Mastermind: How to Think Like Sherlock Holmes (30 page)

Likewise, Holmes. It’s not just in “The Adventure of the Creeping Man” that he needs Watson’s presence. Notice how in each case he is always teaching his companion, always telling him how he reached this or that conclusion, what his mind did and what path it took. And to do that, he must reflect back on the thought process. He must focus back in on what has become habit. He must be mindful of even those conclusions that he reached mindlessly, like knowing why Watson came from Afghanistan. (Though, as we’ve already discussed, Holmesian mindlessness is far different from Watsonian.) Watson prevents Holmes’s mind from forgetting to think about those elements that come naturally.

What’s more, Watson serves as a constant reminder of what errors are possible. As Holmes puts it, “In noting your fallacies I was occasionally guided towards the truth.” And that is no small thing. Even in asking the smallest questions, ones that seem entirely obvious to Holmes, Watson nevertheless forces Holmes to look twice at the very obviousness of the thing, to either question it or explain why it is as plain as all that. Watson is, in other words, indispensable.

And Holmes knows it well. Look at his list of external habits: the violin, the tobacco and pipe, the index book. Each of his habits has been
chosen mindfully. Each facilitates thought. What did he do pre-Watson? Whatever it was, he certainly realized very quickly that a post-Watson world was far preferable. “It may be that you are not yourself luminous,” he tells Watson, not altogether unkindly on one occasion, “but you are a conductor of light. Some people without possessing genius have a remarkable power of stimulating it. I confess, my dear fellow, that I am very much in your debt.” In his debt he most certainly is.

The greats don’t become complacent. And that, in a nutshell, is Holmes’s secret. Even though he doesn’t need anyone to walk him through the scientific method of the mind—he may as well have invented the thing—he nevertheless keeps challenging himself to learn more, to do things better, to improve, to tackle a case or an angle or an approach that he has never seen in the past. Part of this goes back to his constant enlistment of Watson, who challenges him, stimulates him, and forces him to never take his prowess for granted. And another part goes to the choice of the cases themselves. Remember, Holmes doesn’t take on just any case. He takes on only those that interest him. It’s a tricky moral code. He doesn’t take his cases merely to reduce crime but to challenge some aspect of his thinking. The commonplace criminal need not apply.

But either way, whether in cultivating Watson’s companionship or in choosing the harder, more exceptional case over the easier one, the message is the same: keep feeding the need to learn and to improve. At the end of “The Red Circle” Holmes finds himself face-to-face with Inspector Gregson, who turns out to have been investigating the very case that Holmes decides to pursue after his initial work is done. Gregson is perplexed to the extreme. “But what I can’t make head or tail of, Mr. Holmes, is how on earth
you
got yourself mixed up in the matter,” he says.

Holmes’s response is simple. “Education, Gregson, education. Still seeking knowledge at the old university.” The complexity and unrelatedness of this second crime do the opposite of deterring him. They engage him and invite him to learn more.

In a way, that, too, is a habit, of never saying no to more knowledge, as scary or as complicated as it may be. The case in question is “a specimen of the tragic and grotesque,” as Holmes says to Watson. And as such, it is well worthy of pursuit.

We, too, must resist the urge to pass on a difficult case, or to give in to the comfort of knowing we’ve already solved a crime, already accomplished a difficult task. Instead, we have to embrace the challenging, even when it is far easier not to. Only by doing so can we continue throughout our lives to reap the benefits of Holmesian thinking.

The Perils of Overconfidence

But how do we make sure we don’t fall victim to overly confident thinking, thinking that forgets to challenge itself on a regular basis? No method is foolproof. In fact, thinking it foolproof is the very thing that might trip us up. Because our habits have become invisible to us, because we are no longer learning actively and it doesn’t seem nearly as hard to think well as it once did, we tend to forget how difficult the process once was. We take for granted the very thing we should value. We think we’ve got it all under control, that our habits are still mindful, our brains still active, our minds still constantly learning and challenged—especially since we’ve worked so hard to get there—but we have instead replaced one, albeit far better, set of habits with another. In doing so we run the risk of falling prey to those two great slayers of success: complacency and overconfidence. These are powerful enemies indeed. Even to someone like Sherlock Holmes.

Consider for a moment “The Yellow Face,” one of the rare cases where Holmes’s theories turn out to be completely wrong. In the story, a man named Grant Munro approaches Holmes to uncover the cause of his wife’s bizarre behavior. A cottage on the Munros’ property has recently acquired new tenants, and strange ones at that. Mr. Munro glimpses one of its occupants and remarks that “there was something unnatural and inhuman about the face.” The very sight of it chills him.

But even more surprising than the mystery tenants is his wife’s response to their arrival. She leaves the house in the middle of the night, lying about her departure, and then visits the cottage the next day, extracting a promise from her husband that he will not try to pursue her inside. When she goes a third time, Munro follows, only to find the place deserted. But in the same room where he earlier saw the chilling face, he finds a photograph of his wife.

What ever is going on? “There’s blackmail in it, or I am much mistaken,” proclaims Holmes. And the blackmailer? “The creature who lives in the only comfortable room in the place and has her photograph above his fireplace. Upon my word, Watson, there is something very attractive about that livid face at the window, and I would not have missed the case for worlds.”

Watson is intrigued at these tidbits. “You have a theory, then?” he asks.

“Yes, a provisional one,” Holmes is quick to reply. “But,” he adds, “I shall be surprised if it does not turn out to be correct. This woman’s first husband is in that cottage.”

But this provisional theory proves incorrect. The occupant of the cottage is not Mrs. Munro’s first husband at all, but her daughter, a daughter of whose existence neither Mr. Munro nor Holmes had any prior knowledge. What had appeared to be blackmail is instead simply the money that enabled the daughter and the nanny to make the passage from America to England. And the face that had seemed so unnatural and inhuman was that way because it was, indeed, just that. It was a mask, designed to hide the little girl’s black skin. In short, Holmes’s wonderings have ended up far from the truth. How could the great detective have gone so wrong?

Confidence in ourselves and in our skills allows us to push our limits and achieve more than we otherwise would, to try even those borderline cases where a less confident person would bow out. A bit of excess confidence doesn’t hurt; a little bit of above-average sensation can go a long way toward our psychological well-being and even our effectiveness at problem solving. When we’re more confident, we take on tougher problems than we otherwise might. We push ourselves beyond our comfort zone.

But there can be such a thing as being too certain of yourself: overconfidence, when confidence trumps accuracy. We become more confident of our abilities, or of our abilities as compared with others’, than we should be, given the circumstances and the reality. The illusion of validity grows ever stronger, the temptation to do things as you do ever more
tempting. This surplus of belief in ourselves can lead to unpleasant results—like being so incredibly wrong about a case when you are usually so incredibly right, thinking a daughter is a husband, or a loving mother, a blackmailed wife.

It happens to the best of us. In fact, as I’ve hinted at already, it happens
more
to the best of us. Studies have shown that with experience, overconfidence
increases
instead of decreases. The more you know and the better you are in reality, the more likely you are to overestimate your own ability—and underestimate the force of events beyond your control. In one study, CEOs were shown to become more overconfident as they gained mergers and acquisitions experience: their estimates of a deal’s value become overly optimistic (something not seen in earlier deals). In another, in contributions to pension plans, overconfidence correlated with age and education, such that the most overconfident contributors were highly educated males nearing retirement. In research from the University of Vienna, individuals were found to be, in general,
not
overconfident in their risky asset trades in an experimental market—until, that is, they obtained significant experience with the market in question. Then levels of overconfidence rose apace. What’s more, analysts who have been more accurate at predicting earnings in the prior four quarters have been shown to be less accurate in subsequent earnings predictions, and professional traders tend to have a higher degree of overconfidence than students. In fact, one of the best predictors of overconfidence is power, which tends to come with time and experience.

Success breeds overconfidence like nothing else. When we are nearly always right, how far is it to saying that we’ll always be right? Holmes has every reason to be confident. He is almost invariably correct, almost invariably better than anyone else at almost everything, be it thinking, solving crimes, playing the violin, or wrestling. And so, he should rightly fall victim to overconfidence often. His saving grace, however, or what is usually his saving grace, is precisely what we identified in the last section: that he knows the pitfalls of his mental stature and fights to avoid them by following his strict thought guidelines, realizing that he needs to always keep learning.

For those of us who live
off
the page, overconfidence remains a tricky thing. If we let our guard down for just a moment, as Holmes does here, it will get us.

Overconfidence causes blindness, and blindness in turn causes blunders. We become so enamored of our own skill that we discredit information that experience would otherwise tell us shouldn’t be discredited—even information as glaring as Watson telling us that our theories are “all surmise,” as he does in this case—and we proceed as before. We are blinded for a moment to everything we know about not theorizing before the facts, not getting ahead of ourselves, prying deeper and observing more carefully, and we get carried away by the simplicity of our intuition.

Overconfidence replaces dynamic, active investigation with passive assumptions about our ability or the seeming familiarity of our situation. It shifts our assessment of what leads to success from the conditional to the essential.
I am skilled enough that I can beat the environment as easily as I have been doing. Everything is due to my ability, nothing due to the fact that the surroundings just so happened to provide a good background for my skill to shine. And so I will not adjust my behavior.

Holmes fails to consider the possibility of unknown actors in the drama or unknown elements in Mrs. Munro’s biography. He also does not consider the possibility of disguise (something of a blind spot for the detective. If you remember, he, with equal confidence, does not take it into account in the case of Silver Blaze; nor does he do so in “The Man with the Twisted Lip”). Had Holmes had the same benefit of rereading his own exploits as we do, he may have learned that he was prone to this type of error.

Many studies have shown this process in action. In one classic demonstration, clinical psychologists were asked to give confidence judgments on a personality profile. They were given a case report in four parts, based on an actual clinical case, and asked after each part to answer a series of questions about the patient’s personality, such as his behavioral patterns, interests, and typical reactions to life events. They were also asked to rate their confidence in their responses. With each section, background information about the case increased.

As the psychologists learned more, their confidence rose—but accuracy
remained at a plateau. Indeed, all but two of the clinicians became overconfident (in other words, their confidence outweighed their accuracy), and while the mean level of confidence rose from 33 percent at the first stage to 53 percent by the last, the accuracy hovered at under 28 percent (where 20 percent was chance, given the question setup).

Overconfidence is often directly connected to this kind of underperformance—and at times, to grave errors in judgment. (Imagine a clinician in a nonexperimental setting trusting too much in his however inaccurate judgment. Is he likely to seek a second opinion or advise his patient to do so?) Overconfident individuals trust too much in their own ability, dismiss too easily the influences that they cannot control, and underestimate others—all of which leads to them doing much worse than they otherwise would, be it blundering in solving a crime or missing a diagnosis.

The sequence can be observed over and over, even outside of experimental settings, when real money, careers, and personal outcomes are at stake. Overconfident traders have been shown to perform worse than their less confident peers. They trade more and suffer lower returns. Overconfident CEOs have been shown to overvalue their companies and delay IPOs, with negative effects. They are also more likely to conduct mergers in general, and unfavorable mergers in particular. Overconfident managers have been shown to hurt their firms’ returns. And overconfident detectives have been shown to blemish their otherwise pristine record through an excess of self-congratulation.

Something about success has a tendency to bring about an end to that very essential process of constant, never-ending education—unless the tendency is actively resisted, and then resisted yet again. There’s nothing quite like victory to cause us to stop questioning and challenging ourselves in the way that is essential for Holmesian thinking.