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

by Adam M. Grant

Research suggests that there are more similarities between groups than we recognize.39 And there’s typically more variety within groups than between them.

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.41 42 In most cases, the oppressed and marginalized have already done a great deal of contortion to fit in.

“Our ideology needs to catch up to our technology.”

It’s a rare person who wants to hear what he doesn’t want to hear.

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

motivational interviewing.

11 The central premise is that we can rarely motivate someone else to change. We’re better off helping them find their own motivation to change.

Motivational interviewing starts with an attitude of humility and curiosity.

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.

Our role is to hold up a mirror so they can see themselves more clearly, and then empower them to examin...

The process of motivational interviewing involves three key techniques: Asking open-ended questions Engaging in reflective listening Affirming the person’s desire and ability to change

When people ignore advice,28 it isn’t always because they disagree with it. Sometimes they’re resisting the sense of pressure and the feeling that someone else is controlling their decision.

To protect their freedom, instead of giving commands or offering recommendations, a motivational interviewer might say something along the lines of “Here are a few things that have helped me—do you think any of them might work for you?”

Yet the most effective way to help others open their minds is often to listen.

In motivational interviewing, there’s a distinction between sustain talk and change talk.

helping him think about how to execute the change effectively.

summarizing.

The idea is to explain your understanding of other people’s reasons for change, to check on whether you’ve missed or misrepresented anything, and to inquire about their plans and possible next steps.

hiring a tour guide in a foreign country:

Our work isn’t done until we’ve helped them accomplish their goals.

Listening can encourage others to reconsider their stance toward us, but it also gives us information that can lead us to question our own views about them.

If your goals don’t seem to be aligned, how do you help people change their own minds?

Listening well is more than a matter of talking less. It’s a set of skills in asking and responding.

Great listeners are more interested in making their audiences feel smart.

“How can I tell what I think till I see what I say?”

Inverse charisma. What a wonderful turn of phrase to capture the magnetic quality of a great listener.

If you present information without permission, no one will listen to you.”

affirming her freedom to make up her own mind.

Listening is a way of offering others our scarcest, most precious gift: our attention.

When we succeed in changing someone’s mind, we shouldn’t only ask whether we’re proud of what we’ve achieved. We should also ask whether we’re proud of how we’ve achieved it.

Presenting two extremes isn’t the solution; it’s part of the polarization problem. Psychologists have a name for this: binary bias. It’s a basic human tendency

to seek clarity and closure by simplifying a complex continuum into two categories.

it takes a multitude of views to help people realize that they too contain multitudes.

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

A fundamental lesson of desirability bias is that our beliefs are shaped by our motivations.

What we believe depends on what we want to believe.

To overcome binary bias, a good starting point is to become aware of the range of perspectives across a given spectrum.

When the middle of the spectrum is invisible, the majority’s will to act vanishes with it. If other people aren’t going to do anything about it, why should I bother?

When we’re reading, listening, or watching, we can learn to recognize complexity as a signal of credibility.

We can favor content and sources that present many sides of an issue rather than just one or two.

When w...

across simplifying headlines, we can fight our tendency to accept binaries by asking what additional perspectives ...

a potential challenge of nuance is that it doesn’t seem to go viral.

It’s true that complexity doesn’t always make for good sound bites, but it does seed great conversations.

asking “how” tends to reduce polarization,

We can also convey complexity by highlighting contingencies.

In polarized discussions, a common piece of advice is to take the other side’s perspective.

If we don’t understand someone, we can’t have a eureka moment by imagining his perspective.

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.