On the night of September 26, 1983, Lieutenant Colonel Stanislav Petrov was on duty in a bunker outside Moscow when the alarms went off. The Soviet early warning system reported five American nuclear missiles inbound. Protocol was unambiguous. Report the launch up the chain and let retaliation begin.
Petrov paused. Five missiles struck him as an illogical way to start a war. He knew the detection system was new and, in his words, not yet wholly trustworthy. Ground radar stations had picked up nothing. So he reported a malfunction. He was right. Sunlight reflecting off high-altitude clouds had fooled the satellites.
Why did Petrov not follow orders? The alarm was loud, the data looked official and every instinct in the room said believe it. But he questioned the broadcast instead.
I’ve spent my career as a psychologist studying how belief works, and I’ve traveled to places like North Korea and Rwanda to understand how propaganda shapes what people accept as true. The conclusion of that research became my book,Inner Propaganda: the most sophisticated propaganda operation you will ever encounter is the one running inside your own head.
Your brain is a prediction machine. It is constantly trying to keep you safe and make the world feel stable. Accuracy does not always get top billing. The brain leans toward threat because missing danger can be costly. It prefers simple, coherent stories because messy, nuanced reality is harder to process. Then it hands you the finished broadcast and calls it “the truth.”
Psychologists describe two modes of reasoning. Accuracy motivation is truth-seeking. Directional motivation is reasoning toward a conclusion you’ve already chosen. Directional motivation wins more often than we like to admit. We gather evidence to build a case, and uncertainty makes the tendency stronger. When the environment gets volatile, the brain reaches for certainty. Leaders feel most convinced at precisely the moment they should be questioning themselves most carefully.
What does accuracy motivation look like in practice? In April 1993, Lou Gerstner walked into an IBM that had just lost $8 billion. The board decided the move to make was to split the company into seven or eight smaller firms. But nobody had asked the customers. So Gerstner sent all 50 senior managers to visit at least five major customers each, purely to listen. The customers wanted the opposite: one company that made everything work together. Gerstner reversed the breakup and it transformed IBM.
How can a CEO prevent their inner propaganda from skewing their decisions? In the book I lay out a four-part system for making decisions when the stakes are high and the picture is incomplete.
Defuse first.Intense emotion narrows thinking before you’re aware of it. Before any consequential call, name the emotional state you’re in. Fear, frustration and excitement each shape the evidence you notice and the story you build from it.
Then, debias.Ask one blunt question: What bias is affecting my thinking right now? Overconfidence, sunk cost and the pull of the crowd are predictable. Naming them out loud, in the room, makes it harder for them to operate unnoticed.
Model the decision.For every option on the table, including the option of doing nothing, map short-term benefits, long-term benefits, short-term costs and long-term costs. Where possible, test small before you scale. No amount of projection will be a perfect fit with reality.
Practice discernment.This is what Petrov did. Ask,“What would have to be true for me to be wrong?”Then look for that evidence with the same energy you would normally spend proving yourself right. Intelligence analysts call this red team thinking. If your customer data is glowing, check whether it came only from your most loyal users. Discernment means using evidence to investigate the best choice instead of using it to defend the choice you already prefer.
Petrov later explained that his colleagues were professional soldiers, trained to give and obey orders, while his civilian engineering education had taught him to question assumptions. That habit of mind is what quality decision-making under uncertainty requires.
Your alarms won’t involve missiles. They’ll be a rival’s product launch, a rough quarter or a board that wants an answer by Friday. Your brain will offer you a confident story before all the facts are in. You must interrogate the broadcaster.
I’d love to say I’m immune to this. I’m not. I have to remind myself of this constantly. The propaganda is always running. The question is whether you’re editing it, or it’s editing you.
