The power of rethinking what we think we know

It's not hard to see examples all around us of something which is bothering organisational psychologist Professor Adam Grant.

We listen to views that make us feel good, instead of ideas that make us think hard, and Professor grant has been doing a lot of thinking about thinking.

He says we all need to be willing to unlearn and rethink cherished beliefs and ideas, so that we don't favour the comfort of conviction over the discomfort of doubts.

His new book is called; Think Again: The Power of Knowing What You Don't.

Being intelligent can make you bad at rethinking, he told Jesse Mulligan.

“I was really surprised to discover this, we normally think about intelligence as the ability to think and learn. But sometimes that can stand in the way of your willingness to rethink and unlearn.

There's evidence that the smarter you are, the harder it is to see your own limitations. And my favourite way of illustrating this is with research on what's called the ‘I'm not biased bias’, which is the tendency, and many of us have it, to assume that other people have flaws in their thinking, but I am neutral, I am objective.”

People with high intelligence are better at finding reasons to support their beliefs, he says.

“They're faster at doing that. And so, it's easy for them to be convinced that they're right when, in fact, they're wrong.”

Too many of us spend our time “thinking like preachers, prosecutors, or politicians," Grant says.  

“We know that all three of those mindsets can make it can make it really hard to think again. Because whether you're preaching, prosecuting or politicking, you've already concluded that you're right and other people are wrong.

“So, they might need to think again, but your cognitive work is done.”

Think more like a scientist instead, he suggests.

“I do not mean that you need to own a microscope or buy a telescope. I mean you don't let your ideas become your identity, that whatever opinions you hold, you realise those are just hunches.

“They're hypotheses waiting to be tested, and you start to then look for reasons why you might be wrong, not just the reasons why you must be right.”

That makes us more willing to surround ourselves with people who challenge our thinking, he says.

“Instead of just the ones who validate your conclusions.

“And that means you end up getting lots more information that does call into question your beliefs. It forces you to run more experiments, and it makes you a little bit more humble, and a little bit more curious.”

An experiment was conducted with entrepreneurs in Italy to test the power of a more scientific thought process, he says.

“Hundreds of them are randomly assigned to either a scientific thinking group or a control group.

“The scientific thinking group is just taught, hey, your strategy for your start up, that's a theory, when you talk to customers good opportunity to hone in on specific hypotheses.

And then if you launch a product or service, you should just think about that as an experiment to test those hypotheses.”

Over the next year the entrepreneurs who were randomly assigned to think like scientists brought in more than 40 times the revenue of the control group, he says.

“A staggering effect, one of the largest I've ever seen as a social scientist. And the key mechanism behind it is they are more than twice as likely to pivot.

“The poor founders in the control group, when they're their product launch crashes and burns they still preach that they were right, they prosecute their naysayers for being wrong. And they politic by lobbying board members to favour the status quo.”

The entrepreneurs taught to think like scientists saw failure as an experiment which had proven their hypotheses wrong, he says.

“Now I need to rethink my vision or my strategy, or my market to try to find better market fit. And it just makes them much more mentally flexible.

“Which is last time I checked, pretty useful in a rapidly changing world.”

Humans have a natural bias towards looking at complex matters with a black and white mindset, he says.

“I think Robert Benchley put it best when he said, there are only two kinds of people in the world; those who divide the world into two kinds of people - and those who don't.

“It sums up what psychologists call binary bias, which is the tendency many of us have to take a really complex issue and oversimplify it and dumb it down into two categories.”

In the US this manifests itself in the gun debate, he says.

“There's no middle ground, even though more than 85 percent of Americans agree on things like universal background checks for gun owners.”

He believes we should argue like we’re right, and listen like we’re wrong.

“What you do need to do in order to have a thoughtful conversation is express receptiveness, signal that you're open, that you're willing to keep thinking and rethinking.”

He uses this technique in debate himself, he says.

“But I'll just come in and say, hey, Jesse, I have a really different perspective on this. But before I dive into it, I just want to let you know, I've been called a logic bully, I can be just an incredibly annoying prosecuting attorney. And I don't want to be that person anymore.

“So if you catch me, just hammering you with studies and experiments, and you know, and facts, please let me know that I'm overdoing it.

“And I've found that when I do that people will call me out, and it makes sure that I listen.”

The other person will often open up more too, he says.

“And guess what, we're both going into that conversation, making a commitment to being a bit more humble and a bit more curious.

“And I think that's, that's a pretty powerful starting point for a conversation in a in a polarized world.”

Professor Adam Grant is at the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania.