How to Avoid Obedience to Authority and Conformity Effects

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If you don't need the boss in the loop on conversations, i would just advise for the person in charge to show that they welcome dissent. And so it really is important to lead by example. There's a fair amount that you can do that to discourage anchoring. Like if you're making a group decision um, a thing that often happens is one person tosses out an idea and everyone kind of latches on to that.

When it comes to what we believe, humans see what they want to see. We have what Julia Galef calls a “soldier” mindset: a drive to defend the ideas we most want to believe — and shoot down those we don’t. But if we want to get things right more often, argues Galef, we should train ourselves to have a “scout” mindset. Unlike the soldier, a scout’s goal isn’t to defend one side over the other. It’s to go out, survey the territory, and come back with as accurate a map as possible. Regardless of what they hope to be the case, above all, the scout wants to know what’s actually true. In The Scout Mindset, Galef explores why our brains deceive us and what we can do to change the way we think.