Mini Ep. 85: Certainty Heuristic

Speaker 1: Hey everybody, before we get started this week, I just want to let you know, we released a new mindset course featuring Rob Bernaki from Island Top Team and BJJ Concepts. It's called Mindset for Betas. It's an amazing resource that breaks down a new way to build a resilient Jiu-Jitsu mindset. It's part of BJJ Mental Models Premium. I will spare you the full sales pitch because you can try it for free. Just go to BJJmentalmodels.com/beta. I will give you a free month, you can check out the course and if you decide that it's not worth your money, you can cancel, you won't have to pay a cent. I've already been told by subscribers that this is the most valuable piece of Jiu-Jitsu content they've ever received, so I hope you like it too. Speaker 2: Hey everybody. Welcome to BJJ Mental Models. I am Steve Kwan and BJJ Mental Models is your guide to a conceptual and intelligent Jiu-Jitsu approach. Now, when we talk about mental models, we're often talking about things like biases or heuristics, shortcuts that your brain makes to make decisions, which can sometimes be right, but sometimes be wrong. And awareness of these biases and heuristics that your brain is making is one of the keys to preventing them from putting your decision-making on autopilot and doing the wrong thing at the wrong time. One of those biases is sometimes called the certainty heuristic, and I want to talk about that here today. The certainty heuristic refers to our brain's natural bias and favor toward statements that offer us a degree of certainty, even if those statements are false. So to give you an example of how this plays out in theory, if you've ever listened to a con artist or an untrustworthy influencer try to sell you on something, one of the things that distinguishes the way they communicate is that they will do so with absolute certainty. They will tell you, this is the cure to your problem. If you do what I say, it will solve the problem and make situations better. There's no room for ambiguity in the way that they explain things. They make it sound like it is a slam dunk, a silver bullet that's just going to solve your problem, an easy button that you can hit to make your problems go away. Sounds great. And that's why we fall prey to con artists because even as grown, responsible adults, there is that part of our brain that gravitates towards certainty. We crave certainty. Think of the way that we evolved, right? Certainty, man, if you are struggling for food and other basic survival needs, the prospect of certainty, of knowing that you're going to have what you need to get through the day, that makes a big difference and we are going to be biased toward that stuff. So the problem is sometimes when untrustworthy people wrap their message in too much certainty, it can almost bypass the critical thinking mechanisms in our brain and make us gravitate towards them, especially if we're desperate. If we really need a solution to our problem, the more certain someone sounds, the easier it is to fall down that trap of trusting and believing a person even when they're giving you bad information. Now, one of the challenges of combating the certainty heuristic is that if you actually know what you're talking about, you're going to be less likely to speak with these absolutes and speak in guarantees because the reality is for many things in life, the answer is, it depends. There often isn't an easy answer. And if you've ever tried to talk to an expert about anything, then you've probably had this unsatisfying experience where you've tried to get them to just give you a straightforward, simple, absolute answer, and they won't do it. There's always caveats or it depends or maybes or this is the limits of my knowledge. And that is how an expert speaks because once you get good at something, you realize that there often aren't any sure-fire simple answers. In Jiu-Jitsu, you see this a lot, right? If someone really knows what they're doing and they're a good coach, they're going to make it clear that their knowledge is limited and when should you do that technique? Well, it depends. There are very few if any things in Jiu-Jitsu that are absolute, constant certainties that should always be done a certain way with no or few exceptions. Jiu-Jitsu isn't math. As much as we like to paint it as some sort of science, it's really not. It's in many ways a form of personal expression and there's a lot of variability in terms of how you can train and build a style and a game plan that work for you. So when a coach is being absolutely certain in terms of what they tell you to do, that should be a concern for you. If your coaches say, this is how you do this move, the first thing to understand is that your coach is probably oversimplifying and that there's probably a lot of ways to do that move. Maybe that is their preferred way to do it, or maybe that's how they do it often under certain circumstances, but there's no one way to do a technique. Every technique will have variations depending on who you are, who your opponent is, what you're good at, what they're good at, what the rule set is under, the context of the match. All of these things are going to impact which answers are available. So when we talk about mental models for thinking, a big theme that comes up a lot is getting out of the habit of looking for constant, easy, absolute solutions that are always true, and instead understanding that there's nuance. If there's one thing that I hope people get out of BJJ Mental Models, it's to understand the limits of all of the mental models that we think in. Most of these things are not hard and fast rules or laws or principles that must be followed at all times. So I bring this up because in Jiu-Jitsu, you will often see this. People will say things like, put your hands here, or keep your elbows in. And a lot of these things are good advice in a certain context. Going up the belt rank to black belt and becoming a good grappler means understanding the limits of that thinking. And if you collect some of those incorrect statements at the beginning of your journey and you're thinking in absolutes, if you want to get more experienced and more effective, you're going to have to discard those and look at the nuance in Jiu-Jitsu. So that's the certainty heuristic, just this natural bias that we have towards answers that offer certainty, even if those answers are not entirely true. We want to be aware of this bias because it prevents us from falling into this trap of believing something that isn't really backed by the evidence. And in the context of Jiu-Jitsu, that's going to mean questioning advice that you get from coaches or influencers or instructionals that seems just a bit too certain and a bit too good to be true. I hope you found this helpful. There's a lot more like this at BJJmentalmodels.com, so check that out. Many more mini episodes like this, plus longer form full-length episodes that explore concepts in much more detail. Check out our newsletter as well. All of this is free. And if you want to go to our subscription tier, check out BJJ Mental Models Premium. It's the world's largest library of Jiu-Jitsu audio courses on concept, strategy, tactics, mindset, and philosophy. All of that is at BJJmentalmodels.com. Thanks for listening and I'll talk to you in the next episode.