MindCraft Challenges

Hindsight bias (“I knew it all along”, “I saw it coming all along”) can lead to problems with learning and decision-making. Because of hindsight bias, people fail to search long enough for explanations for mistakes or unwanted outcomes (cognitive myopia). People also believe they have the best understanding of situations (overconfidence). Thus, people avoid learning from mistakes.

Challenge:
One of the best ways to counteract hindsight bias is with the consider-the-opposite strategy. When faced with the results of a decision, you can use consider-the-opposite to think about what other outcomes could have occurred and what steps might have led to those other outcomes. You might also think about how other steps could lead to the same outcome. Try using consider-the-opposite to better understand educational or social outcomes for a week. Did you learn anything about alternative actions or possibilities?

Read More:
About hindsight bias:
https://doi.org/10.1177/1745691612454303

About a decade ago, a music professor and a social work professor asked Jewish and Arab women in Israel to join in a music-listening experiment. The women listened to songs about either the Holocaust or fallen Israeli soldiers, sung by either a Jewish or Arab singer. Hearing a national song that did not reference the Israeli-Arab conflict (the Holocaust songs) sung by an Arab singer (an out-group member) reduced prejudice and humanized people from the other group.

Challenge:
You will need to involve another person—specifically someone from a different cultural, generational, racial, or religious background than you. Share songs (not linked to intergroup conflict) that represent your background with them and either teach them to sing or play them, or listen to the songs together. If they would like to share songs with you, accept the offer. Does your perception of a person from a different background change?

Read More:
The Israeli-Arab song study
https://doi.org/10.1177/0305735616640599
Playing music together builds empathy in children
https://doi.org/10.1177/0305735612440609
Music can be a tool to lower cultural prejudice
https://doi.org/10.1177/1029864918802331

One way to break the influence of stereotypes on a situation is to make stereotypes less likely to be activated and used as explanations for an individual’s actions. Perspective-taking is a way to break the automatic use of stereotypes as a default explanation.

To take someone else’s perspective, psychological scientists ask people to:

• visualize, read about, or listen to the person whose perspective they are going to take
• either imagine what the other person is currently thinking or
• imagine what they would be thinking if they were that person

Challenge:
Try taking the perspective of somebody from a group who is very different from you. Does this help you think about them as a person rather than a category?

Read More:
A review of perspective taking, including limits on who benefits from perspective taking:
https://doi.org/10.1111/spc3.12116
Perspective-taking to block racially-biased responses:
https://doi.org/10.1037/a0022308