Gain Confidence By Losing Certainty. Ilana Redstone on Breaking Free from the Certainty Trap

Ilana Redstone is an Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She is also the faculty director and a co-founder of the Mill Institute, an organization aimed at helping educators learn how to foster productive, respectful discussions that make room for a variety of viewpoints in the classroom. In this conversation, Ilana talks about her work around a concept she’s coined “the certainty trap.” The idea is that being "absolutely sure" about a particular position or opinion may actually be a sign of underlying doubt. Unsurprisingly, this  kind of unconscious cognitive dissonance may in fact have a lot to do with our current troubles as a society when it comes to public discourse. In this conversation, Ilana talks with Meghan about how the word “truth” can often throw people off course and explains how she works with her students to challenge their assumptions and biases. In the second part of the interview, Ilana walks Meghan through a couple of positions about which Meghan feels “certain.” In so doing, she floats a potentially mind-blowing concept: if you replace feeling “certain” with feeling “confident,” your entire worldview can shift in a more productive direction. And you might even be better able to change the minds of others. 

 

Guest Bio:

Ilana Redstone is an Associate Professor of sociology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the Faculty Director of The Mill Institute at UATX. In May of 2022 she published her seminal essay, The Certainty Trap, in Tablet. She is also the co-author of Unassailable Ideas: How Unwritten Rules and Social Media Shape Discourse in American Higher Education, the creator of the Beyond Bigots and Snowflakes video series and the founder of Diverse Perspectives Consulting.