Receptivity to challenge from someone with a different viewpoint helps leaders reexamine their perspectives and validate their choices, writes Alaina Love for SmartBrief.
Love writes of a study by Taly Reich of Yale University and Sam Maglio of the University of Toronto. The pair studied how leaders stubbornly defend a choice based on whether they made that choice rationally or emotionally.
Reich and Maglio set up seven experiments and repeatedly found that the choices study participants were most likely to unwaveringly defend were choices where emotion or gut instinct drove the decision.
"Further," Love writes, "they stubbornly defended and clung to those wrong choices and found a way to feel good about their decisions. One of the ways in which they did so was by questioning the competency of the individuals who provided proof of their mistake."