Sometimes I feel like hitting people with a wooden stick when they do this, but that act just expresses an emotion rather than having any discernible positive consequences.)
My normal response is, “so what’s bad about that?” and go a few rounds until the person has to struggle for an answer… the teachable moment where I can say, “you see what you’re doing? you’re just making stuff up. What’s actually going to happen?”
(That being said, it would definitely have been helpful for me in the past if I had thought to confine questions of consequences to things happening at a point-in-time. I eventually figured out that I needed to ask that for things people were thinking about or remembering, but there was a long time where I also had the hit-them-with-a-stick frustration to this kind of response.)
The only suggestion I have for exercises is to make people write down their own thinking (or state their thinking out loud), and then read it back as a kind of grammar-checking exercise. Are these abstract nouns or concrete nouns? Do they describe a point in time or some sort of vague non-timey thing?
I’ve done some similar things with small groups, though, and one thing that becomes quickly apparent is that everybody already knows when somebody else is doing it wrong. The part of the exercise that’s hard, is learning to apply it to your own thoughts or utterances, and for that, it helps to externalize them first, then treat them as input.
To put it another way, the prerequisite 5-second skill for consequence checking is reflecting on what you just said or thought. If people don’t reflect on their utterances, no further debiasing skills can be applied.
My normal response is, “so what’s bad about that?” and go a few rounds until the person has to struggle for an answer… the teachable moment where I can say, “you see what you’re doing? you’re just making stuff up. What’s actually going to happen?”
(That being said, it would definitely have been helpful for me in the past if I had thought to confine questions of consequences to things happening at a point-in-time. I eventually figured out that I needed to ask that for things people were thinking about or remembering, but there was a long time where I also had the hit-them-with-a-stick frustration to this kind of response.)
The only suggestion I have for exercises is to make people write down their own thinking (or state their thinking out loud), and then read it back as a kind of grammar-checking exercise. Are these abstract nouns or concrete nouns? Do they describe a point in time or some sort of vague non-timey thing?
I’ve done some similar things with small groups, though, and one thing that becomes quickly apparent is that everybody already knows when somebody else is doing it wrong. The part of the exercise that’s hard, is learning to apply it to your own thoughts or utterances, and for that, it helps to externalize them first, then treat them as input.
To put it another way, the prerequisite 5-second skill for consequence checking is reflecting on what you just said or thought. If people don’t reflect on their utterances, no further debiasing skills can be applied.