The Falsification Mindset: How to Change Your Own Mind

A simple practice to boost intelligence, avoid cognitive bias, and prove your own ideas wrong

In the middle of the 20th century, philosopher and professor Karl Popper found himself mystified by the beliefs and methods of the otherwise intelligent and rational people around him.

I found that those of my friends who were admirers of Marx, Freud, and Adler were impressed by a number of points common to these theories, and especially by their apparent explanatory power. These theories appear to be able to explain practically everything that happened within the fields to which they referred. Once your eyes were thus opened you saw confirmed instances everywhere: the world was full of verifications of the theory. Whatever happened always confirmed it.

Karl Popper

That last sentence should ring some alarm bells for many readers — it’s a very simple description of confirmation bias. Basically, when you gain a perspective or theory, you tend to interpret everything as confirming that idea. Whatever seems to contradict it is tossed aside or somehow contorted to fit our beliefs.

Popper saw this problem inherent in many theories — both in the physical and social sciences, and in other realms as well. After all, if we find evidence that seems to contradict our beliefs, we should be stopping to see if perhaps we need to abandon or modify our belief.

As a way to cure this ill of self-confirming theories and belief systems, he came up with what is now called falsificationism: the idea that a theory or belief system can only be scientific if it clearly lays out what specific evidence would prove it wrong.

Basically, if you’re going to claim that you know something, you have to be willing to admit that you could be wrong about it. More than that, you have to lay out what kind of evidence would prove you wrong. You have to make yourself falsifiable.

Why is falsification important?

My suggestion is that the spirit of Popper’s principle can help us become smarter and make better decisions — in both professional and personal realms. Adopting an attitude of falsifiability does a few key things:

it helps you to avoid many cognitive biases that can hinder intellectual growth and good decision making

it makes you a clearer thinker by forcing you to be specific about what you think you know, and what evidence you have

it boosts your creative thinking by making you naturally more receptive to new ideas and helping you more quickly process them

Our minds tend to run headlong toward safety and comfort. This is true with regards to physical safety and comfort —but it’s also true of intellectual safety and certainty. If we feel like we know something for sure — like we have a firm grasp of it — we want to hold on to that feeling.

Because we want to hold on to that feeling, we tend to manufacture certainty by either stopping the search for new information (fearful that it might endanger our feeling of certainty) or interpreting new information in a way that keeps supporting our feeling of certainty.

Those practices stifles creative thinking, intellectual growth, and personal growth. Here’s how thinking in terms of falsification can help you avoid this trap.

Putting the falsification mindset into action

The falsifiability mindset is all about thinking through the implications of beliefs, judgments, and decisions. It’s about curbing your craving for certainty. Adopting this mindset is as easy as picking up a simple practice.

For the decision that you’re making, take out a clean sheet of paper, and draw a line down the middle.

On the left side, write at the top “What I Believe to Be True.”

On the right side, write at the top “What Would Prove Me Wrong.”

That left hand side could be anything. It could be something personal and low-stakes, like I should buy the new iPhone model or something more substantial, like global warming is the result of human industrial waste interacting with the atmosphere.

The right side is where you will have to do a bit of thinking. That’s where this practice can yield dividends. Having to understand what would prove you wrong forces you to do 3 important things: