Top Quotes: “Think Again: The Power of Knowing What You Don’t Know” — Adam Grant

Introduction

“When a trio of psychologists conducted a comprehensive review of thirty-three studies, they found that in every one, the majority of answer revisions were from wrong to right. This phenomenon is known as the first-instinct fallacy. In one demonstration, psychologists counted eraser marks on the exams of more than 1,500 students in Illinois. Only a quarter of the changes were from right to wrong, while half were from wrong to right. I’ve seen it in my own classroom year after year: my students’ final exams have surprisingly few eraser marks, but those who do rethink their first answers rather than staying anchored to them end up improving their scores.”

“Tossed into the scalding pot, the frog will get burned badly and may or may not escape. The frog is actually better off in the slow-boiling pot: it will leap out as soon as the water starts to get uncomfortably warm.

It’s not the frogs who fail to reevaluate. It’s us. Once we hear the story and accept it as true, we rarely bother to question it.”

“As of the summer of 2009, Blackberry accounted for nearly half of the U.S. smartphone market.

By 2014, its market share had plummeted to less than 1 percent.”

“The training for both groups was identical, except that one was encouraged to view startups through a scientist’s goggles. From that perspective, their strategy is a theory, customer interviews help to develop hypotheses, and their minimum viable product and prototype are experiments to test those hypotheses. Their task is to rigorously measure the results and make decisions based on whether their hypotheses are supported or refuted.

Over the following year, the startups in the control group averaged under $300 in revenue. The startups in the scientific thinking group averaged over $12,000 in revenue. They brought in revenue more than twice as fast-and attracted customers sooner, too. Why? The entrepreneurs in the control group tended to stay wedded to their original strategies and products. It was too easy to preach the virtues of their past decisions, prosecute the vices of alternative options, and politick by catering to advisers who favored the existing direction. The entrepreneurs who had been taught to think like scientists, in contrast, pivoted more than twice as often. When their hypotheses weren’t supported, they knew it was time to rethink their business models.”

“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.”

“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.”

Imposter Syndrome

“I’ve found that confidence can make us complacent. If we never worry about letting other people down, we’re more likely to actually do so. When we feel like impostors, we think we have something to prove. Impostors may be the last to jump in, but they may also be the last to bail out.

Second, impostor thoughts can motivate us to work smarter. When we don’t believe we’re going to win, we have nothing to lose by rethinking our strategy. Remember that total beginners don’t fall victim to the Dunning-Kruger effect. Feeling like an impostor puts us in a beginner’s mindset, leading us to question assumptions that others have taken for granted.

Third, feeling like an impostor can make us better learners. Having some doubts about our knowledge and skills takes us off a pedestal, encouraging us to seek out insights from others.”

Vulnerability

“If we’re insecure, we make fun of others. If we’re comfortable being wrong, were 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.”

Disputes

“What matters is how respectfully parents argue, not how frequently. Kids whose parents clash constructively feel more emotionally safe in elementary school, and over the next few years they actually demonstrate more helpfulness and compassion toward their classmates.”

“Experiments show that simply framing a dispute as a debate rather than as a disagreement signals that you’re receptive to considering dissenting opinions and changing your mind, which in turn motivates the other person to share more information with you. A disagreement feels personal and potentially hostile; we expect a debate to be about ideas, not emotions. Starting a disagreement by asking, “Can we debate?” sends a message that you want to think like a scientist, not a preacher or a prosecutor — and encourages the other person to think that way, too.”

“When we argue about why, we run the risk of becoming emotionally attached to our positions and dismissive of the other side’s. We’re more likely to have a good fight if we argue about how.

When social scientists asked people why they favor particular policies on taxes, health care, or nuclear sanctions, they often doubled down on their convictions. Asking people to explain how those policies would work in practice — or how they’d explain them to an expert — sometimes activated a rethinking cycle. They noticed gaps in their knowledge, doubted their conclusions, and in some cases became less extreme; they were now more curious about alternative options.”

“The more reasons we put on the table, the easier it is for people to discard the shakiest one. Once they reject one of our justifications, they can easily dismiss our entire case.”

“When I asked Harish how to improve at finding common ground, he offered a surprisingly practical tip. Most people immediately start with a straw man, poking holes in the weakest version of the other side’s case. He does the reverse: he considers the strongest version of their case, which is known as the steel man. A politician might occasionally adopt that tactic to pander or persuade, but like a good scientist, Harish does it to learn. Instead of trying to dismantle the argument that preschool is good for kids, Harish accepted that the point was valid, which allowed him to relate to his opponent’s perspective — and to the audience’s. Then it was perfectly fair and balanced for him to express his concerns about whether a subsidy would give the most underprivileged kids access to preschool.”

“If they’re not invested in the issue or they are receptive to our perspective, more reasons can help: people tend to see quantity as a sign of quality. 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.

It’s not just about the number of reasons, though. It’s also how they fit together. A university once approached me to see if I could bring in donations from alumni who had never given a dime. 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. The audience tuned out the preacher and summoned their best defense attorney to refute the prosecutor.”

“A student in one of my classes, Rachel Breuhaus, noticed that although top college basketball teams have rabid fans, there are usually empty seats in their arenas. To study strategies for motivating more fans to show up, we launched an experiment in the week before an upcoming game targeting hundreds of season ticket holders. When left to their own devices, 77 percent of these supposedly die-hard fans actually made it to the game. We decided that the most persuasive message would come from the team itself, so we sent fans an email with quotes from players and coaches about how part of the home-court advantage stems from the energy of a packed house of cheering fans. It had no effect whatsoever: attendance in that group was 76 percent.

What did move the needle was an email with a different approach. We simply asked fans one question: are you planning to attend? Attendance climbed to 85 percent. The question gave fans the freedom to make their own case for going.

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.”

“Rather than trying to hide her shortcomings, 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.

But what I do have are skills that can’t be taught. I take ownership of projects far beyond my pay grade and what is in my defined scope of responsibilities. I don’t wait for people to tell me what to do and go seek for myself what needs to be done. I invest myself deeply in my projects and it shows in everything I do, from my projects at work to my projects that I undertake on my own time at night. I’m entrepreneurial, I get things done, and I know I would make an excellent right hand for the co-founder leading this project. I love breaking new ground and starting with a blank slate. (And any of my previous bosses would be able to attest to these traits.)”

“We found that it was thinking about the arbitrariness of their animosity — not the positive qualities of their rival — that mattered. Regardless of whether they generated reasons to like their rivals, fans showed less hostility when they reflected on how silly the rivalry was. Knowing what it felt like to be disliked for ridiculous reasons helped them see that this conflict had real implications, that hatred for opposing fans isn’t all fun and games.”

“When we realize how easily we could have held different stereotypes, we might be more willing to update our views. To activate counterfactual thinking, you might ask people questions like: 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?”

“A key turning point, she recalls, was when Araud “told me that whether I chose to vaccinate or not, he respected my decision as someone who wanted the best for my kids. Just that sentence — to me, it was worth all the gold in the world.””

“One day a friend called me for advice on whether she should get back together with her ex. I was a fan of the idea, but I didn’t think it was my place to tell her what to do. Instead of offering my opinion, I asked. her to walk through the pros and cons and tell me how they stacked up against what she wanted in a partner.”

“When people ignore advice, 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?””

“Say you have a friend who mentions a desire to stop smoking. You might respond by asking why she’s considering quitting. If she says a doctor recommended it, you might follow up by inquiring about her own motivations: what does she think of the idea? If she offers a reason why she’s determined to stop, you might ask what her first step toward quitting could be. “Change talk is a golden thread,” clinical psychologist Theresa Moyers says. “What you need to do is you need to pick that thread up and pull it.” So that’s what I did with Jeff.

Me: What do you appreciate most about the leaders you named?

Jeff: They all had vivid visions. They inspired people to achieve extraordinary things.

Me: Interesting. If Steve Jobs were in your shoes right now, what do you think he’d do?

Jeff: He’d probably get his leadership team fired up about a bold idea and create a reality distortion field to make it seem possible. Maybe I should do that, too.”

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

“Motivational interviewing requires a genuine desire to help people reach their goals. Jeff and I both wanted his company to succeed. Marie-Hélène and Arnaud both wanted Tobie to be healthy. If your goals don’t seem to be aligned, how do you help people change their own minds?”

“Eventually, when he understood Marie-Hélène’s beliefs, Arnaud asked if he could share some information about vaccines based on his own expertise. “I started a dialogue,” he told me. “The aim was to build a trusting relationship. If you present information without permission, no one will listen to you.” Arnaud was able to address her fears and misconceptions by explaining that the measles vaccine is a weakened live virus, so the symptoms are typically minimal, and there’s no evidence that it increases autism or other syndromes. He wasn’t delivering a lecture; he was engaging in a discussion. Marie-Hélène’s questions guided the evidence he shared, and they reconstructed her knowledge together. Every step of the way, Arnaud avoided putting pressure on her.”

“An antidote to this proclivity is complexifying: showcasing the range of perspectives on a given topic. We might believe we’re making progress by discussing hot-button issues as two sides of a coin, but people are actually more inclined to think again if we present these topics through the many lenses of a prism. To borrow a phrase from Walt Whitman, it takes a multitude of views to help people realize that they too contain multitudes.

A dose of complexity can disrupt overconfidence cycles and spur rethinking cycles. It gives us more humility about our knowledge and more doubts about our opinions, and it can make us curious enough to discover information we were lacking. In Peter’s experiment, all it took was framing gun control not as an issue with only two extreme positions but rather as one involving many interrelated dilemmas.”

“To overcome binary bias, a good starting point is to become aware of the range of perspectives across a given spectrum. Polls suggest that on climate change, there are at least six camps of thought. Believers represent more than half of Americans, but some are concerned while others are alarmed. The so-called nonbelievers actually range from cautious to disengaged to doubtful to dismissive.”

“Psychologists find that people will ignore or even deny the existence of a problem if they’re not fond of the solution. Liberals were more dismissive of the issue of intruder violence when they read an argument that strict gun control laws could make it difficult for homeowners to protect themselves. Conservatives were more receptive to climate science when they read about a green technology policy proposal than about an emissions restriction proposal.

Featuring shades of gray in discussions of solutions can help to shift attention from why climate change is a problem to how we can do something about it. As we’ve seen from the evidence on the illusion of explanatory depth, asking “how” tends to reduce polarization, setting the stage for more constructive conversations about ac-tion. Here are examples of headlines in which writers have hinted at the complexity of the solutions:

I WORK IN THE ENVIRONMENTAL MOVEMENT. I DON’T CARE IF YOU RECYCLE

CAN PLANTING A TRILLION TREES STOP CLIMATE CHANGE? SCIENTISTS SAY IT’S A LOT MORE COMPLICATED.”

“Psychologists demonstrated that when news reports about science included caveats, they succeeded in capturing readers’ interest and keeping their minds open. Take a study suggesting that a poor diet accelerates aging. Readers were just as engaged in the story – but more flexible in their beliefs – when it mentioned that scientists remained hesitant to draw strong causal conclusions given the number of factors that can affect aging. It even helped just to note that scientists believed more work needed to be done in this area.”

“In one experiment, if an ideological opponent merely began by acknowledging that “I have a lot of respect for people like you who stand by their principles,” people were less likely to see her as an adversary – and showed her more generosity.”

Teaching

“She collects old history books because she enjoys seeing how the stories we tell change over time, and she decided to give her students part of a textbook from 1940. Some of them just accepted the information it presented at face value. Through years of education, they had come to take it for granted that textbooks told the truth. Others were shocked by errors and omissions. It was ingrained in their minds that their readings were filled with incontrovertible facts. The lesson led them to start thinking like scientists and questioning what they were learning: whose story was included, whose was excluded, and what were they missing if only one or two perspectives were shared?

After opening her students’ eyes to the fact that knowledge can evolve, Erin’s next step was to show them that it’s always evolving. To set up a unit on expansion in the West, she created her own textbook section describing what it’s like to be a middle-school student today. All the protagonists were women and girls, and all the generic pronouns were female. In the first year she introduced the material, a student raised his hand to point out that the boys were missing. “But there’s one boy,” Erin replied. “Boys were around. They just weren’t doing anything important.” It was an aha moment for the student: he suddenly realized what it was like for an entire group to be marginalized for hundreds of years.

My favorite assignment of Erin’s is her final one. As a passionate champion of inquiry-based learning, she sends her eighth graders off to do self-directed research in which they inspect, investigate, interrogate, and interpret. Their active learning culminates in a group project: they pick a chapter from their textbook, choosing a time period that interests them and a theme in history that they see as underrepresented. Then they go off to rewrite it.”

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

“Lecturing was especially ineffective in debunking known misconceptions — in leading students to think again. And experiments have shown that when a speaker delivers an inspiring message, the audience scrutinizes the material less carefully and forgets more of the content — even while claiming to remember more of it.”

“The students who struggled the most were the straight-A students — the perfectionists. It turns out that although perfectionists are more likely than their peers to ace school, they don’t perform any better than their colleagues at work. This tracks with evidence that, across a wide range of industries, grades are not a strong predictor of job performance.

Achieving excellence in school often requires mastering old ways of thinking. Building an influential career demands new ways of thinking. In a classic study of highly accomplished architects, the most creative ones graduated with a B average. Their straight-A counterparts were so determined to be right that they often failed to take the risk of rethinking the orthodoxy.”

“At one of their schools in Idaho, a student named Austin was assigned to make a scientifically accurate drawing of a butterfly. This is his first draft:

Austin’s classmates formed a critique group. They gave him two rounds of suggestions for changing the shape of the wings, and he produced his second and third drafts. The critique group pointed out that the wings were uneven and that they d become round again.

Austin wasn’t discouraged. On his next revision, the group encouraged him to fill in the pattern on the wings.

For the final draft, Austin was ready to color it in.

When Ron showed the completed drawing to a roomful of elementary school students in Maine, they gasped in awe at his progress and his final product.

I gasped, too, because Austin made these drawings when he was in first grade.

Seeing a six-year-old undergo that kind of metamorphosis made me think again about how quickly children can become comfortable rethinking and revising. Ever since, I’ve encouraged our kids to do multiple drafts of their own drawings.”

Conclusion

“Tradition (n.)

Peer pressure from dead people.”

“She started carrying a 3 x 5 note card in her pocket with questions to ask about every launch and important operational decision. Her list included:

• What leads you to that assumption? Why do you think it is correct? What might happen if it’s wrong?
• What are the uncertainties in your analysis?
• I understand the advantages of your recommendation. What are the disadvantages?”

“How do you know? Its a question we need to ask more often, both of ourselves and of others. The power lies in its frankness. It’s nonjudgmental — a straightforward expression of doubt and curiosity that doesn’t put people on the defensive.”

“Kids might be better off learning about careers as actions to take rather than as identities to claim. When they see work as what they do rather than who they are, they become more open to exploring different possibilities.”

“Although children are often fascinated by science from a young age, over the course of elementary school, they tend to lose interest and confidence in their potential to be scientists. Recent studies show that it’s possible to maintain their enthusiasm by introducing them to science differently. When second and third graders learned about “doing science” rather than “being scientists,” they were more excited about pursuing science. Becoming a scientist might seem out of reach, but the act of experimenting is something we can all try out. Even prekindergarten students express more interest in science when it’s presented as something we do rather than someone we are.

Recently at dinner, our kids decided to go around the table to ask what everyone wanted to be when they grew up. I told them they didn’t need to choose one career; the average person ends up holding a dozen different jobs. They didn’t have to be one thing; they could do many things. They started brainstorming about all the things they love to do. Their lists ended up including designing Lego sets, studying space, creative writing, architecture, interior design, teaching gymnastics, photography, coaching soccer, and being a fitness YouTuber.”