Many Explanations
Imagine two or more reasons for people’s behavior, recognizing that you can’t read minds.
many of the conflicts that we experience result from people making assumptions; either we make the assumptions about others, or other people make them about us.
When we’re interacting with other people, we have to make a lot of assumptions because we’re not telepathic beings and can’t read each others’ minds.
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I think of the context for this to be in interacting with other people. We observe what people do, and especially if we find something offensive, we jump to what we think is the explanation. This is particularly dangerous when it comes to assuming people’s motivations. We need to recognize that we cannot read minds and therefore don’t really know anything about why someone does what they do.
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The reason that you want to come up with at least two explanations is:
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It will prevent you from making the mistake of jumping to conclusions.
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It will give you options for testing which (if either) of the explanations is correct.
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This practice helps mitigate several cognitive biases: illusion of transparency, illusion of asymmetric insight, and extrinsic incentives bias
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The process of generating multiple explanations for an event or an observed behavior is called abductive reasoning. It’s the less-well-known cousin of inductive and deductive reasoning.
Therefore:
Always imagine two or more explanations for people’s behavior, recognizing that you don’t actually know what they’re thinking. From that attitude of humility, start asking questions to try to understand the true situation.
Coming up with many explanations is the same as thinking of hypotheses that you can later test though Experiment