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

support your clients and address their problems. If you’re a mechanic or an accountant, being an emotional genius is less useful and could even become a distraction. If you’re fixing my car or doing my taxes, I’d rather you didn’t pay too much attention to my emotions.

In an effort to set the record straight, I wrote a short LinkedIn post arguing that emotional intelligence is overrated. I did my best to follow my own guidelines for complexity:

Nuance: This isn’t to say that emotional intelligence is useless.

Caveats: As better tests of emotional intelligence are designed, our knowledge may change.

Contingencies: For now, the best available evidence suggests that emotional intelligence is not a panacea. Let’s recognize it for what it is: a set of skills that can be beneficial in situations where emotional information is rich or vital.

Over a thousand comments poured in, and I was pleasantly surprised that many reacted enthusiastically to the complexified message. Some mentioned that nothing is either/or and that data can help us reexamine even our closely held beliefs. Others were downright hostile. They turned a blind eye to the evidence and insisted that emotional intelligence was the sine qua non of success. It was as if they belonged to an emotional intelligence cult.

From time to time I’ve run into idea cults—groups that stir up a batch of oversimplified intellectual Kool-Aid and recruit followers to serve it widely. They preach the merits of their pet concept and prosecute anyone who calls for nuance or complexity. In the area of health, idea cults defend detox diets and cleanses long after they’ve been exposed as snake oil. In education, there are idea cults around learning styles—the notion that instruction should be tailored to each student’s preference for learning through auditory, visual, or kinesthetic modes. Some teachers are determined to tailor their instruction accordingly despite decades of evidence that although students might enjoy listening, reading, or doing, they don’t actually learn better that way. In psychology, I’ve inadvertently offended members of idea cults when I’ve shared evidence that meditation isn’t the only way to prevent stress or promote mindfulness; that when it comes to reliability and validity, the Myers-Briggs personality tool falls somewhere between a horoscope and a heart monitor; and that being more authentic can sometimes make us less successful. If you find yourself saying ____ is always good or ____ is never bad, you may be a member of an idea cult. Appreciating complexity reminds us that no behavior is always effective and that all cures have unintended consequences.

xkcd.com

In the moral philosophy of John Rawls, the veil of ignorance asks us to judge the justice of a society by whether we’d join it without knowing our place in it. I think the scientist’s veil of ignorance is to ask whether we’d accept the results of a study based on the methods involved, without knowing what the conclusion will be.

MIXED FEELINGS

In polarized discussions, a common piece of advice is to take the other side’s perspective. In theory, putting ourselves in another person’s shoes enables us to walk in lockstep with them. In practice, though, it’s not that simple.

In a pair of experiments, randomly assigning people to reflect on the intentions and interests of their political opposites made them less receptive to rethinking their own attitudes on health care and universal basic income. Across twenty-five experiments, imagining other people’s perspectives failed to elicit more accurate insights—and occasionally made participants more confident in their own inaccurate judgments. Perspective-taking consistently fails because we’re terrible mind readers. We’re just guessing.

If we don’t understand someone, we can’t have a eureka moment by imagining his perspective. Polls show that Democrats underestimate the number of Republicans who recognize the prevalence of racism and sexism—and Republicans underestimate the number of Democrats who are proud to be Americans and oppose open borders. The greater the distance between us and an adversary, the more likely we are to oversimplify their actual motives and invent explanations that stray far from their reality. What works is not perspective-taking but perspective-seeking: actually talking to people to gain insight into the nuances of their views. That’s what good scientists do: instead of drawing conclusions about people based on minimal clues, they test their hypotheses by striking up conversations.

For a long time, I believed that the best way to make those conversations less polarizing was to leave emotions out of them. If only we could keep our feelings off the table, we’d all be more open to rethinking. Then I read evidence that complicated my thinking.

It turns out that even if we disagree strongly with someone on a social issue, when we discover that she cares deeply about the issue, we trust her more. We might still dislike her, but we see her passion for a principle as a sign of integrity. We reject the belief but grow to respect the person behind it.

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