When I least expect it is when I most expect it.

This running joke in my house is my anthem as an anxious, absent-minded person. Just when I think the coast is clear is when something gets me. It’s quiet… too quiet…

The idea that quiet signals danger is a classic rule of thumb in pop culture. But to paraphrase George Carlin, while you’re busy “watching out for the quiet ones,” the loud guy at the bar waving a machete is the one who will actually kill you.

Rules like this usually aren’t based on evidence. We pick them up from what’s easy to recall and what the people around us seem to believe. This is what behavioral scientists call heuristics: default rules we rely on when real evidence is uncertain. And the tricky part is that these mental shortcuts hand you a feeling of certainty, but don’t say anything about why you should trust the feeling.

So what can we do if we’d like to start thinking empirically? I’d suggest a counterintuitive move, because feeling sure is often when we stop checking. When you’re sure you’re right, pause and ask whether you can say why. If someone disagreed with you, what would they say? If you’d struggle to respond, it’s worth a little research, because it means your confidence was resting on a feeling and not on evidence.

Thinking empirically doesn’t mean distrusting every instinct. It means learning to tell “feels right” from “is right.” And that’s getting harder as more tools are built to make “feels right” effortless. That’s where we’ll go in my next post.