Think Again: The Power of Knowing What You Don't Know by Adam Grant (sad books to read txt) 📕

ENTERING A PARALLEL UNIVERSE

Outside the lab, dismantling stereotypes and decreasing prejudice rarely happen overnight. Even if people aren’t on guard from the start, they’re quick to put their defenses up when their attitudes are challenged. Getting through to them requires more than just telling them that their views are arbitrary. A key step is getting them to do some counterfactual thinking: helping them consider what they’d believe if they were living in an alternative reality.

In psychology, counterfactual thinking involves imagining how the circumstances of our lives could have unfolded differently. When we realize how easily we could have held different stereotypes, we might be more willing to update our views.* To activate counterfactual thinking, you might ask people questions like: How would your stereotypes be different if you’d been born Black, Hispanic, Asian, or Native American? What opinions would you hold if you’d been raised on a farm versus in a city, or in a culture on the other side of the world? What beliefs would you cling to if you lived in the 1700s?

You’ve already learned from debate champions and expert negotiators that asking people questions can motivate them to rethink their conclusions. What’s different about these kinds of counterfactual questions is that they invite people to explore the origins of their own beliefs—and reconsider their stances toward other groups.

People gain humility when they reflect on how different circumstances could have led them to different beliefs. They might conclude that some of their past convictions had been too simplistic and begin to question some of their negative views. That doubt could leave them more curious about groups they’ve stereotyped, and they might end up discovering some unexpected commonalities.

Recently, I stumbled onto an opportunity to encourage some counterfactual thinking. A startup founder asked me to join an all-hands meeting to share insights on how to better understand other people’s personalities and our own. During our virtual fireside chat, she mentioned that she was an astrology fan and the company was full of them. I wondered if I could get some of them to see that they held inaccurate stereotypes about people based on the month in which they happened to be born. Here’s an excerpt of what happened:

Me: You know we have no evidence whatsoever that horoscopes influence personality, right?

Founder: That’s such a Capricorn thing to say.

Me: I think I’m a Leo. I’d love to find out what evidence would change your mind.

Founder: So my partner has been trying for as long as we’ve been dating. He’s given up. There’s nothing that can convince me otherwise.

Me: Then you’re not thinking like a scientist. This is a religion for you.

Founder: Yeah, well, maybe a little.

Me: What if you’d been born in China instead of the U.S.? Some evidence just came out that if you’re a Virgo in China, you get discriminated against in hiring and also in dating. These poor Virgos are stereotyped as being difficult and ornery.*

Founder: So in the West, Adam, that same discrimination happens to Scorpios.

Although the founder started out resistant to my argument, after considering how she might hold different stereotypes if she lived in China, she recognized a familiar pattern. She’d seen an entire group of people mistreated as a result of the positions of the sun and the moon on the day they happened to enter the world.

Realizing how unfair discrimination based on zodiac signs was, the founder ended up jumping in to help me build my case. As we wrapped up the conversation, I offered to do a follow-up discussion on the science of personality. More than a quarter of the company signed up to participate. Afterward, one of the participants wrote that “the biggest takeaway from this chat is the importance of ‘unlearning’ things to avoid being ignorant.” Having grasped how arbitrary their stereotypes were, people were now more open to rethinking their views.

Psychologists find that many of our beliefs are cultural truisms: widely shared, but rarely questioned. If we take a closer look at them, we often discover that they rest on shaky foundations. Stereotypes don’t have the structural integrity of a carefully built ship. They’re more like a tower in the game of Jenga—teetering on a small number of blocks, with some key supports missing. To knock it over, sometimes all we need to do is give it a poke. The hope is that people will rise to the occasion and build new beliefs on a stronger foundation.

Can this approach extend to bigger divisions among people? I don’t believe for a minute that it will solve the Israel-Palestine conflict or stop racism. I do think it’s a step, though, toward something more fundamental than merely rethinking our stereotypes. We might question the underlying belief that it makes sense to hold opinions about groups at all.

If you get people to pause and reflect, they might decide that the very notion of applying group stereotypes to individuals is absurd. Research suggests that there are more similarities between groups than we recognize. And there’s typically more variety within groups than between them.

Sometimes letting go of stereotypes means realizing that many members of a hated group aren’t so terrible after all. And that’s more likely to happen when we actually come face-to-face with them. For over half a century, social scientists have tested the effects of intergroup contact. In a meta-analysis of over five hundred studies with over 250,000 participants, interacting with members of another group reduced prejudice in 94 percent of the cases. Although intergroup communication isn’t a panacea, that is a staggering statistic. The most effective way to help people pull the unsteady Jenga blocks out of their stereotype towers is to talk with them in person. Which is precisely what Daryl Davis did.

HOW A BLACK MUSICIAN CONFRONTS WHITE SUPREMACISTS

One day, Daryl was driving his car with the chief officer of a KKK chapter, whose official title was Exalted Cyclops. Before long, the Cyclops was sharing his stereotypes of Black people.