To prevent “cognitive entrenchment,” think like a scientist and be wrong often

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In a rapid­ly chang­ing world, it’s impor­tant to be able to adapt and change rather than stub­born­ly adher­ing to old ideas and opin­ions. This was one of the lessons of 2020, a year that forced us to ques­tion many of our assump­tions about what behav­iors are safe, how work and school can be con­duct­ed, and how we con­nect with others.

“In a chang­ing world, you have to be will­ing and able to change your mind. Oth­er­wise, your exper­tise can fail, your opin­ions get out of date, and your ideas fall flat,” says orga­ni­za­tion­al psy­chol­o­gist Adam Grant, author of the new book Think Again: The Pow­er of Know­ing What You Don’t Know.

In his book, Grant explains why it’s so impor­tant for peo­ple to be hum­bler about their knowl­edge and stay open to learn­ing and chang­ing their minds. The book is filled with fas­ci­nat­ing research and guid­ance on becom­ing more flex­i­ble in our think­ing, while help­ing oth­ers to be more open-mind­ed, too. This skill is cru­cial not only for fac­ing crises like the pan­dem­ic, but also for nav­i­gat­ing com­plex social issues, mak­ing good busi­ness deci­sions, and more.

I spoke to Grant recent­ly about his book and what we can take away from it. Here is an edit­ed ver­sion of our conversation.

Jill Sut­tie: Your book focus­es on the impor­tance of peo­ple ques­tion­ing what they think they know and being open to chang­ing their mind. Why is it so hard to do that?

Adam Grant: It’s hard for a few rea­sons. One is what psy­chol­o­gists call “cog­ni­tive entrench­ment,” which is when you have so much knowl­edge in an area that you start to take for grant­ed assump­tions that need to be ques­tioned. There’s evi­dence, for exam­ple, that when you change the rules of the game for expert bridge play­ers, they real­ly strug­gle, because they don’t real­ize that the strate­gies they’ve used for years don’t apply. There’s also evi­dence that high­ly expe­ri­enced accoun­tants are slow­er to adapt to the new tax laws than novices because they’ve inter­nal­ized a cer­tain way of doing things.

A sec­ond bar­ri­er is moti­va­tion: I don’t want to rethink; I’m com­fort­able with the way I’ve always done things. It makes me feel and look stu­pid if I admit that I was wrong. It’s eas­i­er to just stick to my guns (or my gun bans, depend­ing on where I stand ideologically).

The third rea­son is social. We don’t form beliefs in a vac­u­um. We gen­er­al­ly end up with opin­ions that are influ­enced by and pret­ty much sim­i­lar to the peo­ple in our social cir­cles. So, there’s a risk that if I let go of some of my views, I might be exclud­ed from my tribe, and I don’t want to take that risk.

JS: In your book, you talk about the impor­tance of the “sci­en­tif­ic mind­set.” What do you mean by a sci­en­tif­ic mind­set and how does it help us in rethinking?

AG: I think too many of us spend too much time think­ing like preach­ers, pros­e­cu­tors, and politi­cians. [Phillip] Tet­lock made a very com­pelling case that when we’re in preach­er mode, we’re con­vinced we’re right; when we’re in pros­e­cu­tor mode, we’re try­ing to prove some­one else wrong; and when we’re in politi­cian mode, we’re try­ing to win the approval of our audi­ence. Each of these men­tal modes can stand in the way of “think­ing again,” because in preach­er and pros­e­cu­tor mode, I’m right and you’re wrong, and I don’t need to change my mind. In politi­cian mode, I might tell you what you want to hear, but I’m prob­a­bly not chang­ing what I real­ly think; I’m pos­tur­ing as opposed to rethinking.

Think­ing like a sci­en­tist does not mean you need to own a tele­scope or a micro­scope. It just means that you favor humil­i­ty over pride and curios­i­ty over con­vic­tion. You know what you don’t know, and you’re eager to dis­cov­er new things. You don’t let your ideas become your iden­ti­ty. You look for rea­sons why you might be wrong, not just rea­sons why you must be right. You lis­ten to ideas that make you think hard, not just the ones that make you feel good. And you sur­round your­self with peo­ple who can chal­lenge your process, not just the ones who agree with your conclusion.

JS: Why would peo­ple ever want to look for rea­sons to be wrong?

AG: One of the rea­sons you want to is because if you don’t get good at rethink­ing, then you end up being wrong more often. I think it’s one of the great para­dox­es of life: The quick­er you are to rec­og­nize when you’re wrong, the less wrong you become.

There’s an exper­i­ment where entre­pre­neurs were being taught to think like sci­en­tists that’s such a good demon­stra­tion of some­thing we can all prac­tice. Ital­ian start­up founders went through a three- to four-month crash course in how to start and run a busi­ness. But half of them were ran­dom­ly assigned to think like sci­en­tists, where they’re told that your strat­e­gy is a the­o­ry. You can do cus­tomer inter­views to devel­op spe­cif­ic hypothe­ses, and then when you launch your first prod­uct or ser­vice, think of that as an exper­i­ment and test your hypothesis.

Those entre­pre­neurs that we taught to think like sci­en­tists brought in more than 40 times the rev­enue of the con­trol group. The rea­son for that is they were more than twice as like­ly to piv­ot when their first prod­uct or ser­vice launch didn’t work instead of get­ting their egos all wrapped up in prov­ing that they were right. To me, that is some of the strongest evi­dence that being will­ing to admit you’re wrong can actu­al­ly accel­er­ate your progress toward being right.

JS: But shouldn’t we be able to embrace our exper­tise rather than always giv­ing every idea equal weight?

AG: I’m not say­ing that you shouldn’t have stan­dards. The whole point of rethink­ing is to change your mind in the face of bet­ter log­ic or stronger evidence—not to just roll the dice and say, I’m going to pick a ran­dom new opin­ion today.

There’s a great way of cap­tur­ing what I’m after here, which is some­thing Bob Sut­ton has writ­ten about for years. He defines an atti­tude of wis­dom as act­ing on the best infor­ma­tion you have while doubt­ing what you know. That’s what I’m say­ing here. You need humility.

I think peo­ple mis­un­der­stand what humil­i­ty is. When I talk about humil­i­ty in experts or in lead­ers, peo­ple say, “No, I don’t want to have no self-con­fi­dence. I don’t want to have a low opin­ion of myself.” But, I say, that’s not humil­i­ty. The Latin root of humil­i­ty trans­lates to “from the earth.” It’s about being ground­ed, rec­og­niz­ing that, yes, we have strengths, but we also have weak­ness­es. You’re fal­li­ble. Con­fi­dent humil­i­ty is being able to say, “I don’t know and I might be wrong,” or “I haven’t fig­ured it out yet,” which is essen­tial­ly believ­ing in your­self but doubt­ing your cur­rent knowl­edge or skills.

JS: Peo­ple often seem to not want to rethink, and they’ll use strate­gies to shut down con­ver­sa­tion, like say­ing, “I’m enti­tled to my opin­ion” or “I don’t care what you say, I’m not chang­ing my mind.” How can you encour­age some­body to be more open to rethink­ing if they’re unmotivated?

AG: Your options are not always going to work. But one option is to show your own open­ness and admit that you might be wrong or your knowl­edge might be incom­plete. The rea­son peo­ple shut down is often because they’re afraid of being judged. So, they would rather dis­en­gage and avoid that. But if you say, “Hey, you know what? I’m not sure about my opin­ion here,” there’s a pos­si­bil­i­ty they’ll real­ize that you’re both here to learn from each other.

A sec­ond option might be to ask ques­tions that help to con­sid­er what would open their mind, which at least encour­ages them to con­tem­plate sit­u­a­tions where they might rethink. If they acknowl­edged evi­dence could change their mind, at least it’s a step toward progress.

A third pos­si­bil­i­ty is to do some­thing I’ve been doing since I wrote the book: to acknowl­edge my own stub­born­ness at the begin­ning of these kinds of con­ver­sa­tions and admit that I have a bad habit of going into “log­ic bul­ly mode.” I bom­bard peo­ple with facts and data, but that’s not who I want to be. I want to come into con­ver­sa­tions with peo­ple who dis­agree with me in the hopes that I can learn some­thing from them. I don’t want to be a prosecutor.

So, I invite peo­ple to catch me doing that and ask them to please let me know. A cou­ple of things hap­pen when I do that. One is some­times peo­ple will call me out and it helps me. Just last week, I was in a debate by email with a col­league and he said, “You’re going into lawyer mode again.” It was a good prompt for me to think, “Uh oh, I’d bet­ter rethink the way that I’m hav­ing this fight.” The oth­er thing that hap­pens is when I put my cards on the table, often the oth­er per­son will say, “Oh my gosh, I do that, too. I don’t want to be like that either.” It sets the terms for the con­ver­sa­tion a lit­tle bit.

JS: At the end of your book, you have 30 prac­ti­cal take­aways for rethink­ing. Can you men­tion a few that are par­tic­u­lar­ly impor­tant or eas­i­er to embrace?

AG: One of my favorites is being a “super-fore­cast­er,” which means, when you form an opin­ion, you make a list of con­di­tions that would change your mind. That keeps you hon­est, because once you get attached to an opin­ion, it’s real­ly hard to let go. But if you iden­ti­fy fac­tors that would change your mind up front, you keep your­self flexible.

For encour­ag­ing oth­er peo­ple to think again, you can avoid argu­ment dilu­tion. Most of us try to con­vince peo­ple with as many rea­sons as pos­si­ble, because we think that giv­ing peo­ple more rea­sons makes it eas­i­er for them to change their mind. But we for­get that two things hap­pen. (I’m tempt­ed to give you many more, but I’m going to try to avoid dilut­ing my own argu­ment.) The more rea­sons we give, the more we trig­ger the oth­er person’s aware­ness that we’re try­ing to per­suade them, and they put their guard up. Also, if they’re resis­tant, giv­ing them more rea­sons allows them to pick the least com­pelling rea­son and throw out the whole argument.

The les­son here is, if you have an audi­ence who might be closed to your point of view, some­times it’s more effec­tive to give two rea­sons instead of five. Lead with your strongest argument.

On the col­lec­tive side, I love the idea of doing a rethink­ing check­up. We all go to the doc­tor for reg­u­lar check­ups, even when noth­ing is wrong. We should do the same with the impor­tant deci­sions in our lives. I’ve encour­aged my stu­dents for years to do annu­al career check­ups where they just ask them­selves once or twice a year, “Have I reached a learn­ing plateau? Are the inter­ests and val­ues I had when I came in still impor­tant to me now?” We can do the same thing with our rela­tion­ships or pret­ty much any­thing that’s impor­tant to us.

JS: You write that being wrong is tied to a more joy­ful life. Why is that?

AG: I had noticed Dan­ny Kah­ne­man [the Nobel prize–winning behav­ioral econ­o­mist] just lights up with joy when he finds out that one of his hypothe­ses is false. So, I asked him, “Why do you look so excit­ed when you find out that you’re wrong?” And he cor­rect­ed me. He made clear to me that no one enjoys being wrong, but that he takes real joy in find­ing out that he was wrong, because that means now he’s less wrong than he was before. All of a sud­den, it clicked for me: Being wrong means I’ve learned some­thing. If I find out that I was right, there’s no new knowl­edge or discovery.

In some ways, the joy of being wrong is the free­dom to keep learn­ing. If you can embrace the joy of being wrong, then you get to anchor your iden­ti­ty more in being some­one who’s eager to dis­cov­er new things, than some­one who already knows every­thing or is expect­ed to know everything.

JS: Do you have any hopes for peo­ple engag­ing in rethink­ing as a way of bridg­ing our polit­i­cal divide?

AG: It depends on who’s doing the talk­ing. So many of us fall into bina­ry bias, and we only focus on the most extreme ver­sion of the oth­er side, which is a car­i­ca­ture, where we say they’re either dumb or bad. If you let go of that, there’s a whole com­plex spec­trum and many shades of gray between these two polit­i­cal extremes.

Peter Coleman’s research shows that, instead of intro­duc­ing a com­plex top­ic like abor­tion or guns or cli­mate change as rep­re­sent­ing two sides of the coin, if you can encour­age peo­ple to think about it through the many lens­es of a prism, they become more nuanced and less polar­ized, and they’re more like­ly to find com­mon ground. Any time you see some­one cre­at­ing an “us ver­sus them” dichoto­my, you can ask, “What’s the third angle, what’s the fourth lens on that?” That gives peo­ple the chance to belong to mul­ti­ple belief sys­tems and to open their mind to mul­ti­ple ideas, as opposed to stick­ing to one.

JS: What are your hopes for this book?

AG: I hope that it will encour­age more peo­ple to be more flex­i­ble in their own think­ing, to say they care more about learn­ing and improv­ing them­selves than about prov­ing them­selves. Too many of us get trapped in men­tal pris­ons of our own mak­ing. But if we could be com­mit­ted to rethink­ing, we might have a slight­ly more open-mind­ed society.

— Jill Sut­tie, Psy.D., is Greater Good‘s  book review edi­tor and a fre­quent con­trib­u­tor to the mag­a­zine. Based at UC-Berke­ley, Greater Good high­lights ground break­ing sci­en­tif­ic research into the roots of com­pas­sion and altru­ism. Copy­right Greater Good.

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