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

polarization became more extreme and more visible, the solution seemed obvious to me. We needed to burst filter bubbles in our news feeds and shatter echo chambers in our networks. If we could just show people the other side of an issue, they would open their minds and become more informed. Peter’s research challenges that assumption.

We now know that where complicated issues are concerned, seeing the opinions of the other side is not enough. Social media platforms have exposed us to them, but they haven’t changed our minds. Knowing another side exists isn’t sufficient to leave preachers doubting whether they’re on the right side of morality, prosecutors questioning whether they’re on the right side of the case, or politicians wondering whether they’re on the right side of history. Hearing an opposing opinion doesn’t necessarily motivate you to rethink your own stance; it makes it easier for you to stick to your guns (or your gun bans). Presenting two extremes isn’t the solution; it’s part of the polarization problem.

Psychologists have a name for this: binary bias. It’s a basic human tendency to seek clarity and closure by simplifying a complex continuum into two categories. To paraphrase the humorist Robert Benchley, there are two kinds of people: those who divide the world into two kinds of people, and those who don’t.

An antidote to this proclivity is complexifying: showcasing the range of perspectives on a given topic. We might believe we’re making progress by discussing hot-button issues as two sides of a coin, but people are actually more inclined to think again if we present these topics through the many lenses of a prism. To borrow a phrase from Walt Whitman, it takes a multitude of views to help people realize that they too contain multitudes.

A dose of complexity can disrupt overconfidence cycles and spur rethinking cycles. It gives us more humility about our knowledge and more doubts about our opinions, and it can make us curious enough to discover information we were lacking. In Peter’s experiment, all it took was framing gun control not as an issue with only two extreme positions but rather as one involving many interrelated dilemmas. As journalist Amanda Ripley describes it, the gun control article “read less like a lawyer’s opening statement and more like an anthropologist’s field notes.” Those field notes were enough to help pro-life and pro-choice advocates find some areas of agreement on abortion in only twenty minutes.

The article didn’t just leave people open to rethinking their views on abortion; they also reconsidered their positions on other divisive issues like affirmative action and the death penalty.* If people read the binary version of the article, they defended their own perspective more often than they showed an interest in their opponent’s. If they read the complexified version, they made about twice as many comments about common ground as about their own views. They asserted fewer opinions and asked more questions. At the end of the conversation, they generated more sophisticated, higher-quality position statements—and both parties came away more satisfied.

For a long time, I struggled with how to handle politics in this book. I don’t have any silver bullets or simple bridges across a widening gulf. I don’t really even believe in political parties. As an organizational psychologist, I want to vet candidates’ leadership skills before I worry about their policy positions. As a citizen, I believe it’s my responsibility to form an independent opinion on each issue. Eventually, I decided that the best way to stay above the fray was to explore the moments that affect us all as individuals: the charged conversations we have in person and online.

Resisting the impulse to simplify is a step toward becoming more argument literate. Doing so has profound implications for how we communicate about polarizing issues. In the traditional media, it can help journalists open people’s minds to uncomfortable facts. On social media, it can help all of us have more productive Twitter tiffs and Facebook fights. At family gatherings, it might not land you on the same page as your least favorite uncle, but it could very well prevent a seemingly innocent conversation from exploding into an emotional inferno. And in discussions of policies that affect all of our lives, it might bring us better, more practical solutions sooner. That’s what this section of the book is about: applying rethinking to different parts of our lives, so that we can keep learning at every stage of our lives.

Non Sequitur © 2016 Wiley Ink, Inc. Dist. by ANDREWS MCMEEL SYNDICATION. Reprinted with permission. All rights reserved.

SOME INCONVENIENT TRUTHS

In 2006, Al Gore starred in a blockbuster film on climate change, An Inconvenient Truth. It won the Academy Award for Best Documentary and spawned a wave of activism, motivating businesses to go green and governments to pass legislation and sign landmark agreements to protect the planet. History teaches us that it sometimes takes a combination of preaching, prosecuting, and politicking to fuel that kind of dramatic swing.

Yet by 2018, only 59 percent of Americans saw climate change as a major threat—and 16 percent believed it wasn’t a threat at all. Across many countries in Western Europe and Southeast Asia, higher percentages of the populations had opened their minds to the evidence that climate change is a dire problem. In the past decade in the United States, beliefs about climate change have hardly budged.

This thorny issue is a natural place to explore how we can bring more complexity into our conversations. Fundamentally, that involves drawing attention to the nuances that often get overlooked. It starts with seeking and spotlighting shades of gray.

A fundamental lesson of desirability bias is that our beliefs are shaped by our motivations. What we believe depends on what we want to believe. Emotionally, it can be unsettling for anyone to admit that all life as we know it might be in danger, but Americans have some additional reasons to be dubious about climate change. Politically, climate change has been branded in the United States