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

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