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77 pages 2 hours read

Adam Grant

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

Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2021

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Key Figures

Adam Grant

Adam Grant, the author, is a professor of organizational psychology at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. A Michigan native, Grant earned his BA from Harvard College before going on to earn his PhD from the University of Michigan. He began his career at the University of North Carolina before accepting a faculty position at the University of Pennsylvania, where he became the college’s youngest tenured professor at just 28 years old.

Grant is the author of several books on organizational psychology as well as numerous academic papers, and as he discusses in Think Again, frequently consults with large companies on organizational and psychological problems. In addition to his academic work, he is the host of the WorkLife podcast and an entrepreneur. He is also on the board of the Lean In Foundation, the organization founded by Sheryl Sandberg, with whom Grant coauthored Option B (2017).

Halla Tómasdóttir

Tómasdóttir is a former presidential candidate in Iceland. Grant introduces Tómasdóttir in Chapter 2, in which he argues for confident humility as a means of counteracting blind spots and overconfidence. In 2015, Tómasdóttir was urged to run for the presidency. However, despite her previous successes and experience, and her current support, Tómasdóttir was initially reluctant to run because she felt she wasn’t qualified enough. At the same time, however, Davíð Oddsson, a former prime minister who was largely responsible for Iceland’s 2009 financial collapse, still believed that he was so qualified that he ran himself.

Grant initially introduces Tómasdóttir and Oddsson to demonstrate two opposing ends of the confidence spectrum. Tómasdóttir suffered from imposter syndrome, which made her believe she was unqualified when she was perfectly capable. On the other hand, Oddsson showed signs of the Dunning-Kruger effect, in which he believed he was far more qualified than he was simply because he didn’t know what he didn’t know, and his arrogance prevented him from getting expert advice. In the end, though, Tómasdóttir’s story demonstrates the power of confident humility. She eventually came around and gained confidence in herself, but she remained humble enough to be open to new ideas in the process. As a result, although she didn’t win the election, she finished second and defeated Oddsson.

The Wright Brothers

The Wright Brothers, Orville and Wilbur Wright, invented the first working airplane, which flew in Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, in 1903. The brothers were the son of a bishop who promoted debate and alternative ways of thinking. As Grant writes, their father “included books by atheists in his library—and encouraged the children to read and debate them” (81). As a result, while they grew up close and continued to work well professionally, they were raised in an environment that promoted conflict, and they learned to have long, productive arguments.

Grant includes the Wright Brothers in Chapter 4 in order to frame his conversation about relationship and task conflict. Grant argues that although relationship conflict can be detrimental to a team’s success, task conflict can be productive under the right circumstances, namely that those involved learn to separate ideas from people. The Wright Brothers did exactly that. Although they had legendary, heated arguments about their ideas, they never took the arguments personally and always shrugged the incidents off by the following day. Grant suggests that this ability to make task conflict productive ultimately helped them solve a key problem in inventing the airplane.

Harish Natarajan

Harish Natarajan is a world-champion debater, widely considered to be the best in the world. In Chapter 5, Grant uses Natarajan’s debate with Project Debater, an IBM machine-learning project, to demonstrate how we can more effectively persuade people who are skeptical of our positions.

The topic of the debate was preschool subsidies, and although Natarajan was given the more difficult task of arguing against them, he won the debate by drawing people over to his side. Grant, in speaking with Natarajan and analyzing his performance, identifies several key factors important to his success that we can apply to our own lives. First, Natarajan begins his debates by searching for common ground with his opponents, and he openly acknowledges their strong points; second, he focuses on a small number of strong arguments; finally, he spends more time asking questions. Grant acknowledges that these tactics won’t work in all situations, but in most situations, they are more likely to persuade a skeptical audience than more forceful argumentation.

Daryl Davis

Daryl Davis, introduced in Chapter 6, is man who, since the 1980s, has made it a mission to speak with and convert members of the Ku Klux Klan. Davis was a musician who found himself in a conversation with a KKK member after a Maryland gig in 1983 (Davis is Black). Rather than reacting with horror or disgust, however, Davis instead asked the man how he could hate someone he’s never met. This question sparked a lengthy relationship, and the man eventually renounced his earlier beliefs and membership in the KKK. From that time, Davis has spoken with numerous members and leaders of the organization, convincing many of them to rethink their beliefs and leave the hate group.

Grant introduces Davis in a chapter that explores how we can use methods of rethinking and conversation in order to overcome prejudice. Grant views prejudice as a deeply held, but arbitrary, belief that has become such a part of the person’s core identity that they simply never stop to think about where it came from. With these kinds of arbitrary, but fundamental, beliefs, Grant argues that they can be overcome by asking people to consider the arbitrariness of the belief along with counterfactuals, or exercises in examining our own roots. Davis uses both these techniques in his conversations through the simple, above question, as it both highlights the arbitrary nature of the hatred and asks people to examine the roots of it. Although Grant is careful to warn that it shouldn’t be on the victim to force these conversations, he nevertheless demonstrates through Davis how such rethinking can happen.

Bill Miller, Stephen Rollnick, and Arnaud Gagneur

Bill Miller and Stephen Rollnick are the researchers who developed the motivational interviewing framework in the 1980s. This framework originally sought to rethink how we approach substance abuse treatment by taking a less adversarial approach and beginning from the assumption that only the client can find the motivation to change. This framework emphasizes open-ended questions that root out change language as opposed to sustain language; this is in contrast to more forceful methods of intervention, which put substance abuse victims on the defensive and make them resistant to change.

Grant introduces motivational interviewing in Chapter 7 in the contemporary moment through the “vaccine whisperer,” Arnaud Gagneur, as a means of combatting vaccine hesitancy. Gagneur is a specialist in Quebec who meets with vaccine hesitant parents to discuss their concerns. While Gagneur’s goal is to convince them to vaccinate their children, his method is to get them to discuss their own concerns and potentially identify what make them open to changing their minds. This ties into Grant’s larger claim that in order to persuade and convince, we need to first be open to and respect others’ perspectives and beliefs.

Peter Coleman

Peter Coleman runs the Difficult Conversations Lab at Columbia University in Manhattan. The lab pairs people with opposing views on controversial topics together and asks them to simply discuss the topic for 20 minutes. At the end, if they can come to an agreement, they sign a statement indicating success. Coleman’s aim is to revere-engineer successful conversations; his research suggests that by reminding participants that such topics are very complex, they are generally able to come to an agreement.

Grant discusses Coleman in Chapter 8, a chapter on the increasingly polarized society. Grant’s argument, following Coleman, is that in order to become less polarized, we can’t just expose opposing camps to one another’s beliefs, but rather must complexify issues in the way that Coleman does. By recognizing that controversial topics have a diverse range of perspectives and complex issues, not just two binary opposites, people are generally able to be more receptive to perspectives that differ from their own.

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