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

by Adam Grant

  It can help to make that respect explicit at the start of a conversation. In one experiment, if an ideological opponent merely began by acknowledging that “I have a lot of respect for people like you who stand by their principles,” people were less likely to see her as an adversary—and showed her more generosity.

  When Peter Coleman brings people together in his Difficult Conversations Lab, he plays them the recording of their discussions afterward. What he wants to learn is how they were feeling, moment by moment, as they listen to themselves. After studying over five hundred of these conversations, he found that the unproductive ones feature a more limited set of both positive and negative emotions, as illustrated below in the image on the left. People get trapped in emotional simplicity, with one or two dominant feelings.

  As you can see with the duo on the right, the productive conversations cover a much more varied spectrum of emotions. They’re not less emotional—they’re more emotionally complex. At one point, people might be angry about the other person’s views, but by the next minute they’re curious to learn more. Soon they could be shifting into anxiety and then excitement about considering a new perspective. Sometimes they even stumble into the joy of being wrong.

  In a productive conversation, people treat their feelings as a rough draft. Like art, emotions are works in progress. It rarely serves us well to frame our first sketch. As we gain perspective, we revise what we feel. Sometimes we even start over from scratch.

  What stands in the way of rethinking isn’t the expression of emotion; it’s a restricted range of emotion. So how do we infuse our charged conversations with greater emotional variety—and thereby greater potential for mutual understanding and rethinking?

  It helps to remember that we can fall victim to binary bias with emotions, not only with issues. Just as the spectrum of beliefs on charged topics is much more complex than two extremes, our emotions are often more mixed than we realize.* If you come across evidence that you might be wrong about the best path to gun safety, you can simultaneously feel upset by and intrigued with what you’ve learned. If you feel wronged by someone with a different set of beliefs, you can be simultaneously angry about your past interactions and hopeful about a future relationship. If someone says your actions haven’t lived up to your antiracist rhetoric, you can experience both defensiveness (I’m a good person!) and remorse (I could’ve done a lot more).

  In the spring of 2020, a Black man named Christian Cooper was bird-watching in Central Park when a white woman walked by with her dog. He respectfully asked her to put the dog on a leash, as the nearby signs required. When she refused, he stayed calm and started filming her on his phone. She responded by informing him that she was going to call the police and “tell them there’s an African American man threatening my life.” She went on to do exactly that with a 911 operator.

  When the video of the encounter went viral, the continuum of emotional reactions on social media rightfully spanned from moral outrage to sheer rage. The incident called to mind a painful history of false criminal accusations made against Black men by white women, which often ended with devastating consequences. It was appalling that the woman didn’t leash her dog—and her prejudice.

  “I’m not a racist. I did not mean to harm that man in any way,” the woman declared in her public apology. “I think I was just scared.” Her simple explanation overlooks the complex emotions that fueled her actions. She could have stopped to ask why she had been afraid—what views about Black men had led her to feel threatened in a polite conversation? She could have paused to consider why she had felt entitled to lie to the police—what power dynamics had made her feel this was acceptable?

  Her simple denial overlooks the complex reality that racism is a function of our actions, not merely our intentions. As historian Ibram X. Kendi writes, “Racist and antiracist are not fixed identities. We can be a racist one minute and an antiracist the next.” Humans, like polarizing issues, rarely come in binaries.

  When asked whether he accepted her apology, Christian Cooper refused to make a simple judgment, offering a nuanced assessment:

  I think her apology is sincere. I’m not sure if in that apology she recognizes that while she may not be or consider herself a racist, that particular act was definitely racist. . . .

  Granted, it was a stressful situation, a sudden situation, maybe a moment of spectacularly poor judgment, but she went there. . . .

  Is she a racist? I can’t answer that—only she can answer that . . . going forward with how she conducts herself, and how she chooses to reflect on the situation and examine it.

  By expressing his mixed emotions and his uncertainty about how to judge the woman, Christian signaled his willingness to rethink the situation and encouraged others to rethink their own reactions. You might even be experiencing some complex emotions as you read this.

  It shouldn’t be up to the victim to inject complexity into a difficult conversation. Rethinking should start with the offender. If the woman had taken responsibility for reevaluating her beliefs and behaviors, she might have become an example to others who recognized a bit of themselves in her reaction. Although she couldn’t change what she’d already done, by recognizing the complex power dynamics that breed and perpetuate systemic racism, she might have spurred deeper discussions of the range of possible steps toward justice.

  Charged conversations cry out for nuance. When we’re preaching, prosecuting, or politicking, the complexity of reality can seem like an inconvenient truth. In scientist mode, it can be an invigorating truth—it means there are new opportunities for understanding and for progress.

  CHAPTER 9

  Rewriting the Textbook

  Teaching Students to Question Knowledge

  No schooling was allowed to interfere with my education.

  —Grant Allen

  A decade ago, if you had told Erin McCarthy she would become a teacher, she would have laughed. When she graduated from college, the last thing she wanted to do was teach. She was fascinated by history but bored by her social studies classes. Searching for a way to breathe life into overlooked objects and forgotten events, Erin started her career working in museums. Before long, she found herself writing a resource manual for teachers, leading school tours, and engaging students in interactive programs. She realized that the enthusiasm she saw on field trips was missing in too many classrooms, and she decided to do something about it.

  For the past eight years, Erin has taught social studies in the Milwaukee area. Her mission is to cultivate curiosity about the past, but also to motivate students to update their knowledge in the present. In 2020, she was named Wisconsin’s Teacher of the Year.

  One day, an eighth grader complained that the reading assignment from a history textbook was inaccurate. If you’re a teacher, that kind of criticism could be a nightmare. Using an outdated textbook would be a sign that you don’t know your material, and it would be embarrassing if your students noticed the error before you did.

  But Erin had assigned that particular reading intentionally. She collects old history books because she enjoys seeing how the stories we tell change over time, and she decided to give her students part of a textbook from 1940. Some of them just accepted the information it presented at face value. Through years of education, they had come to take it for granted that textbooks told the truth. Others were shocked by errors and omissions. It was ingrained in their minds that their readings were filled with incontrovertible facts. The lesson led them to start thinking like scientists and questioning what they were learning: whose story was included, whose was excluded, and what were they missing if only one or two perspectives were shared?

  After opening her students’ eyes to the fact that knowledge can evolve, Erin’s next step was to show them that it’s always evolving. To set up a unit on expansion in the West, she created her own textbook section describing what it’s like to be a middle-school stude
nt today. All the protagonists were women and girls, and all the generic pronouns were female. In the first year she introduced the material, a student raised his hand to point out that the boys were missing. “But there’s one boy,” Erin replied. “Boys were around. They just weren’t doing anything important.” It was an aha moment for the student: he suddenly realized what it was like for an entire group to be marginalized for hundreds of years.

  My favorite assignment of Erin’s is her final one. As a passionate champion of inquiry-based learning, she sends her eighth graders off to do self-directed research in which they inspect, investigate, interrogate, and interpret. Their active learning culminates in a group project: they pick a chapter from their textbook, choosing a time period that interests them and a theme in history that they see as underrepresented. Then they go off to rewrite it.

  One group took on the civil rights chapter for failing to cover the original March on Washington, which was called off at the last minute in the early 1940s but inspired Martin Luther King Jr.’s historic march two decades later. Other groups revised the chapter on World War II to include the infantry regiments of Hispanic soldiers and second-generation Japanese soldiers who fought for the U.S. Army. “It’s a huge light-bulb moment,” Erin told me.

  Even if you’re not a teacher by profession, you probably have roles in which you spend time educating others—whether as a parent, a mentor, a friend, or a colleague. In fact, every time we try to help someone think again, we’re doing a kind of education. Whether we do our instruction in a classroom or in a boardroom, in an office or at our kitchen table, there are ways to make rethinking central to what—and how—we teach.

  With so much emphasis placed on imparting knowledge and building confidence, many teachers don’t do enough to encourage students to question themselves and one another. To figure out what it takes to change that mindset, I tracked down some extraordinary educators who foster rethinking cycles by instilling intellectual humility, disseminating doubt, and cultivating curiosity. I also tested a few of my own ideas by turning my classroom into something of a living lab.

  LEARNING, INTERRUPTED

  Looking back on my own early education, one of my biggest disappointments is that I never got to fully experience the biggest upheavals in science. Long before it ever occurred to me to be curious about the cosmos, my teachers started demystifying it in kindergarten. I often wonder how I would have felt if I was a teenager when I first learned that we don’t live on a static, flat disc, but on a spinning, moving sphere.

  I hope I would have been stunned, and that disbelief would have quickly given way to curiosity and eventually the awe of discovery and the joy of being wrong. I also suspect it would have been a life-changing lesson in confident humility. If I could be that mistaken about what was under my own two feet, how many other so-called truths were actually question marks? Sure, I knew that many earlier generations of humans had gotten it wrong, but there’s a huge difference between learning about other people’s false beliefs and actually learning to unbelieve things ourselves.

  I realize this thought experiment is wildly impractical. It’s hard enough to keep kids in the dark about Santa Claus or the Tooth Fairy. Even if we could pull off such a delay, there’s a risk that some students would seize and freeze on what they learned early on. They could become trapped in an overconfidence cycle where pride in false knowledge fuels conviction, and confirmation and desirability biases lead to validation. Before you know it, we might have a whole nation of flat-earthers.

  Evidence shows that if false scientific beliefs aren’t addressed in elementary school, they become harder to change later. “Learning counterintuitive scientific ideas [is] akin to becoming a fluent speaker of a second language,” psychologist Deborah Kelemen writes. It’s “a task that becomes increasingly difficult the longer it is delayed, and one that is almost never achieved with only piecemeal instruction and infrequent practice.” That’s what kids really need: frequent practice at unlearning, especially when it comes to the mechanisms of how cause and effect work.

  In the field of history education, there’s a growing movement to ask questions that don’t have a single right answer. In a curriculum developed at Stanford, high school students are encouraged to critically examine what really caused the Spanish-American War, whether the New Deal was a success, and why the Montgomery bus boycott was a watershed moment. Some teachers even send students out to interview people with whom they disagree. The focus is less on being right, and more on building the skills to consider different views and argue productively about them.

  That doesn’t mean all interpretations are accepted as valid. When the son of a Holocaust survivor came to her class, Erin McCarthy told her students that some people denied the existence of the Holocaust, and taught them to examine the evidence and reject those false claims. This is part of a broader movement to teach kids to think like fact-checkers: the guidelines include (1) “interrogate information instead of simply consuming it,” (2) “reject rank and popularity as a proxy for reliability,” and (3) “understand that the sender of information is often not its source.”

  These principles are valuable beyond the classroom. At our family dinner table, we sometimes hold myth-busting discussions. My wife and I have shared how we learned in school that Pluto was a planet (not true anymore) and Columbus discovered America (never true). Our kids have taught us that King Tut probably didn’t die in a chariot accident and gleefully explained that when sloths do their version of a fart, the gas comes not from their behinds but from their mouths.

  Rethinking needs to become a regular habit. Unfortunately, traditional methods of education don’t always allow students to form that habit.

  THE DUMBSTRUCK EFFECT

  It’s week twelve of physics class, and you get to attend a couple of sessions with a new, highly rated instructor to learn about static equilibrium and fluids. The first session is on statics; it’s a lecture. The second is on fluids, and it’s an active-learning session. One of your roommates has a different, equally popular instructor who does the opposite—using active learning for statics and lecturing on fluids.

  In both cases the content and the handouts are identical; the only difference is the delivery method. During the lecture the instructor presents slides, gives explanations, does demonstrations, and solves sample problems, and you take notes on the handouts. In the active-learning session, instead of doing the example problems himself, the instructor sends the class off to figure them out in small groups, wandering around to ask questions and offer tips before walking the class through the solution. At the end, you fill out a survey.

  In this experiment the topic doesn’t matter: the teaching method is what shapes your experience. I expected active learning to win the day, but the data suggest that you and your roommate will both enjoy the subject more when it’s delivered by lecture. You’ll also rate the instructor who lectures as more effective—and you’ll be more likely to say you wish all your physics courses were taught that way.

  Upon reflection, the appeal of dynamic lectures shouldn’t be surprising. For generations, people have admired the rhetorical eloquence of poets like Maya Angelou, politicians like John F. Kennedy Jr. and Ronald Reagan, preachers like Martin Luther King Jr., and teachers like Richard Feynman. Today we live in a golden age of spellbinding speaking, where great orators engage and educate from platforms with unprecedented reach. Creatives used to share their methods in small communities; now they can accumulate enough YouTube and Instagram subscribers to populate a small country. Pastors once gave sermons to hundreds at church; now they can reach hundreds of thousands over the internet in megachurches. Professors used to teach small enough classes that they could spend individual time with each student; now their lessons can be broadcast to millions through online courses.

  It’s clear that these lectures are entertaining and informative. The question is whether they’re the ideal method of teachi
ng. In the physics experiment, the students took tests to gauge how much they had learned about statics and fluids. Despite enjoying the lectures more, they actually gained more knowledge and skill from the active-learning session. It required more mental effort, which made it less fun but led to deeper understanding.

  For a long time, I believed that we learn more when we’re having fun. This research convinced me I was wrong. It also reminded me of my favorite physics teacher, who got stellar reviews for letting us play Ping-Pong in class, but didn’t quite make the coefficient of friction stick.

  Active learning has impact far beyond physics. A meta-analysis compared the effects of lecturing and active learning on students’ mastery of the material, cumulating 225 studies with over 46,000 undergraduates in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM). Active-learning methods included group problem solving, worksheets, and tutorials. On average, students scored half a letter grade worse under traditional lecturing than through active learning—and students were 1.55 times more likely to fail in classes with traditional lecturing. The researchers estimate that if the students who failed in lecture courses had participated in active learning, more than $3.5 million in tuition could have been saved.

  It’s not hard to see why a boring lecture would fail, but even captivating lectures can fall short for a less obvious, more concerning reason. Lectures aren’t designed to accommodate dialogue or disagreement; they turn students into passive receivers of information rather than active thinkers. In the above meta-analysis, lecturing was especially ineffective in debunking known misconceptions—in leading students to think again. And experiments have shown that when a speaker delivers an inspiring message, the audience scrutinizes the material less carefully and forgets more of the content—even while claiming to remember more of it.