Think Again — Adam Grant

 

Rating: ★★★★½

Summary: Think Again (Canada/US) explores the power of rethinking in a world where certainty and dogma often spread like wildfire.

​Much of the time, we hold onto our deeply cherished beliefs and seek out confirming evidence for them. In the process, we settle on beliefs that may be flawed and rarely, if ever, revisit them.

When we do so, we act in three main roles: as preachers trying defend our beliefs from questioning, as prosecutors attacking the arguments of the opposition, and as politicians using rhetoric to persuade others to our point of view. 

However, there is a fourth role that is often neglected: that of a scientist questioning a hypothesis. 

I co-created an infographic outlining these four modes of thinking. Check it out :

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Click "read more" to see my detailed notes from the book.

Scientist mode encourages us to rethink our beliefs despite our desires and confirmatory pressures, examine evidence more objectively, and be more comfortable with nuance and uncertainty. Ultimately, it is the ability to rethink ideas, attitudes, and decisions that helps us learn more effectively and develop a better understanding of reality.

Key Concepts:

• Intelligence is often defined as the ability to think and learn, and is a highly valued attribute. However, the ability to rethink and relearn may be even more important in the long term.

• The first instinct fallacy is when we avoid revising an answer despite thinking that it may be wrong, in order to avoid self-recrimination later.

• “Questioning ourselves makes the world more unpredictable. It requires us to admit that the facts may have changed, that what was once right may now be wrong.”

• "We favour the comfort of conviction over the discomfort of doubt, and we let our beliefs get brittle long before our bones.”

• Automatic, well-learned responses can help you, but only if the environment is conducive to them. When something changes in the environment, our thinking needs to change and we may need to override our learned responses.

• For many of the firefighters at the Mann Gulch fire in 1949, ditching their equipment to flee from the flames meant admitting failure, and abandoning their identities. 

• Think Again is about letting go of the ideas that no longer serve you well, and developing mental flexibility.

• Companies don’t adapt; people adapt their decision-making.

• The amount of knowledge and information in the world is growing at an increasing rate. As fields are rapidly evolving, rethinking old assumptions is more important than ever.

• In a study of more than 100 Italian entrepreneurs, participants that learned to model entrepreneurship on scientific thinking earned an average of forty times more than members of the control group. The regular entrepreneurs got attached to their products and couldn’t change them, while the scientific-minded entrepreneurs saw products as experiments and tried multiple products in succession.

• IQ and statistical savvy actually lead to worse performance on tests where the ideological content is antithetical to one’s own beliefs. Basically, smart people are better at coming up with cherry-picked evidence that distorts reality. 

• Confirmation bias is when we see what we expect to see, while desirability bias is when we see what we want to see.

• Being good at thinking can make you worse at rethinking. If you are unaware of your limitations and biases, you may believe that you are right more often than you actually are.

• The most predictive factors of presidential excellence are intellectual curiosity and openness.

• The process of rethinking things starts with intellectual humility. Knowing what you don’t know should make you curious, which then leads to discoveries, which in turn leads to more humility. The process looks something like this: humility → knowing what you don’t know → curiosity → discoveries → more humility.

• An overconfidence cycle is at the opposite end of the rethinking spectrum, an and looks more like this: pride in understanding → overconfidence → confirmation/desirability bias → validate our wrong beliefs 

• The prideful understanding cycle leads to what is called the fat cat syndrome, which is when a persons rest on their laurels and stops learning.

• Mike Lazaridis, the founder of Blackberry, fell prey to an overconfidence cycle when Apple threatened to dominate the smartphone market. Ignoring widespread consumer interest in Apple’s glass screen typing technology, he doubled down on keypad typing. He listened to favourable feedback from Blackberry users (desirability bias), and failed to adequately stress-test his ideas.

• Anton’s Syndrome arises when there is damage to the occipital lobe of the brain. Many who suffer from it are blind, but claim quite insistently that they can still see. Similarly, we all have our own cognitive blind spots that we need to address in order to think more accurately. 

• Men tend to overestimate their leadership capabilities, while women tend to underestimate their ability to lead.

• The armchair quarterback has more confidence than competence. He may believe that he knows more or can perform better than a professional.  On the other end of the spectrum, the person with imposter’s syndrome often has more competence than confidence. He is continually uncertain of his abilities in spite of his successes, and lives in constant fear of being “found out”.

• The Dunning-Kruger Effect is the tendency for those without expertise in an area to rate themselves as better than they actually are. Low ability often comes with a high internal sense of efficacy. 

• You can be confident in your ability to achieve long-term goals, while also having humility about your present condition. This works better than see-sawing between meekness and arrogance.

• Imposter’s syndrome is more prevalent among women, marginalized groups, and high achievers. While it is often framed negatively, imposter’s syndrome can make people work harder, work smarter, and become better learners, because they continually err on the side of humility.

• “Uncertainty primes us to ask questions and absorb new ideas. It protects us against the Dunning-Kruger effect.”

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

• The totalitarian ego strives to protect us from facts, information, and evidence that threatens to undermine our intelligence, competence, or worldview.

• Discovering that you are wrong can be a delightful experience, because your knowledge deepens and you end up with less mistaken assumptions than before.

• Detaching your present self from your past self frees you to change the trajectory of your life, and reconsider your previously cherished beliefs. Detaching your beliefs from your identity allows you to be more critical of what you hold to be true, and less flustered when something you thought was true turns out to be wrong.

• The best forecasters are not necessarily those who have higher levels of intelligence, grit, or “vision”. The best forecasters are the ones who continually update their beliefs when new evidence arises.

• There are (at least) two kinds of interpersonal conflict: relationship conflict and task conflict. Task conflict, which centres around competing ideas, leads to higher rates of creativity, innovation, and efficiency. Relationship conflict, on the other hand, often leads to poor results. 

• Respectful arguments between parents helps children feel safer, and actually contributes towards the child’s generosity and compassion towards their peers.

• “The absence of conflict is not harmony, it’s apathy”. 

• Weak leaders often don’t seek out challenge networks, but instead look for sycophants to agree with their every word. Strong leaders do the opposite. 

• The illusion of explanatory depth: we overestimate our ability to describe our knowledge of even basic objects.

• Debating is a science as well as an art. It is often perceived in military terms: defeat your enemy with air-tight logic and plenty of evidence. However, debating and negotiation are more like a dance of give and take. 

• Expert negotiators spend up to a third of their time figuring out where they share common ground with the opposing side. This often disarms the other party, as they did not anticipate agreement and mutual understanding.

• Expert debaters don’t use more evidence; they use less. They don’t want to dilute their strong points.

• Questions and curiosity are also hallmarks of great negotiators. They use inquisitiveness to frame arguments in their favour.

• While it can be tempting to straw man an opposing argument by pointing out its immediate flaws, skilled debaters often steel man the opposing argument; they look for the strong points that they agree with.

• Asking questions is a powerful method to prompt rethinking. Emails that simply asked fans if they would attend a college basketball game led to increases in attendance, where other emails had no effect.

• “Start with common ground, and fewer data points.”

• When someone becomes hostile, if you respond by viewing the argument as a war, you can either attack or retreat. If instead, you treat it as a dance, you have another option; you can sidestep. [...] the more anger and hostility a person expresses, the more curiosity and interest you show.”

• When irritability and frustration arise, shift the attention towards the process.

• Beliefs are like perceptual goggles that often distort our realities. 

• Group polarization occurs when common, shared beliefs get exaggerated or amplified when amongst like-minded people.

• One possible antidote to partisan politics and groupthink is a kind of global consciousness. Recognizing that we are all living on a tiny floating space rock leads to prioritizing global well-being over personal gain. This is known as the overview effect.

• Counterfactual thinking involves reconsidering beliefs based on thought experiments about your own past. What would you think if you had been born in a different country? Spoke a different language? Grew up in a different neighborhood?

• People form stereotypes and discriminate based on arbitrary star signs. Counterfactual thinking can help to dismantle these beliefs through an invitation to rethink things.

• There are more similarities between groups than we recognize, and there is a lot of variation within groups.

• It is very hard to motivate people to change, but much easier to help them find their own reasons to change. Motivational interviewing is a technique for listening with humility and curiosity, with the intention of having the other person figure out what potential problems might be connected to a particular viewpoint or ideology. It is like holding up a mirror in order to reveal reality, and jar people out of overconfidence cycles.

• Motivational interviewing is the process of guiding others to self-discovery. Daryl Davis, the musician who encouraged hundreds of members to leave the KKK, used this technique to get to the root of their racist beliefs.

• Students at university tend to rate lecture-based classes highly and consider them more enjoyable than active-learning classes. Skillful orators and less strain on the learner might be reasons for this trend. However, evidence suggests that we learn more through active engagement than passive listening. 

• “Lectures aren’t designed to accommodate dialogue or disagreement. They turn students into passive receivers of information, rather than active thinkers.”

• Teaching something is often one of the best ways to learn it.