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

* When reporters and activists discuss the consequences of climate change, complexity is often lacking there as well. The gloom-and-doom message can create a burning platform for those who fear a burning planet. But research across twenty-four countries suggests that people are more motivated to act and advocate when they see the collective benefits of doing so—like economic and scientific advancement and building a more moral and caring community. People across the spectrum of climate skepticism, from alarmed to doubtful, are more determined to take initiative when they believe it would produce identifiable benefits. And instead of just appealing to stereotypical liberal values like compassion and justice, research suggests that journalists can spur more action by emphasizing crosscutting values like defending freedom as well as more conservative values like preserving the purity of nature or protecting the planet as an act of patriotism.

* Even when we try to convey nuance, sometimes the message gets lost in translation. Recently some colleagues and I published an article titled “The Mixed Effects of Online Diversity Training.” I thought we were making it abundantly clear that our research revealed how complicated diversity training is, but soon various commentators were heralding it as evidence supporting the value of diversity training—and a similar number were holding it up as evidence that diversity training is a waste of time. Confirmation bias and desirability bias are alive and well.

* Some experiments show that when people embrace paradoxes and contradictions—rather than avoid them—they generate more creative ideas and solutions. But other experiments show that when people embrace paradoxes and contradictions, they’re more likely to persist with wrong beliefs and failing actions. Let that paradox marinate for a while.

* It turns out that younger Anglo Americans are more likely than their older or Asian American counterparts to reject mixed emotions, like feeling happy and sad at the same time. The difference seems to lie in comfort accepting dualities and paradoxes. I think it might help if we had richer language to capture ambivalent emotions. For example, Japanese gives us koi no yokan, the feeling that it wasn’t love at first sight but we could grow to love the person over time. The Inuit have iktsuarpok, the mix of anticipation and anxiety when we’re awaiting the arrival of a guest at our house. Georgians have shemomedjamo, the feeling of being completely full but eating anyway because the meal is so good. My favorite emotion word is German: kummerspeck, the extra weight we gain from emotional overeating when we’re sad. The literal translation of that one: “grief bacon.” I can see that coming in handy in charged conversations: I didn’t mean to insult you. I’m just working through some grief bacon right now.

* There’s evidence that middle schoolers score higher on math and science competency tests when teachers dedicate more time to lecturing than active learning. It remains to be seen whether lectures are more effective with younger students or whether the gap is driven by the ineffective implementation of active-learning methods.

* Nozick predicted that most of us would ditch the machine because we value doing and being—not just experiencing—and because we wouldn’t want to limit our experiences to what humans could imagine and simulate. Later philosophers argued that if we did reject the machine, it might not be for those reasons but due to status quo bias: we would have to walk away from reality as we know it. To investigate that possibility, they changed the premise and ran an experiment. Imagine that you wake up one day to learn that your whole life has been an experience machine that you chose years earlier, and you now get to choose whether to unplug or plug back in. In that scenario, 46 percent of people said they wanted to plug back in. If they were told that unplugging would take them back to “real life” as a multimillionaire artist based in Monaco, 50 percent of people still wanted to plug back in. It seems that many people would rather not abandon a familiar virtual reality for an unfamiliar actual reality—or maybe some have a distaste for art, wealth, and sovereign principalities.

* Sharing our imperfections can be risky if we haven’t yet established our competence. In studies of lawyers and teachers searching for jobs, expressing themselves authentically increased the odds of getting job offers if they were rated in the 90th percentile or above in competence, but backfired if they were less competent. Lawyers at or below the 50th percentile in competence—and teachers at or below the 25th—actually did worse when they were candid. Experiments show that people who haven’t yet proven their competence are respected less if they admit their weaknesses. They aren’t just incompetent; they seem insecure, too.

* I have another objection to this question: it encourages kids to make work the main event of their identities. When you’re asked what you want to be, the only socially acceptable response is a job. Adults are waiting for kids to wax poetic about becoming something grand like an astronaut, heroic like a firefighter, or inspired like a filmmaker. There’s no room to say you just want job security, let alone that you hope to be a good father or a great mother—or a caring and curious person. Although I study work for a living, I don’t think it should define us.

* There’s evidence that graduates of universities in England and Wales were more