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

by Adam M. Grant

Yet in a turbulent world, there’s another set of cognitive skills that might matter more: the ability to rethink and unlearn.

But recent studies point to a different explanation: it’s not so much changing your answer that improves your score as considering whether you should change it.

Some psychologists point out that we’re mental misers: we often prefer the ease of hanging on to old views over the difficulty of grappling with new ones.

Reconsidering something we believe deeply can threaten our identities, making it feel as if we’re losing a part of ourselves.

Similar to the Identity Trigger in Thanks for the Feedback

Discarding your equipment means admitting failure and shedding part of your identity. You have to rethink your goal in your job—and your role in life.

What if we were quicker to make amendments to our own mental constitutions?

The risk is that we become so wrapped up in preaching that we’re right, prosecuting others who are wrong, and politicking for support that we don’t bother to rethink our own views.

The less intelligent we are in a particular domain, the more we seem to overestimate our actual intelligence in that domain.

It’s when we progress from novice to amateur that we become overconfident. A bit of knowledge can be a dangerous thing. In too many domains of our lives, we never gain enough expertise to question our opinions or discover what we don’t know. We have just enough information to feel self-assured about making pronouncements and passing judgment, failing to realize that we’ve climbed to the top of Mount Stupid without making it over to the other side.

“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.”

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.

What we want to attain is confident humility: having faith in our capability while appreciating that we may not have the right solution or even be addressing the right problem. That gives us enough doubt to reexamine our old knowledge and enough confidence to pursue new insights.

A mark of lifelong learners is recognizing that they can learn something from everyone they meet.

“You must not fool yourself—and you are the easiest person to fool.”

We won’t have much luck changing other people’s minds if we refuse to change ours.

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. That’s where Harish’s final edge came in. In every round he posed more questions to contemplate. The computer spoke in declarative sentences, asking just a single question in the opening statement—and directing it at Harish, rather than at the audience. In his opening, Harish asked six different questions for the audience to ponder. Within the first minute, he asserted that just because preschools are good doesn’t mean that they should be funded by the government, and then inquired, “Why is that the case?” He went on to ask whether preschools were underprovided, whether they did help the most disadvantaged—and then why they didn’t, why they were so costly, and who they actually helped instead.

This is why the Socratic method works so well in the classroom when it comes to getting students to engage with the material and actually REMEMBER their learning.

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.[*] And these principles aren’t limited to debates—they apply in a wide range of situations where we’re advocating for our beliefs or even for ourselves.

It’s only natural to put up our guard in response—and Kelly noticed that we become especially hostile when trying to defend opinions that we know, deep down, are false.

Interesting...but doesn't seem likely to be an accurate study. How do you quantify this kind of "evidence?" Is the suggestion REALLY that we can ascertain what somebody disbelieves "deep down" through a study?

Don’t confuse confidence with competence.

Don’t evaluate decisions based only on the results; track how thoroughly different options are considered in the process.