Think Again: The Power of Knowing What You Don't Know

by Adam M. Grant

The more anger and hostility the other person expresses, the more curiosity and interest you show. When someone is losing control, your tranquility is a sign of strength. It takes the wind out of their emotional sails.

In a heated argument, you can always stop and ask, “What evidence would change your mind?” If the answer is “nothing,” then there’s no point in continuing the debate. You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it think.

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.

there’s evidence that people are more interested in hiring candidates who acknowledge legitimate weaknesses as opposed to bragging or humblebragging.

what would it take to get him to root for the Yankees?

coming to define who we are by what we’re not.

fans showed less hostility when they reflected on how silly the rivalry was.

How would your stereotypes be different if you’d been born Black, Hispanic, Asian, or Native American? What opinions would you hold if you’d been raised on a farm versus in a city, or in a culture on the other side of the world? What beliefs would you cling to if you lived in the 1700s?

People gain humility when they reflect on how different circumstances could have led them to different beliefs.

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. Stereotypes don’t have the structural integrity of a carefully built ship. They’re more like a tower in the game of Jenga—teetering on a small number of blocks, with some key supports missing. To knock it over, sometimes all we need to do is give it a poke. The hope is that people will rise to the occasion and build new beliefs on a stronger foundation.

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

motivational interviewing.

Motivational interviewing starts with an attitude of humility and curiosity. We don’t know what might motivate someone else to change, but we’re genuinely eager to find out. The goal isn’t to tell people what to do; it’s to help them break out of overconfidence cycles and see new possibilities.

In motivational interviewing, there’s a distinction between sustain talk and change talk. Sustain talk is commentary about maintaining the status quo. Change talk is referencing a desire, ability, need, or commitment to make adjustments.

There’s a fourth technique of motivational interviewing, which is often recommended for the end of a conversation and for transition points: summarizing.

Listening is a way of offering others our scarcest, most precious gift: our attention. Once we’ve demonstrated that we care about them and their goals, they’re more willing to listen to us.

A dose of complexity can disrupt overconfidence cycles and spur rethinking cycles.

Resisting the impulse to simplify is a step toward becoming more argument literate.

when the only available options are black and white, it’s natural to slip into a mentality of us versus them

It’s especially important to distinguish skeptics from deniers. Skeptics have a healthy scientific stance: They don’t believe everything they see, hear, or read. They ask critical questions and update their thinking as they gain access to new information. Deniers are in the dismissive camp, locked in preacher, prosecutor, or politician mode: They don’t believe anything that comes from the other side. They ignore or twist facts to support their predetermined conclusions.

skepticism is “foundational to the scientific method,” whereas denial is “the a priori rejection of ideas without objective consideration.”[*]

when experts express doubt, they become more persuasive. When someone knowledgeable admits uncertainty, it surprises people, and they end up paying more attention to the substance of the argument.

Acknowledging complexity doesn’t make speakers and writers less convincing; it makes them more credible. It doesn’t lose viewers and readers; it maintains their engagement while stoking their curiosity.

If you find yourself saying ____ is always good or ____ is never bad, you may be a member of an idea cult.

The greater the distance between us and an adversary, the more likely we are to oversimplify their actual motives and invent explanations that stray far from their reality. What works is not perspective-taking but perspective-seeking: actually talking to people to gain insight into the nuances of their views. That’s what good scientists do: instead of drawing conclusions about people based on minimal clues, they test their hypotheses by striking up conversations.

In a productive conversation, people treat their feelings as a rough draft. Like art, emotions are works in progress. It rarely serves us well to frame our first sketch. As we gain perspective, we revise what we feel. Sometimes we even start over from scratch.

In fact, every time we try to help someone think again, we’re doing a kind of education.

I tracked down some extraordinary educators who foster rethinking cycles by instilling intellectual humility, disseminating doubt, and cultivating curiosity.

Evidence shows that if false scientific beliefs aren’t addressed in elementary school, they become harder to change later.

In the field of history education, there’s a growing movement to ask questions that don’t have a single right answer.

This is part of a broader movement to teach kids to think like fact-checkers: the guidelines include (1) “interrogate information instead of simply consuming it,” (2) “reject rank and popularity as a proxy for reliability,” and (3) “understand that the sender of information is often not its source.”

Rethinking needs to become a regular habit. Unfortunately, traditional methods of education don’t always allow students to form that habit.

Despite enjoying the lectures more, they actually gained more knowledge and skill from the active-learning session. It required more mental effort, which made it less fun but led to deeper understanding.

Social scientists have called this phenomenon the awestruck effect, but I think it’s better described as the dumbstruck effect. The sage-on-the-stage often preaches new thoughts, but rarely teaches us how to think for ourselves.

I just think it’s a problem that lectures remain the dominant method of teaching in secondary and higher education. Expect a lecture on that soon.

Lectures are not always the best method of learning, and they are not enough to develop students into lifelong learners. If you spend all of your school years being fed information and are never given the opportunity to question it, you won’t develop the tools for rethinking that you need in life.

Achieving excellence in school often requires mastering old ways of thinking.

That’s what I saw with my straight-A students: they were terrified of being wrong.

It’s been demonstrated repeatedly that one of the best ways to learn is to teach.

anyone could teach the class about something he or she loved. We learned how to beatbox and design buildings that mesh with nature and make the world more allergy safe.

Instead of introducing existing taxonomies of animals, for example, Ron had them develop their own categories first. Some students classified animals by whether they walked on land, swam in water, or flew through the air; others arranged them according to color, size, or diet. The lesson was that scientists always have many options, and their frameworks are useful in some ways but arbitrary in others.

“Quality means rethinking, reworking, and polishing,”

Whomever we’re educating, we can express more humility, exude more curiosity, and introduce the children in our lives to the infectious joy of discovery.

I believe that good teachers introduce new thoughts, but great teachers introduce new ways of thinking. Collecting a teacher’s knowledge may help us solve the challenges of the day, but understanding how a teacher thinks can help us navigate the challenges of a lifetime. Ultimately, education is more than the information we accumulate in our heads. It’s the habits we develop as we keep revising our drafts and the skills we build to keep learning.

Over the past few years, psychological safety has become a buzzword in many workplaces. Although leaders might understand its significance, they often misunderstand exactly what it is and how to create it. Edmondson is quick to point out that psychological safety is not a matter of relaxing standards, making people comfortable, being nice and agreeable, or giving unconditional praise. It’s fostering a climate of respect, trust, and openness in which people can raise concerns and suggestions without fear of reprisal. It’s the foundation of a learning culture. In performance cultures, the emphasis on results often undermines psychological safety.