To resolve conflicts with messengers that challenge our belief system and increase our ability to consider messages, we must wrench ourselves away from confirmation biases.
Make a habit of asking questions that challenge your preexisting beliefs, in particular by raising multiple possible explanations about the behavior of people who think, act, and look different from you. If you assume that someone on your team always contributes bad ideas, you might note that implementation of his last idea cost the team money. Ask questions like: “How many times did the group ignore his concerns about a project that ended up becoming a problem later on?” or “How many times did he suggest ideas that improved a project, whether or not he received credit?” If you assume that someone is a poor team player, you might think back to the times when others complained about them. Raise questions that potentially challenge this assumption, such as: “Why do other people in other settings enjoy working with them?” or “Why did they perform exceptionally in groups other than this one?”
Training ourselves to invalidate our preexisting hypotheses, rather than blithely confirming them, will help us reverse misperceptions that in turn allows us to generate more friendships and reduce social conflicts. In essence, we want to train ourselves to behave like scientists when evaluating principled insubordination rather than lawyers who seek to bury information that conflicts with preexisting conclusions.
Conditioning ourselves to get outside of our own heads and consider others’ vantage points really works. In another study of whether brief psychological interventions work within intractable conflicts, Israeli participants instructed on how to get in touch with the thoughts and feelings of others responded less angrily toward Palestinians and in turn voiced greater support for reconciliation policies and less support for military aggression. Five months later, Israelis given these instructions continued to feel less anger toward Palestinians and still expressed more support for policies promoting peace instead of war.
BUILDING REBEL-FRIENDLY CULTURES
Congress’s decision to allow women to assume roles as combat pilots was long overdue and an important step forward. But we can’t just mandate inclusion of minority groups, including principled insubordinates, and expect to see instant progress. The mere presence of principled insubordinates doesn’t mean that companies, teams, political parties, and other groups in society will succeed in harvesting their unique and valuable insights. Each of us as individuals must work to become more congenial to non-conformists and their views, and we must create groups adept at extracting wisdom from weirdos. We must carve out opportunities within groups for principled rebels to share what they know, and we must ensure that newcomers or marginal group members can wield influence to the same extent as established group members. Culture building takes time, and once we see progress, we must remain vigilant to prevent backsliding. With focus and determination, we can build groups in which disinterested inquiry and the ability to think in someone else’s shoes become entrenched, maximizing group intelligence and creativity.
To round out this book, I’d like to challenge us to think even more ambitiously. Why should we wait until people enter teams and companies before increasing our hospitality toward those holding unpopular, minority opinions? To build a society fully capable of mobilizing the insights of non-conformists, we must also increase the total number of non-conformists among us. Over the long term, the most effective way of doing this is to educate children from a young age to break from the crowd and become principled rebels themselves. We must instill in youth the mindset and skills that produce and sustain non-conformity, and we must make dissent cool. Drawing on the latest science, the next chapter provides a science-based roadmap for creating a new generation of courageous and inspiring freethinkers.
RECIPE STEPS
1. Treat rebels as uniquely valuable contributors. To maximize a group’s collective intelligence, build a culture that affirms certain values: autonomy, critical thinking, freedom of thought, and the desire to seek out useful information regardless of where it originates.
2. Fight back against confirmation bias. Make a habit of asking questions that challenge your preexisting beliefs, in particular by raising multiple possible explanations about the behavior of people who think, act, and look differently than yourself.
3. Repeatedly reinforce norms for permitting dissent and embracing it when present. Notice stark shifts when particular non-conformist members speak in terms of a drop in attentiveness (turning to devices and side conversations), insufficient follow-up on what is said (squashing traction), and failing to offer charity (making no attempt to find the truth or rational basis behind someone’s words). If you don’t think this happens on your team, you are ignoring social activity. We now know that small behavioral shifts will help teams reap the benefits of people who are different and dissenting. We can build groups where intellectual humility, disinterested inquiry, and viewing matters from another person’s perspective become commonplace.
CHAPTER 10
Raising Insubordinate Kids
Evidence-based strategies for training the next generation of heroes in waiting
In August 2020, high school sophomore Hannah Watters made national news by getting herself into what she called some “good and necessary trouble.” Across the country, controversy swirled around whether schools should open for business in the midst of the raging COVID-19 pandemic or conduct classes virtually. President Donald J. Trump and others in government were pushing for schools nationwide to reopen. Many parents, teachers, students, and public health officials doubted schools could operate safely. The school Watters attended, North Paulding High School in suburban Atlanta, Georgia, decided to start in-person classes. Students who declined to attend risked expulsion. The school’s reopening plan seemed so reckless that one teacher resigned rather than come back to work.
When Watters arrived for her first day of school, she was appalled at what she saw. The school had “ignorantly opened back up,” she said. “Not only did they open, but they have not been safe.” Although the Centers for Disease Control and other top public health authorities identified face masks as important for reducing the spread of COVID-19, the school made wearing them voluntary. Watters found that only a minority of students were wearing them. Meanwhile, hallways were packed during the course of the day, with students sometimes pressed shoulder to shoulder. Although the school had policies against using smartphones and posting pictures of students on social media sites without obtaining consent, Watters took and posted a video of crowded hallways on Twitter. “I was concerned for the safety of everyone in that building and everyone in the county because precautions and guidelines that the CDC has been telling us for months now, weren’t being followed.”
The images went viral and elicited a storm of media coverage. Did administrators applaud Watters for her act of principled rebellion? Not at all. They slapped her with a five-day suspension for breaking school policies. Meanwhile, the school’s principal announced to students that they would be disciplined for posting pictures on social media. Happily, when Watters’s mother called the school, she learned the suspension had been rescinded. Although the school district defended its performance, the superintendent acknowledged that “the photo does not look good” and suggested the school would have to make adjustments.
It couldn’t have been easy for Watters to break the rules. She knew she’d piss people off. And yet she did it anyway because she felt it was the morally appropriate thing to do. She had an impact, raising awareness about a critically important issue that affects us all. Pretty amazing, if you ask me. What would our country look like if every school was teaming with students like Watters, and if getting yourself into “some good and necessary trouble” was not only common, but “cool”? Science reveals a number of principles that parents and teachers can use to train youth to disagree, defy, and deviate from problematic norms and standards. You might be using some of these principles right now without realizing it. The key is to make all of them prominent in your parenting approach or pedagogy so that your kids feel inclined and empowered to dissent. Let’s all dedicate ourselves to raising a new generation of young people like Watters who care so damn much that they rise up and take a stand on behalf of progress.
THE BIG IDEA
We must dedicate ourselves to raising a new generation of youth who feel emboldened to disagree, defy, and deviate from problematic norms and standards for the sake of progress.
REBEL-MAKER PRINCIPLE 1: SHOW YOUR KIDS THAT YOU BELIEVE IN THEM
Do you remember the inspiring English teacher played by Robin Williams in the movie Dead Poets Society? I had a grade-school teacher like that—Dr. Frank Cacciutto. Once he stood on a desk just like Robin Williams did and read aloud a poem he’d written about grammar—in particular, the dejection felt by misunderstood semicolons and the pride felt by frequently used commas and exclamation points (the idea of describing punctuation with human attributes blew our minds). But Dr. Cacciutto didn’t just read to us—he asked for constructive feedback on work in progress, and when we gave it, he listened. Imagine a teacher—with a Ph.D. no less—asking little old me for writing advice! While most educators treat students as oversized children, Dr. Cacciutto flattened the classroom’s social hierarchy, showing us that he regarded us as fully formed, independent human beings with opinions worth hearing. No accident that my friends and I loved going to class and hung on his every word.
Setting high standards and regularly affirming students’ potential boosts their performance, especially when youths belong to marginalized or stigmatized groups. But if you think about it, showing kids that you believe in them is also a great way of raising them to become principled insubordinates. To dissent from prevailing wisdom, kids must believe they have the ability to make a difference in the world. They must have a sense of their own power. When parents or teachers show confidence in their kids’ competence, affirming that their kids can create workable strategies to surmount obstacles and persist in the long game of achieving goals, they help their kids to believe in themselves. As kids develop ideas that deviate from the norm, they become more inclined to pursue them.
The question then becomes: how can parents and teachers best help kids internalize a sense of competence? One way is to simply remind youth about their past successes. Ask your child about experiences they define as successes. Some kids might have persuaded a friend to change their mind on a topic, learned how to type without looking at their hands, auditioned for a role in a play (regardless of whether they made the cut), raised doubts about information presented in class, or finished a non-assigned book to ramp up their knowledge base. Have your kids list positive changes they’ve made, skills they’ve learned, accomplishments of which they are proud, times they took a bold stand. Probe for details, asking questions like: “When did you first start thinking about making a change or improving your skill set?”; “What was going on in your life at the time?”; “Did you improve all at once, or take small steps?”; “What were some of the steps?”; “How do you feel about what you did today?”; “How does it feel to remember this now?”
A second strategy is to help your child minimize what psychologists call “belonging uncertainty.” When youths feel like outsiders, they tend to view social bonds as fragile. Constantly gauging whether you fit in is exhausting for anyone, much less youth who are still developing a firm sense of identity. We adults can reduce these feelings of uncertainty that undermine motivation and achievement. When youth are experiencing difficult transitions, let them hear from kids who were once in the exact same situation and are now on the other side.
Lowering standards in the hope of making youth feel good about themselves is not the answer (often adults do this so that they can feel positive about themselves and virtuous for trying to even the playing field). To become principled rebels, youth must believe they possess sufficient agency to make a difference. We adults must build our kids’ confidence in their ability to surmount obstacles and persist in the long game of succeeding at their goals.
REBEL-MAKER PRINCIPLE 2: SHOW INTEREST IN YOUR KID’S INTERESTS
Former Delaware secretary of education Mark Murphy visited thousands of classrooms in over seven hundred schools. What he found disheartened him. Young people were eager to learn yet bored by traditional schooling. They had teachers who believed in them but lacked adults in their lives who took an interest in their efforts. “There are so many things I want to learn,” they told him, “but nobody seems to care. I feel smothered by rules, regulations, and boundaries of what is right, what is acceptable, and what is valued. I am not in control, at all.”
Determined to do something, Mark founded GripTape, an organization that allows teenagers to take ten-week learning journeys outside the classroom guided by their own interests. GripTape asks young people two questions: What is an idea, topic, or skill you’ve always wanted to learn? How is this related to your success, now or in the future? Based on satisfactory answers to both questions, they receive an invitation to start a learning journey. Young people who completed the program have learned about rap communities, computer coding, fashion design, blockchain technology, homelessness, drone photography, and the use of gene-editing techniques. GripTape is agnostic toward content, paying heed to research showing that kids learn best and are most motivated to persist through challenges and find alternative routes around roadblocks when engaged in personally meaningful pursuits. Critically, GripTape provides youth with an adult “champion” who provides emotional support, not advice. To minimize the risk that champions will veer back into advice-giving mode, the organization excludes adults who are subject experts in the topics kids are exploring. These adult figures are present simply to affirm, validate, and encourage kids as they learn, not to feed them specialized knowledge.
Champions ask reflective questions, trying to grasp what youth find most energizing or depleting as they proceed with their missions. Instead of giving in to the temptation to proffer advice, champions ask questions that guide youth in whatever it is that interests them, such as “How’s it going?”; “What are you struggling with?”; “Did you talk to anyone about that?”; “Who would be a good person to contact who knows more than you?” Such questions allow youth to think about their actions and problem-solve the next move for themselves. Kids have enough adults in their lives telling them what to do. They want adults who will simply listen to them without feeling compelled to jump in with a story or piece of information.
Preliminary data show that GripTape’s methodology is extremely effective, transforming kids’ lives and turning them on to the power of learning. More broadly, science confirms how important it is for kids to have supportive, interested adults in their lives. Such adults not only enhance learning; they help kids grow into principled rebels. We become more curious and courageous when others let us feel safe to be ourselves and support our explorations. Also, when we share our interests with other people and they listen enthusiastically, what we share becomes more interesting and meaningful to us. We in turn become more curious and want to take more risks.
Provide this support system for your child. Be responsive when your child shares past explorations or future plans with you. If they feel uncomfortable, let them know that anxious thoughts and feelings are natural when trying new things and tackling challenges. When you accept their negative feelings, they will learn to do the same. Help your kid regulate their emotions. Start by setting an example yourself, expressing the right level of emotion for particular situations and breaking with entrenched cultural norms (for instance, affirm that boys can cry and girls can get angry). Not only will you enhance your kids’ curiosity; you will strengthen your relationship with them by serving as a facilitator of their life’s journey.
REBEL-MAKER PRINCIPLE 3: SUPPORT AUTONOMY
At GripTape, adult champions refrain from providing advice because they seek to advance another strategy critical for training in principled insubordination: providing kids with autonomy. Rebels by definition feel a strong sense of freedom to go their own way. That mentality has to come from somewhere. You instill it when you allow children to serve as a codirector of when, how, and what they learn. Doing so facilitates active engagement and an experience of joy and wonder. Letting youth direct their time and energy toward a meaningful goal in a way that is enriching to them offers the best opportunity for learning.
Research has shown that youth explore and discover best when they are in control and allowed to solve problems themselves. As parents and educators, we must set aside our fears and our impulse to intercede, allowing our kids to feel (and master!) moments of discomfort. Doing so helps them to become self-directed in their thinking and behavior. If you can’t break with the idea that learning requires a student and teacher, then have kids teach other kids. There is no better way to consolidate learning and a deeper understanding of material than to verbalize and explain it to a peer with a deep interest in the subject at hand. What Adults Can Say and Do to Support Autonomy
1. Don’t lecture your kids. Instead, spend time listening to them. Show them that what they say matters. You should re-express what a child says with such clarity and vividness that they respond, “Damn, I wish you could be my speech writer.”
2. Find moments for kids to enjoy independence, offering them space to work on problems and puzzles in their own way.
3. Provide your kids with frequent speaking opportunities. Even if their points are nearly inarticulate, find the useful nugget and validate it. Give them the floor to speak for themselves when around other adults.
4. Note indicators that your child is improving or mastering a skill and call it out. Try to connect what they do to their personal goals. For example, you might say, “And that is why you are going to be landing ollies on a skateboard soon!” or “Spoken like a future veterinarian.”
5. Don’t bark out commands at your kids. Instead, encourage them as they work, chiming in with “You got this” and “So close” along with reminders of what they’ve done in the past (“Keep plugging away and remember how well your efforts paid off last time”).
