In this video Neil Bearden, Associate Professor of Decision Sciences at INSEAD, offers a simple methodological prescription for fighting our natural tendency to treat our own interpretations as facts. It relies on the appreciation that our mind is a translator and one that is prone to make mistakes.
His idea is called ‘The Principle of Charity’: you should try to interpret the statements and actions of people in a way that maximizes the reasonableness of those statements and actions. The underlying assumption is that most of the time people are quite reasonable, and so exercising the principle of charity can mitigate potential misunderstandings.
