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By Root 981 0

strategies for accommodating uncertainty and error. Among these: we suggest (“off the top of my head”), we survey (“what’s your take on this?”), we generalize (“roughly speaking”), we qualify (“I tend to agree”), we hedge our bets (“to the best of my knowledge”), we wager (“I’d say there’s a sixty–forty chance”), and we cover our tracks (“don’t quote me on this”). Also, in strange and fascinating fashion, we multiply ourselves to make room for competing beliefs. So, for instance, we say “I’m of two minds,” as if entertaining two contradictory hypotheses required becoming two different people—an idea that comports with the notion that belief and identity are inextricable. Similarly, we say “on the third hand,” as if our attraction to binaries were built into our very bodies, so that venturing beyond them required a phantom limb. In this parallel universe of two minds and three hands, there are many possible right and wrong (or right-ish and wrong-ish) answers. We use these expressions to stake out the range of available positions on an issue before taking a stand—or to indicate that uncertainty itself is our stand.

Consciously or otherwise, we also use these linguistic strategies to influence our audience. If being contradicted or facing other people’s categorical pronouncements tends to make listeners stubborn, defensive, and inclined to disagree, open expressions of uncertainty can be remarkably disarming. To take a trivial but common example, I once sat in on a graduate seminar in which a student prefaced a remark by saying, “I might be going out on a limb here.” Before that moment, the class had been contentious; the prevailing ethos seemed to be a kind of academic one-upmanship, in which the point was to undermine all previous observations. After this student’s comment, though, the room seemed to relax. Because she took it upon herself to acknowledge the provisionality of her idea, her classmates were able to contemplate its potential merit instead of rushing to invalidate it.

These kinds of disarming, self-deprecating comments (“this could be wrong, but…” “maybe I’m off the mark here…”) are generally considered more typical of the speech patterns of women than men. Not coincidentally, they are often criticized as overly timid and self-sabotaging. But I’m not sure that’s the whole story. Awareness of one’s own qualms, attention to contradiction, acceptance of the possibility of error: these strike me as signs of sophisticated thinking, far preferable in many contexts to the confident bulldozer of unmodified assertions. Philip Tetlock, too, defends these and similar speech patterns (or rather, the mental habits they reflect), describing them, admiringly, as “self-subversive thinking.” That is, they let us function as our own intellectual sparring partner, thereby honing—or puncturing—our beliefs. They also help us do greater justice to complex topics and make it possible to have riskier thoughts. At the same time, by moving away from decree and toward inquiry, they set the stage for more open and interesting conversations. Perhaps the most striking and paradoxical effect of the graduate student’s out-on-a-limb caveat was that, even as it presented her idea as potentially erroneous, it caused her classmates to take that idea more seriously: it inspired her listeners to actually listen.

That’s important, because, as Harville Hendrix observed, listening is one of the best ways we can make room in our lives for our own fallibility. You might imagine that it would be one of the easiest ways, too—certainly easier than technical approaches like Six Sigma—but in fact, as we saw earlier, it is surprisingly hard. At least, it is hard to listen closely, sincerely, and for any length of time. This is true even when listening carefully really matters. For instance, studies have shown that, on average, doctors interrupt their patients eighteen seconds after they have started explaining the reason for their visit. Trained to assemble a clinical picture as rapidly as possible, doctors often start homing in on a diagnosis almost before