How To Change Your Mind (Maybe)

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

America is arguably plagued with a crisis of overconfidence. Politicians, business professionals, and pundits can’t be shaken from their opinions. Everyone from bankers to athletic coaches keeps supporting their investments, even after they’ve proven themselves unreliable. Why are so many people unwilling to change their minds? And is there any way to reverse this apparently culture-wide aversion to basic rethinking?

I had two different opinions about Wharton organizational psychologist Adam Grant’s latest book. While reading, I felt very genial toward his message, that constantly reëvaluating our own beliefs strengthens our position, and makes it more likely that we’re ultimately correct. He uses the latest research from psychology and behavioral economics to justify his position, but he restates that research in plain English, so us ordinary readers grasp the import of his message.

However, I took few notes while reading, and when I sat to write this review, I realized I couldn’t remember very much of what he’d said. Grant made what felt, as I was reading, like several important and substantive points. However, he made them in ways that had no mental adhesion, that slid off my recollection like bugs off a windshield. If I can’t recall them, just two hours later, have his points really changed my mind?

Not that Grant says nothing memorable. Throughout his book, he emphasizes the importance of “thinking like a scientist.” This means using knowledge, not as absolute truth, but as the foundation for hypothesis and experiment. Good scientists test all knowledge against emerging evidence, and when the evidence requires it, they change their minds. To scientists, being proven wrong isn’t evidence of weakness; it’s a sign that they’re still growing.

Grant contrasts thinking like a scientist to the other roles our thinking often falls into: preacher, prosecutor, and politician. That is, we preach the truth of our own understanding, prosecute supposed flaws in others’ understanding, and politically hedge between these extremes to make our understanding useful. All these, Grant admits, are useful roles, in their place. But too often, we let them dominate us, and we pay for it.

Adam Grant

This broad outline makes sense. The extreme intellectual and political intolerance which dominates modern discourse comes from people seeing their ideas, not as tentative expressions of the best evidence, but as extensions of their own identity. Too many people respond to friendly intellectual challenges like they’d respond to a bear attack. This individualistic approach is personally harmful, and it prevents us getting any closer to resolving our differences.

In justifying this outline, however, Grant caroms wildly. In an early chapter, he draws an analogy between rigid, hidebound thinking, and the way the once-popular Blackberry Corporation collapsed because it couldn’t adapt to changing tides. It’s a valid analogy. Except he lays the premise, then leaves for so long that, when he returns to it, I’d forgotten the premise, and had to skip backward to remember what he was talking about.

He repeats this hit-and-run technique with multiple examples: Apple Computer, Pixar Animation, the anti-vax movement, his own cousin’s medical career. He dips in, makes his point, and zooms away, in a manner that arguably would work well in a TED Talk or other oral format. In a book, where audiences expect thoughtful authors to unpack weighty topics with appropriate gravity, the product just looks chaotic.

Maybe it’s the format. Like multiple scholars writing nonfiction for a general-interest market (Malcolm Gladwell and Naomi Klein come to mind), Professor Grant feels obligated to make his narrative fast-moving, concise, and peppy. However, he’s addressing a topic where his audience has precast opinions, and where he often has to overcome deep intransigence. As Grant himself notes, “There's a fine line between heroic persistence and foolish stubbornness.”

I found plenty in Grant’s writing that stuck with me. His chapter on Motivational Interviewing, a technique of persuasion through asking questions rather than making statements, gave me plenty to consider. Particularly since I formerly struggled to overcome my students’ ingrained beliefs by making statements, which they found easy to ignore, I really enjoyed Grant’s insights into this topic, and will definitely read further and utilize this technique.

On balance, I’m glad I read this book. Professor Grant gives readers important insights, encourages us to reframe our own thinking processes, and shows us how successful rethinkers have made their approach systemic. Perhaps I’ll reread the book, taking more notes the second time. But this book didn’t really change me, ironically. In today’s busy, time-crunched environment, most readers won’t give books that second chance.