Congruence Bias

Why You Keep Taking the Same Road and Expecting a Different Destination

I’d like to talk about stubbornness for a moment.

Stubbornness can work for us or against us. I often see people disadvantaged by a stubborn tendency, people who carry on doing what they’ve always done yet possibly expecting a different result. I also see people who use stubbornness to their advantage, who refuse to give in, giving it everything they have each and every day of their lives.

The problem with stubbornness is that it also tends to be blind. For it to be an effective trait, it needs to be directed in a positive way. Otherwise it’ll work against you. The problem is due to a cognitive bias called congruence bias.

Congruence bias is the inability to consider an alternative hypothesis. This may mean you’re just stubbornly doing the same things again and again with your eyes shut to alternative ways of thinking or doing things.

It could be you don’t know what you’re doing is wrong. Maybe you aren’t ready to accept there may be another way to solve your problem. Start to notice the times in your life where patterns repeat themselves, and you can then start to figure out what’s really going wrong.

If you’re stubbornly repeating the same behaviour again and again, your thinking is probably being affected by congruence bias.

There’s a well-known line, often floating around self-help books and Instagram quote cards, that defines insanity as “doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” It gets attributed to all sorts of famous names, usually incorrectly, and nobody really knows where it started. But whoever first said it, it’s a useful description, not of insanity, but of congruence bias.

The inability to accept a different explanation or hypothesis shows stubborn, rigid thinking, and in life, this can lead to disaster by repetition of the same mistakes.

Think about the last time you travelled along a familiar road. Maybe it’s the road to work. Maybe it’s just another road you travel along often. The thing is, every time you take this path, you end up at the same destination.

It seems obvious that every time you take that road, you’ll end up in the same place. So the next obvious question is, what do you need to do to get to a different destination? The answer is that to go to a different place, we need to take a different path, a different road, a different route.

Congruence bias is something you can ponder the next time you take a familiar journey. But what’s really worrying to me is that if we take a familiar journey often enough, you can often arrive at the destination without fully remembering how you even got there.

The same is true in life. We go through life on automatic, on autopilot, stubbornly doing the same things again and again. Perhaps you’re even guilty of making the same mistakes again and again without even realising you’re doing so, because even making those mistakes is something you do automatically.

So the next time you feel like you’re banging your head against a brick wall, maybe it’s time to stop. Because if what you’re doing isn’t working, maybe you need to do something else to get the result you want.

It’s time to accept there may be another way you can apply your stubbornness. Maybe this time you can stubbornly work towards getting something better out of life instead.

It’s a pattern that shows up everywhere, not just in one part of life. It affects careers, health, finances, relationships, everything. You keep applying for the same types of jobs and wondering why you don’t get hired. You keep trying the same diet and wondering why you don’t lose weight. You keep managing your money the same way and wondering why you’re always broke.

The definition of congruence bias is the tendency to test a hypothesis by examining cases where you expect the hypothesis to be true, rather than examining cases where it might be false. In simpler terms, you keep looking for evidence that your current approach could work if you just tweak it slightly, rather than considering whether your entire approach might be wrong.

You’re stubborn about the method whilst being completely flexible about the outcome. What you should be doing is the opposite. Be flexible about the method whilst being stubborn about the outcome.

If you want a different result, genuinely want it, then you need to be willing to do things differently. Not slightly differently. Actually differently. Different route. Different approach. Different thinking.

I see this constantly in my practice. People who’ve been trying to lose weight for ten years using the same basic approach. Different diets, but always diets. Never questioning whether dieting itself is the problem. People who’ve been trying to sleep better for five years using the same strategies. Different pills, different bedtime routines, but always trying to fix sleep directly rather than looking at what’s actually keeping them awake.

That’s congruence bias. You’re so convinced you know what the problem is and how to fix it that you never step back and ask, “What if I’m wrong? What if there’s a completely different way to look at this?”

Think about it like this. If you’re in a maze and you keep taking the left turn at every junction and you keep ending up back at the start, at what point do you try turning right instead? Most people just keep turning left but faster, or with more determination, or with a better attitude. They never question whether the direction itself is the problem.

Congruence bias keeps you in the maze. It keeps you testing variations of the same approach whilst never considering a fundamentally different approach.

So here’s what you need to do. Look at the areas of your life where you’re stuck. Really stuck. Not making progress despite effort. Then ask yourself, what’s the one thing I’ve been assuming is true that might not be? What’s the approach I’ve been taking repeatedly that might be fundamentally flawed?

Then, and this is the hard part, try something completely different. Not a variation. Not a tweaked version. Something actually, genuinely different.

Because if you keep taking the same road, you’ll keep arriving at the same destination. That’s not insanity. That’s just geography. The road goes where the road goes. If you want to end up somewhere different, you need to take a different road.

It really is that simple. And that difficult.

Further reading

• Wason, P. C. (1960). On the failure to eliminate hypotheses in a conceptual task. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 12(3), 129-140.
• Klayman, J., & Ha, Y. W. (1987). Confirmation, disconfirmation, and information in hypothesis testing. Psychological Review, 94(2), 211-228.
• Popper, K. R. (1959). The Logic of Scientific Discovery. Hutchinson.
• Argyris, C. (1991). Teaching smart people how to learn. Harvard Business Review, 69(3), 99-109.
• Kahneman, D. (2011). Thinking, Fast and Slow. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.