational culture calcifies around bad ideas. This is how the confident person in the meeting who repeats the same wrong thing five times ends up getting believed.
There’s a companion to this worth knowing. Tim Levine, a communication researcher, developed what he called truth default theory. His argument: our baseline assumption when we hear information is that it’s probably true.
Together, these two effects create a cognitive environment where we are constantly absorbing beliefs we didn’t choose, from sources we haven’t vetted, that feel more credible the more often we encounter them.
Plato spent a considerable amount of time arguing that reason was our primary tool for approaching reality more clearly. The problem is that assumes we are actually using reason to examine what we believe. Instead, much of the time, we use reason to justify what we already believe. As Jonathan Haidt put it, we are not scientists testing hypotheses. We are lawyers building cases.
The verdict was decided before the trial began.
When you find yourself believing something strongly, ask:
How many times have I heard this?
That number tells you how often something has been repeated, not whether it’s true. The more familiar a belief feels, the more carefully it deserves to be examined, because familiarity is exactly the mechanism through which bad information gets mistaken for established fact.
Embrace the belief growth mindset
You know Carol Dweck’s work on the growth mindset. The core insight: people who believe their abilities can improve actually improve more than people who believe their abilities are fixed. What you believe about your capacity shapes what your capacity becomes.
The same principle applies to beliefs themselves.
I call this the belief growth mindset: the recognition that updating your beliefs is a sign of intellectual strength. That the willingness to say “I was wrong about that” is one of the most cognitively sophisticated things a person can do. The quality of your thinking is determined not just by what you believe today, but by how readily you examine and revise those beliefs when better evidence arrives.
The mechanism for this was worked out by Thomas Bayes in the 18th century and has since become one of the most important frameworks in statistics and epistemology. Bayesian reasoning starts from the idea that you enter every situation with a prior: your current belief about how likely something is to be true. As you encounter new evidence, you update that prior. Your belief becomes more accurate over time, not because you decided to believe the right thing, but because you stayed open to revision.
Most of us don’t think this way. We form beliefs and then look for evidence to support them. We treat our priors as conclusions rather than starting points.
Pick one belief you hold confidently about something happening in the world right now. Then ask:
What would have to be true for this to be wrong?
What would I need to read, or who would I need to hear from, for me to genuinely update my position?
The more often you ask it, the more flexible your thinking becomes. The more flexible your thinking becomes, the more accurate your map of reality gets. And right now, with the world moving as fast as it is, an accurate map matters enormously.
We are living through a period of genuine uncertainty. The temptation, when the world feels unstable, is to reach for certainty wherever you can find it. To accept the nearest available explanation. To trust the people around you to have done the thinking. To believe what you read simply because you’ve read it often enough.
Your brain is doing its job. But its job is survival. And that only gets you so far.
Instead, the key is to build a more accurate map of reality.
That requires something your brain resists. The willingness to sit with uncertainty long enough to actually examine it. To notice when you have borrowed a belief without examining it, and to decide for yourself whether it deserves to stay. To pause between encountering an idea and accepting it as true.
That gap, between stimulus and belief, is where your thinking actually happens.
In uncertain times, the most radical thing you can do is protect that gap. With enough humility to know that your starting point might be wrong.
That is what the belief growth mindset actually looks like. And right now, it matters more than ever.
____________________
Belief Leader of the Week
Jonah Berger
Jonah Berger is a Wharton marketing professor whose book Contagious decoded why ideas and products spread, and whose follow-up, The Catalyst, I consider one of the most underrated books on influence ever written. His most important insight, and one that has deeply impacted my own thinking, is this: the best way to change someone’s mind is not to push harder — it is to identify and remove the invisible barriers that make change feel threatening. This felt right to anyone who had ever watched a perfectly constructed argument fail to move someone an inch. It fit in with a growing understanding that resistance, not ignorance, was the real enemy of change. And it made sense, remove the friction, and movement becomes natural.
