The Fox And The Hedgehog

**Shankar Vedantam** (0:00)
This is Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedantam. We like stories about leaders who have big ideas, who defy the odds and pursue their goals with messianic purpose. Think of Winston Churchill in World War II, or Abraham Lincoln during the Civil War.
But what happens when a leader's vision is the wrong one? How do we think about people who dream big only to invite disaster? At such times, we might prefer a more cautious style, someone who plays the odds. Those leaders might not score historic triumphs, but they rarely cause catastrophes.
Thousands of years ago, the Greek poet Archilochus summed up this idea. He said, the fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.

**Phil Tetlock** (0:50)
That has been, that parable has been the subject of much debate over the last 2500 years, what exactly Archilochus meant.

**Shankar Vedantam** (0:57)
This is psychologist Phil Tetlock.

**Phil Tetlock** (0:59)
Various people have offered various interpretations. Some people coming out on the side of the hedgehog, saying the hedgehog will trump the fox, and other people saying no, it really means the fox is going to do better.

**Shankar Vedantam** (1:13)
There are different ways to think about the metaphor, but here's how I see it. If a fox wants dinner, it has many options. It can chase down a hedgehog, it can find something else to eat. It can even go without food for a day.
But if you're a hedgehog being chased by a fox, you don't have multiple goals. You have one overarching idea. Don't get eaten.
Philip Tetlock thinks this metaphor also describes two different cognitive styles among people. Foxes have different strategies for different problems. They're comfortable with nuance. They can live with contradictions. Hedgehogs focus on the big picture. They see every problem through the lens of a single organizing principle.

**Phil Tetlock** (2:12)
The hedgehogs are more parsimonious, more decisive. In most MBA programs, they'd probably be viewed as better leadership material.

**Shankar Vedantam** (2:22)
This week on Hidden Brain, we're listening back to our May 2017 show that tells the story of a hedgehog, a surgeon who changed the world in daring ways. His bold style made him a pioneer in what has today become the transgender movement. It also propelled him to create one of the world's first international medical missions.
Like other hedgehogs, this surgeon experienced outside success until one day he didn't.

**Don Lobb** (2:51)
It's just a goddamn disaster, an awful thing.

**Shankar Vedantam** (2:57)
Greatness and tragedy, this week on Hidden Brain.
Sandy Stone was born in 1936 in the midst of the Great Depression. Her parents gave her a Hebrew name.

**Sandy Stone** (3:19)
It was Zellig Ben-Nautan.

**Shankar Vedantam** (3:21)
Zellig Ben-Nautan, a boy's name. That's because her parents thought she was a boy. But from a very early age, she knew she was a girl.
This was a long time ago, decades before the modern trans movement. When Sandy was a child, there were no words, no language to describe what she knew about herself.

**Sandy Stone** (3:41)
It was lonely, it was disorienting, it was puzzling, confusing, scary. It was all of those things.

**Shankar Vedantam** (3:52)
It stayed like that for Sandy all the way into adulthood. She went to school, became a recording engineer, moved to the Bay Area. All the while, everyone thought she was a man.
She kept searching for help. In the San Francisco phone book, she found a promising lead. It was a group for gay men. When she called, they asked if she was gay. She said she wasn't. So they sent her away and told her to try another group. The outfit they recommended surprised Sandy.
It was the San Francisco Police Department.

**Sandy Stone** (4:24)
It turned out that the Police Department was running a counseling unit of sorts, which they did for the population of transgender people that lived in the San Francisco Tenderloin, which was sort of the down-and-out skid row section of town that tended to collect people who couldn't afford to live anywhere else or who had run out of options.

**Shankar Vedantam** (4:52)
Trans people who ended up in the Tenderloin were at high risk for drug addiction and prostitution. They were social outcasts.
When Sandy got in touch with the police to ask for help, the first thing they did was to dissuade her from acting on her feelings.

**Sandy Stone** (5:06)
And they actually tried to discourage me by taking on a tour that reminded me of Dante being led down into the lower circles of hell.
They really showed me the worst of everything. And then said, are you sure you still want to go ahead with what you're thinking of? And to be perfectly honest, I was not quite sure what I was thinking of. I was just trying to collect information. And I think it would be safe to say that that's what we were all doing at that time.