Thinking Trap

Speaker: Adam Grant (Interviewed by Steve Bartlett)

Summary

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• The worst problem in humanity is the addiction to being right.
• People get stuck in three thinking modes: preacher, prosecutor, and politician.
• The speaker suggests an alternative: thinking like a scientist.
• Scientists don’t see their ideas as their identity; instead, they view them as hypotheses to be tested.
• People should focus on getting things right rather than being right.
• One way to do this is to separate beliefs from values.
• Beliefs are what you think is true, while values are what you think is important.

Transcript

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The worst problem in humanity is the addiction to being right. You’ve already concluded that other people are wrong and you’re right. You lose the ability to open your mind.

How do we get out of those modes?

I so struck by how many people spend too many of their waking hours, thinking like preachers, prosecutors, and politicians.

When you go into preacher mode, you’re prizing your own ideas. In prosecutor mode, you’re attacking somebody else’s ideas, and in politician mode you don’t even bother to listen to people unless they already agree with your ideas.

I find that most people have a dominant style that gets them in trouble. So mine is prosecutor mode. If I think you’re wrong, I’m like, it is my professional and moral responsibility to correct you, which never goes well. And I’ve even been called a logic bully, which my wife had to explain to me was not a compliment.

She’s like, you don’t have to pressure test every single point that’s made. Sometimes you can listen and learn from other people, as opposed to duking it out to try to figure out who’s right.

I think it’s such an important note because in prosecutor mode, you’ve already concluded that other people are wrong and you’re right. So you lose the ability to open your mind, and the same thing happens if you’re preaching or politicking.

You’re basically drinking your own Kool-Aid, or listening only to your own tribe, and trapping yourself in an echo chamber. And so I got really curious about, how do we get out of those modes? What’s an alternative?

And my favorite alternative is to think think more like a scientist.

When I say think like a scientist, I do not mean that you need to buy a microscope, or you know a telescope. I mean that you don’t let your ideas become your identity. You recognize every opinion you hold, it’s just a hypothesis. You can test it.

Every decision you make, just an experiment. It might succeed, it might fail.

And when you do that, it turns out when people people can be taught to think more like scientists, when you teach people to see their opinions as hypotheses, their decisions as experiments, lo and behold, they make better choices.

They achieve more success because they become more flexible. They change their minds faster. They’re quicker to recognize that they’re wrong. And that means they’re quicker to get it right.

A colleague once told me that the worst problem he sees in humanity is the addiction to being right. And I think it’s much more important to focus on getting it right than being right. One of the ways you do that is you do not let your beliefs become part of your self-concept.

People are like, “wait, who are you if you’re not what you think?” You are what you value.

What’s the difference between values and beliefs? Beliefs are what you think is True. Values are what you think is important.

And I think this is such a critical distinction because when you start to base your identity, your sense of self, and your ego, and your self-esteem, and selfworth on what you think is true, then admitting you were wrong is a major threat.

Whereas when you start to see yourself as someone who values curiosity, or is a lifelong learner, now changing your mind is a moment of growth.