Skepticism as an emotionally intelligent moral value
An excerpt from Chapter 10 of “Trial, Error, and Success: 10 Insights into Realistic Knowledge, Thinking, and Emotional Intelligence”
In Chapter 10 of Trial, Error, and Success we show how emotional intelligence can be improved by developing holistic moral values. The core holistic moral value is skepticism. This is so because you are not helping others if you fail to protect yourself.
Take as an example IBM’s information about security breaches experienced in 2013 by its clients worldwide. According to their Cyber Security Intelligence Index, “more than half a billion records—including names, emails, credit card numbers, and passwords—were stolen,” costing these companies more than $70 billion in total.1 A common attack path exploits the emotions of email recipients by phishing. The attacker designs the email so as to look like it’s coming from a reputable organization. For example, when the receiver sees a familiar company logo, the aim is to condition the receiver’s brain and to remove any initial doubt. In the terminology we use in the book, they want you to generalize this similarity and, effectively, to ignore any differences from what would be a genuine email from the purported organization. However, this similarity is no reason to abandon your skepticism. The message in the phishing text will evoke an emotion, either fear or happiness, and it’s far less likely you’ll click on the offered link if you skeptically process the information available in the received email.
Specifically, processing information skeptically means not to be overwhelmed by portrayed similarities. This is the necessary mindset to initiate thinking by spotting and then analyzing suspicious differences. As illustrated in the post about thinking, the decision what to do with an observed difference is often obvious. In this example, spotting any characters or words beyond the usual email address will be a sure sign the email is a scam. To deal with other suspicious differences, you may need to make inquiries, but in this example you have the time to do it. If the email requests an immediate action, a skeptical brain will not see any immediate danger and its neural signals will ward the fingers off the requested mouse-click.
Adopting skepticism as your defensive moral value means you are building barriers in your brain to block unnecessary automatic actions, so that you don’t end up ignoring relevant differences. In the phishing example, the aim is to block the emotional signals of either fear or happiness and to prevent the subconscious mouse-click on the offered link. Instead, the neural barriers should channel the new information into the thinking brain.
Coming from the Greek skepticos, meaning “thoughtful,” the deep meaning of the word “skeptic” is an inquiring and reflective person. For the sake of your self-defense, you should adopt this meaning and reject the modern misconceptions of this concept. The Skeptic Society, a nonprofit scientific and educational organization with Dr Michael Shermer as its Executive Director, provides more detailed description:
Some people believe that skepticism is the rejection of new ideas, or worse, they confuse “skeptic” with “cynic” and think that skeptics are a bunch of grumpy curmudgeons unwilling to accept any claim that challenges the status quo. This is wrong. Skepticism is a provisional approach to claims. It is the application of reason to any and all ideas—no sacred cows allowed. In other words, skepticism is a method, not a position. Ideally, skeptics do not go into an investigation closed to the possibility that a phenomenon might be real or that a claim might be true. When we say we are “skeptical,” we mean that we must see compelling evidence before we believe.2
This is the opposite from the common advice to give the benefit of the doubt in the absence of compelling evidence. According to this school of thought, doubt without a solid evidence leads to mistrust and possibly relationship breakdown.
Here is an example to elucidate the possible outcomes of these two contrasting approaches. Mr. Williams runs a small business, its main product being a patented sensor device. He is selling this product to a single large company, but he is doing well financially thanks to a very healthy margin between the sales price of $300 and the production cost. The large company, whose CEO is Mr. Clarke, benefits from the patented feature of the sensor device by building and selling a unique product to a growing number of customers.
One day, Clarke meets Williams to discuss a report about reliability issues with the sensor device. Clarke begins the meeting with a common phrase, “I have bad and good news.” The bad news is that his engineers have traced customer complaints to reliability issues with the sensor device. The good news is that his engineers could design a workaround, which would add cost, but they are happy to move ahead with the new design if Williams could reduce the price of the sensor device to $200.
This supply deal has been the only source of income for Williams’s company. Their attempts to diversify the client base are at the stage of negotiating a deal with a start-up company that can also pay no more than $200. Now, Williams is facing a considerable uncertainty as a result of Clarke’s information about the reliability issues.
According to the don’t-be-skeptical school of thought, Williams has no reason to doubt the information about reliability issues and he should accept Clarke’s offer. Otherwise, he will be taking the risk of losing the existing sales and all income will dry out if he doesn’t close the deal with the start-up company.
However, Williams may be facing what is called the dark side of emotional intelligence.3 Clarke’s bad and good news could be an attempt to manage Williams’s emotions—the bad news scaring him with the potential of losing the sales, and then the good news making him feel happy about the option of reducing the price from $300 to $200.
Williams doesn’t have any evidence that Clarke is engaging in this kind of emotional manipulation. However, he is a person who doesn’t believe in highly-consequential actions without compelling evidence. This skepticism subdues both the fear due to the bad news and the happiness due to the good news. Williams needs evidence to believe what he has heard, and he asks for specific information about the reliability issue. Clarke pulls out an executive summary of the mentioned reliability analysis, but the summary provides no more than generic statements. For Williams, this is a reason to doubt and he asks for the reliability analysis with specific data. The meeting ends with Clarke saying he would see with his engineers whether he could provide the requested information.
This outcome leaves Williams in a much better position than if he acted emotionally to accept the price reduction. If Clarke does provide specific data, his engineers would be able to analyze the issue and, based on the results, they may be able to resolve the issue by modifying the sensor device. This would be far more favorable for their business opportunities in the future than to rely on Clarke’s expensive workaround at the system level.
In the absence of the requested data, Williams can keep waiting by taking the business-as-usual approach. He can ignore the generic statements about reliability issues as he continues to negotiate with the start-up company. Regarding the future relationship with Clarke’s company, Williams can see all their possible actions and he already knows how to respond to each of them. If Clarke calls for more discussions, he will engage for as long as he can see more transparency and progress toward a resolution of the issue. If they remain silent about the reliability problem but continue ordering devices at $300, he will continue with the sales. The final option is no further communication and no further orders. According to this scenario, Clarke would decide to lose a profitable business without giving Williams’s engineers an opportunity to respond. This would signal either incompetence in Clarke’s company or that they were playing on the dark side of emotional intelligence. Either way, it’s better for Williams to cut his losses than to compromise his product and company image by maintaining such a risky and possibly deceitful engagement.
By asking for specific data, Williams has acted in response to the news about reliability issues—he did not ignore this negative feedback. In general, skepticism is not about rejecting negative feedback, even though it hurts when you hear negative feedback without specific instructions of what to change. Nonetheless, some negative feedback cannot be delivered with instructions for adequate changes. In the example with the reliability issue, Clarke’s company should be able to provide specific data about the observed problem, but they didn’t invent the sensor device so they don’t know what changes may or may not be possible at the device level. Williams’s company would need to analyze the technical feedback—if they receive it—to see if they could change something to improve their invention.
The proper mindset regarding negative feedback is to think about changes in the future rather than try to change the past. Assuming Williams receives the technical information, his skeptical mind will neither reject the data nor accept the idea that the device is unfixable. However, an optimist may focus on the fact that the sensor device worked well for a long time and ignore the troublesome data. This selection of facts from the past may relieve the emotional pain, but it’s unhelpful in the long term. On the other hand, it doesn’t help to be a pessimist who drowns in the negative aspects of past events. The best approach is to accept what happened in the past but distinguish these facts from their inherent interpretations in any decision about future actions.
Turning to positive feedback, skepticism is again about paying attention to and dealing with differences, if any. For example, skeptics don’t need to subdue their happiness when deciding to buy something important. If a real-estate agent works out what a buyer needs and comes back with the news about a house ticking all the boxes, the lack of difference from the buyer’s criteria is the reason for rational happiness. The decision to buy is emotional but—satisfying all thought through and set up criteria in advance—it’s also rational. In this example, the seller properly employs his or her emotional intelligence to make the buyer happy and, hence, to close the purchase deal. On the other hand, if an emotionally-intelligent seller utilizes happiness due to a single feature to sell a house that doesn’t satisfy key criteria, then the buyer needs skepticism as protection against this emotional manipulation.
Another buying-and-selling example can illustrate that a skeptical analysis can render a hyped difference as irrelevant. In 1975, the US Congress was debating a bill to outlaw a practice by credit-card companies to ban their affiliated stores from charging higher prices for purchases by credit cards. Unable to derail the bill, the credit-card lobby requested that “any difference between credit card and cash customers take the form of a cash discount rather than a credit card surcharge.”4 A skeptic can see that the one-dollar difference between a credit-card payment of $99 and a cash payment of $98 is the same, irrespective of whether it’s labeled as either cash discount or credit-card surcharge. However, the credit-card companies made the right judgment that most customers would see a surcharge as penalty, creating emotional discouragement from using credit cards. This customer behavior illustrates the lack of habit to check whether an apparent difference is real or not.
Here are the titles of the remaining sections in Chapter 10 of Trial, Error, and Success:
Recognizing and tolerating uniqueness is a key step toward enlightened self-interest
Giving has value for personal benefit
IBM Security Services 2014 Cyber Security Intelligence Index; https://www.ibm.com/developerworks/library/se-cyberindex2014/index.html
https://www.skeptic.com/about_us/
M. Kilduff, D.S. Chiaburu, and J.I. Menges, “Strategic use of emotional intelligence in organizational settings: Exploring the dark side,” Research in Organizational Behavior, vol. 30 pp. 129–152, 2010.
R. Thaler, “Toward a positive theory of consumer choice,” Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, vol. 1, pp. 39–60, 1980.