Think Again

Adam Grant

61 annotations • Feb 2022 – Oct 2022 • data

Chapter 1: A Preacher, a Prosecutor, a Politician, and a Scientist Walk into Your Mind

Mental horsepower doesn't guarantee mental dexterity. No matter how much brainpower you have, if you lack the motivation to change your mind, you'll miss many occasions to think again. Research reveals that the higher you score on an IQ test, the more likely you are to fall for stereotypes, because you're faster at recognizing patterns. And recent experiments suggest that the smarter you are, the more you might struggle to update your beliefs.
The better you are at crunching numbers, the more spectacularly you fail at analyzing patterns that contradict your views. If they were liberals, math geniuses did worse than their peers at evaluating evidence that gun bans failed. If they were conservatives, they did worse at assessing evidence that gun bans worked.
Being good at thinking can make you worse at rethinking
As I've studied the process of rethinking, I've found that it often unfolds in a cycle. It starts with intellectual humility—knowing what we don't know. We should all be able to make a long list of areas where we're ignorant. Mine include art, financial markets, fashion, chemistry, food, why British accents turn American in songs, and why it's impossible to tickle yourself. Recognizing our shortcomings opens the door to doubt. As we question our current understanding, we become curious about what information we're missing. That search leads us to new discoveries, which in turn maintain our humility by reinforcing how much we still have to learn. If knowledge is power, knowing what we don't know is wisdom.
Scientific thinking favors humility over pride, doubt over certainty, curiosity over closure.
Research shows that when people are resistant to change, it helps to reinforce what will stay the same. Visions for change are more compelling when they include visions of continuity. Although our strategy might evolve, our identity will endure.
The curse of knowledge is that it closes our minds to what we don't know. Good judgment depends on having the skill—and the will—to open our minds. I'm pretty confident that in life, rethinking is an increasingly important habit. Of course, I might be wrong. If I am, I'll be quick to think again.

Chapter 2: The Armchair Quarterback and the Impostor

In theory, confidence and competence go hand in hand. In practice, they often diverge. You can see it when people rate their own leadership skills and are also evaluated by their colleagues, supervisors, or subordinates. In a meta-analysis of ninety-five studies involving over a hundred thousand people, women typically underestimated their leadership skills, while men overestimated their skills.
They found that in many situations, those who can't . . . don't know they can't. According to what's now known as the Dunning-Kruger effect, it's when we lack competence that we're most likely to be brimming with overconfidence.
As Dunning quips, "The first rule of the Dunning-Kruger club is you don't know you're a member of the Dunning-Kruger club."*
This might be one of the reasons that patient mortality rates in hospitals seem to spike in July, when new residents take over. It's not their lack of skill alone that proves hazardous; it's their overestimation of that skill.
"Arrogance is ignorance plus conviction," blogger Tim Urban explains. "While humility is a permeable filter that absorbs life experience and converts it into knowledge and wisdom, arrogance is a rubber shield that life experience simply bounces off of."
Humility is often misunderstood. It's not a matter of having low self-confidence. One of the Latin roots of humility means "from the earth." It's about being grounded—recognizing that we're flawed and fallible.
Confidence is a measure of how much you believe in yourself. Evidence shows that's distinct from how much you believe in your methods. You can be confident in your ability to achieve a goal in the future while maintaining the humility to question whether you have the right tools in the present. That's the sweet spot of confidence.
As psychologist Elizabeth Krumrei Mancuso and her colleagues write, "Learning requires the humility to realize one has something to learn."
Uncertainty primes us to ask questions and absorb new ideas
"Maybe impostor syndrome is needed for change. Impostors rarely say, 'This is how we do things around here.' They don't say, 'This is the right way.' I was so eager to learn and grow that I asked everyone for advice on how I could do things differently." Although she doubted her tools, she had confidence in herself as a learner. She understood that knowledge is best sought from experts, but creativity and wisdom can come from anywhere.

Chapter 3: The Joy of Being Wrong

The Industrial Revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race. They have greatly increased the life-expectancy of those of us who live in "advanced" countries, but they have destabilized society, have made life unfulfilling, have subjected human beings to indignities . . . to physical suffering as well . . . and have inflicted severe damage on the natural world.
"Being wrong is the only way I feel sure I've learned anything."
Attachment. That's what keeps us from recognizing when our opinions are off the mark and rethinking them. To unlock the joy of being wrong, we need to detach. I've learned that two kinds of detachment are especially useful: detaching your present from your past and detaching your opinions from your identity
He's passionately dispassionate. At
It's a sign of wisdom to avoid believing every thought that enters your mind. It's a mark of emotional intelligence to avoid internalizing every feeling that enters your heart.
If we're insecure, we make fun of others. If we're comfortable being wrong, we're not afraid to poke fun at ourselves. Laughing at ourselves reminds us that although we might take our decisions seriously, we don't have to take ourselves too seriously. Research suggests that the more frequently we make fun of ourselves, the happier we tend to be.* Instead of beating ourselves up about our mistakes, we can turn some of our past misconceptions into sources of present amusement.

Chapter 4: The Good Fight Club

"The absence of conflict is not harmony, it's apathy."
Research reveals that when their firms perform poorly, CEOs who indulge flattery and conformity become overconfident. They stick to their existing strategic plans instead of changing course—which sets them on a collision course with failure.
Disagreeable givers often make the best critics: their intent is to elevate the work, not feed their own egos. They don't criticize because they're insecure; they challenge because they care. They dish out tough love.*
"Honest argument is merely a process of mutually picking the beams and motes out of each other's eyes so both can see clearly,"
"I see that you are back at your old trick of giving up before you are half beaten in an argument. I feel pretty certain of my own ground but was anticipating the pleasure of a good scrap before the matter was settled. Discussion brings out new ways of looking at things."

Chapter 5: Dances with Foes

"Arguments are often far more combative and adversarial than they need to be," Harish told me. "You should be willing to listen to what someone else is saying and give them a lot of credit for it. It makes you sound like a reasonable person who is taking everything into account.
Drawing attention to common ground and avoiding defend-attack spirals weren't the only ways in which Harish resembled expert negotiators. He was also careful not to come on too strong.
The more the topic matters to them, the more the quality of reasons matters. It's when audiences are skeptical of our view, have a stake in the issue, and tend to be stubborn that piling on justifications is most likely to backfire. If they're resistant to rethinking, more reasons simply give them more ammunition to shoot our views down.
My colleagues and I ran an experiment testing two different messages meant to convince thousands of resistant alumni to give. One message emphasized the opportunity to do good: donating would benefit students, faculty, and staff. The other emphasized the opportunity to feel good: donors would enjoy the warm glow of giving. The two messages were equally effective: in both cases, 6.5 percent of the stingy alumni ended up donating. Then we combined them, because two reasons are better than one. Except they weren't. When we put the two reasons together, the giving rate dropped below 3 percent. Each reason alone was more than twice as effective as the two combined. The audience was already skeptical. When we gave them different kinds of reasons to donate, we triggered their awareness that someone was trying to persuade them—and they shielded themselves against it. A single line of argument feels like a conversation; multiple lines of argument can become an onslaught.
Psychologists have long found that the person most likely to persuade you to change your mind is you. You get to pick the reasons you find most compelling, and you come away with a real sense of ownership over them.
When we hit a brick wall in a debate, we don't have to stop talking altogether. "Let's agree to disagree" shouldn't end a discussion. It should start a new conversation, with a focus on understanding and learning rather than arguing and persuading. That's what we'd do in scientist mode: take the long view and ask how we could have handled the debate more effectively
If we hold an opinion weakly, expressing it strongly can backfire. You end up persuading yourself to hold it more strongly, and you come across as more extreme and entrenched
Research shows that in courtrooms, expert witnesses and deliberating jurors are more credible and more persuasive when they express moderate confidence, rather than high or low confidence
Michele opened with them. "I'm probably not the candidate you've been envisioning," her cover letter began. "I don't have a decade of experience as a Product Manager nor am I a Certified Financial Planner." After establishing the drawbacks of her case, she emphasized a few reasons to hire her anyway:
By emphasizing a small number of core strengths, Michele avoided argument dilution, focusing attention on her strongest points. And by showing curiosity about times the team had been wrong, she may have motivated them to rethink their criteria. They realized that they weren't looking for a set of skills and credentials—they were looking to hire a human being with the motivation and ability to learn. Michele knew what she didn't know and had the confidence to admit it, which sent a clear signal that she could learn what she needed to know.

Introduction

"I'm probably not the candidate you've been envisioning,"
I love breaking new ground and starting with a blank slate.

Chapter 6: Bad Blood on the Diamond

Some economists and finance experts have even found that the stock market rises if a country's soccer team wins World Cup matches and falls if they lose.*
Socially, there's another reason stereotypes are so sticky. We tend to interact with people who share them, which makes them even more extreme. This phenomenon is called group polarization, and it's been demonstrated in hundreds of experiments. Juries with authoritarian beliefs recommend harsher punishments after deliberating together. Corporate boards are more likely to support paying outlandish premiums for companies after group discussions. Citizens who start out with a clear belief on affirmative action and gay marriage develop more extreme views on these issues after talking with a few others who share their stance. Their preaching and prosecuting move in the direction of their politics. Polarization is reinforced by conformity: peripheral members fit in and gain status by following the lead of the most prototypical member of the group, who often holds the most intense views.
We found that it was thinking about the arbitrariness of their animosity—not the positive qualities of their rival—that mattered.
Psychologists find that many of our beliefs are cultural truisms: widely shared, but rarely questioned. If we take a closer look at them, we often discover that they rest on shaky foundations
Daryl Davis
As a general rule, it's those with greater power who need to do more of the rethinking, both because they're more likely to privilege their own perspectives and because their perspectives are more likely to go unquestioned. In most cases, the oppressed and marginalized have already done a great deal of contortion to fit in.

Chapter 7: Vaccine Whisperers and Mild-Mannered Interrogators

This is a common problem in persuasion: what doesn't sway us can make our beliefs stronger.

Chapter 10: That’s Not the Way We’ve Always Done It

In performance cultures, people often become attached to best practices. The risk is that once we've declared a routine the best, it becomes frozen in time. We preach about its virtues and stop questioning its vices, no longer curious about where it's imperfect and where it could improve. Organizational learning should be an ongoing activity, but best practices imply it has reached an endpoint. We might be better off looking for better practices.
That left NASA rewarding luck and repeating problematic practices, failing to rethink what qualified as an acceptable risk.
xclusively praising and rewarding results is dangerous because it breeds overconfidence in poor strategies, incentivizing people to keep doing things the way they've always done them. It isn't until a high-stakes decision goes horribly wrong that people pause to reexamine their practices
Amy Edmondson finds that when psychological safety exists without accountability, people tend to stay within their comfort zone, and when there's accountability but not safety, people tend to stay silent in an anxiety zone. When we combine the two, we create a learning zone. People feel free to experiment—and to poke holes in one another's experiments in service of making them better
Requiring proof is an enemy of progress. This is why companies like Amazon use a principle of disagree and commit. As Jeff Bezos explained it in an annual shareholder letter, instead of demanding convincing results, experiments start with asking people to make bets. "Look, I know we disagree on this but will you gamble with me on it?" The goal in a learning culture is to welcome these kinds of experiments, to make rethinking so familiar that it becomes routine.

Chapter 11: Escaping Tunnel Vision

When we dedicate ourselves to a plan and it isn't going as we hoped, our first instinct isn't usually to rethink it. Instead, we tend to double down and sink more resources in the plan. This pattern is called escalation of commitment
Escalation of commitment happens because we're rationalizing creatures, constantly searching for self-justifications for our prior beliefs as a way to soothe our egos, shield our images, and validate our past decisions.
Early on, he had fallen victim to what psychologists call identity foreclosure—when we settle prematurely on a sense of self without enough due diligence, and close our minds to alternative selves.
In some ways, identity foreclosure is the opposite of an identity crisis: instead of accepting uncertainty about who we want to become, we develop compensatory conviction and plunge head over heels into a career path. I've noticed that the students who are the most certain about their career plans at twenty are often the ones with the deepest regrets by thirty. They haven't done enough rethinking along the way.*
Sadly, they often know too little about the job—and too little about their evolving selves—to make a lifelong commitment. They get trapped in an overconfidence cycle, taking pride in pursuing a career identity and surrounding themselves with people who validate their conviction. By the time they discover it was the wrong fit, they feel it's too late to think again
There's a lot a vacation can do: help you unwind, see some different-looking squirrels, but it cannot fix deeper issues, like how you behave in group settings. We can take you on a hike. We cannot turn you into someone who likes hiking. Remember, you're still gonna be you on vacation. If you are sad where you are, and then you get on a plane to Italy, the you in Italy will be the same sad you from before, just in a new place.
Our happiness often depends more on what we do than where we are. It's our actions—not our surroundings—that bring us meaning and belonging.
Phase 1: I'm not important Phase 2: I'm important Phase 3: I want to contribute to something important
Those only are happy," philosopher John Stuart Mill wrote, "who have their minds fixed on some object other than their own happiness; on the happiness of others, on the improvement of mankind, even on some art or pursuit, followed not as a means, but as itself an ideal end. Aiming thus at something else, they find happiness by the way."