Think Again: The Power of Knowing What You Don't Know

by Adam Grant

  Even after building a better solution, they were still open to rethinking it. At Kitty Hawk, they found that it was indeed the right one. The Wright brothers had figured out that their airplane didn’t need a propeller. It needed two propellers, spinning in opposite directions, to function like a rotating wing.

  That’s the beauty of task conflict. In a great argument, our adversary is not a foil, but a propeller. With twin propellers spinning in divergent directions, our thinking doesn’t get stuck on the ground; it takes flight.

  PART II

  Interpersonal Rethinking

  Opening Other People’s Minds

  CHAPTER 5

  Dances with Foes

  How to Win Debates and Influence People

  Exhausting someone in argument is not the same as convincing him.

  —Tim Kreider

  At thirty-one, Harish Natarajan has won three dozen international debate tournaments. He’s been told it’s a world record. But his opponent today presents a unique challenge.

  Debra Jo Prectet is a prodigy hailing from Haifa, Israel. She’s just eight years old, and although she made her first foray into public debating only last summer, she’s been preparing for this moment for years. Debra has absorbed countless articles to accumulate knowledge, closely studied speechwriting to hone her clarity, and even practiced her delivery to incorporate humor. Now she’s ready to challenge the champion himself. Her parents are hoping she’ll make history.

  Harish was a wunderkind too. By the time he was eight, he was outmaneuvering his own parents in dinner-table debates about the Indian caste system. He went on to become the European debate champion and a grand finalist in the world debate championship, and coached the Filipino national school debate team at the world championship. I was introduced to Harish by an unusually bright former student who used to compete against him, and remembers having lost “many (likely all)” of their debates.

  Harish and Debra are facing off in San Francisco in February 2019 in front of a large crowd. They’ve been kept in the dark about the debate topic. When they walk onstage, the moderator announces the subject: should preschools be subsidized by the government?

  After just fifteen minutes of preparation, Debra will present her strongest arguments in favor of subsidies, and Harish will marshal his best case against them. Their goal is to win the audience over to their side on preschool subsidies, but their impact on me will be much broader: they’ll end up changing my view of what it takes to win a debate.

  Debra kicks off with a joke, drawing laughter from the crowd by telling Harish that although he may hold the world record in debate wins, he’s never debated someone like her. Then she goes on to summarize an impressive number of studies—citing her sources—about the academic, social, and professional benefits of preschool programs. For good measure, she quotes a former prime minister’s argument about preschool being a smart investment.

  Harish acknowledges the facts that Debra presented, but then makes his case that subsidizing preschools is not the appropriate remedy for the damage caused by poverty. He suggests that the issue should be evaluated on two grounds: whether preschool is currently underprovided and underconsumed, and whether it helps those who are the least fortunate. He argues that in a world full of trade-offs, subsidizing preschool is not the best use of taxpayer money.

  Going into the debate, 92 percent of the audience has already made up their minds. I’m one of them: it didn’t take me long to figure out where I stood on preschool subsidies. In the United States, public education is free from kindergarten through high school. I’m familiar with evidence that early access to education in the first few years of children’s lives may be even more critical to helping them escape poverty than anything they learn later. I believe education is a fundamental human right, like access to water, food, shelter, and health care. That puts me on Team Debra. As I watch the debate, her early arguments strike a chord. Here are some highlights:

  Debra: Research clearly shows that a good preschool can help kids overcome the disadvantages often associated with poverty.

  Data for the win! Be still, my beating heart.

  Debra: You will possibly hear my opponent talk today about different priorities . . . he might say that subsidies are needed, but not for preschools. I would like to ask you, Mr. Natarajan . . . why don’t we examine the evidence and the data and decide accordingly?

  If Harish has an Achilles’ heel, my former student has told me, it’s that his brilliant arguments aren’t always grounded in facts.

  Harish: Let me start by examining the main claim . . . that if we believe preschools are good in principle, surely it is worth giving money to subsidize those—but I don’t think that is ever enough of a justification for subsidies.

  Debra has clearly done her homework. She didn’t just nail Harish on data—she anticipated his counterargument.

  Debra: The state budget is a big one, and there is room in it to subsidize preschools and invest in other fields. Therefore, the idea that there are more important things to spend on is irrelevant, because the different subsidies are not mutually exclusive.

  Way to debunk Harish’s case for trade-offs. Bravo.

  Harish: Maybe the state has the budget to do all the good things. Maybe the state has the budget to provide health care. Maybe it has the budget to provide welfare payments. Maybe it has the budget to provide running water as well as preschool. I would love to live in that world, but I don’t think that is the world we live in. I think we live in a world where there are real constraints on what governments can spend money on—and even if those are not real, those are nonetheless political.

  D’oh! Valid point. Even if a program has the potential to pay for itself, it takes a lot of political capital to make it happen—capital that could be invested elsewhere.

  Debra: Giving opportunities to the less fortunate should be a moral obligation of any human being, and it is a key role for the state. To be clear, we should find the funding for preschools and not rely on luck or market forces. This issue is too important to not have a safety net.

  Yes! This is more than a political or an economic question. It’s a moral question.

  Harish: I want to start by noting what [we] agree on. We agree that poverty is terrible. It is terrible when individuals do not have running water. It is terrible when . . . they are struggling to feed their family. It is terrible when they cannot get health care. . . . That is all terrible, and those are all things we need to address, and none of those are addressed just because you are going to subsidize preschool. Why is that the case?

  Hmm. Can Debra argue otherwise?

  Debra: Universal full-day preschool creates significant economic savings in health care as well as decreased crime, welfare dependence, and child abuse.

  Harish: High-quality preschools will reduce crime. Maybe, but so would other measures in terms of crime prevention.

  Debra: High-quality preschool boosts high school graduation rates.

  Harish: High-quality preschools can lead to huge improvements in individuals’ lives. Maybe, but I’m not sure if you massively increase the number of people going to preschool, they’re all gonna be the ones going to the high-quality preschools.

  Uh-oh. Harish is right: there’s a risk that children from the poorest families will end up in the worst preschools. I’m starting to rethink my position.

  Harish: Even when you subsidize preschools, it doesn’t mean that all individuals go. . . . The question is, who do you help? And the people you don’t help are those individuals who are the poorest. You give unfair and exaggerated gains to those individuals who are in the middle class.

  Point taken. Since preschool won’t be free, the underprivileged still might not be able to afford it. Now I’m torn about where I stand.

  You’ve seen arguments from both sides. Before I tell you who won, consider your own position: what was your opinion of presch
ool subsidies going into the debate, and how many times did you end up rethinking that opinion?

  If you’re like me, you reconsidered your views multiple times. Changing your mind doesn’t make you a flip-flopper or a hypocrite. It means you were open to learning.

  Looking back, I’m disappointed in myself for forming an opinion before the debate even started. Sure, I’d read some research on early child development, but I was clueless about the economics of subsidies and the alternative ways those funds could be invested. Note to self: on my next trip to the top of Mount Stupid, remember to take a selfie.

  In the audience poll after the debate, the number of undecided people was the same, but the balance of opinion shifted away from Debra’s position, toward Harish’s. Support for preschool subsidies dropped from 79 to 62 percent, and opposition more than doubled from 13 to 30 percent. Debra not only had more data, better evidence, and more evocative imagery—she had the audience on her side going into the debate. Yet Harish convinced a number of us to rethink our positions. How did he do it, and what can we learn from him about the art of debate?

  This section of the book is about convincing other people to rethink their opinions. When we’re trying to persuade people, we frequently take an adversarial approach. Instead of opening their minds, we effectively shut them down or rile them up. They play defense by putting up a shield, play offense by preaching their perspectives and prosecuting ours, or play politics by telling us what we want to hear without changing what they actually think. I want to explore a more collaborative approach—one in which we show more humility and curiosity, and invite others to think more like scientists.

  THE SCIENCE OF THE DEAL

  A few years ago a former student named Jamie called me for advice on where to go to business school. Since she was already well on her way to building a successful career, I told her it was a waste of time and money. I walked her through the lack of evidence that a graduate degree would make a tangible difference in her future, and the risk that she’d end up overqualified and underexperienced. When she insisted that her employer expected an MBA for promotions, I told her that I knew of exceptions and pointed out that she probably wouldn’t spend her whole career at that firm anyway. Finally, she hit back: “You’re a logic bully!”

  A what?

  “A logic bully,” Jamie repeated. “You just overwhelmed me with rational arguments, and I don’t agree with them, but I can’t fight back.”

  At first I was delighted by the label. It felt like a solid description of one of my roles as a social scientist: to win debates with the best data. Then Jamie explained that my approach wasn’t actually helpful. The more forcefully I argued, the more she dug in her heels. Suddenly I realized I had instigated that same kind of resistance many times before.

  David Sipress/The New Yorker Collection/The Cartoon Bank; © Condé Nast

  Growing up, I was taught by my karate sensei never to start a fight unless I was prepared to be the only one standing at the end. That’s how I approached debates at work and with friends: I thought the key to victory was to go into battle armed with airtight logic and rigorous data. The harder I attacked, though, the harder my opponents fought back. I was laser-focused on convincing them to accept my views and rethink theirs, but I was coming across like a preacher and a prosecutor. Although those mindsets sometimes motivated me to persist in making my points, I often ended up alienating my audience. I was not winning.

  For centuries, debating has been prized as an art form, but there’s now a growing science of how to do it well. In a formal debate your goal is to change the mind of your audience. In an informal debate, you’re trying to change the mind of your conversation partner. That’s a kind of negotiation, where you’re trying to reach an agreement about the truth. To build my knowledge and skills about how to win debates, I studied the psychology of negotiations and eventually used what I’d learned to teach bargaining skills to leaders across business and government. I came away convinced that my instincts—and what I’d learned in karate—were dead wrong.

  A good debate is not a war. It’s not even a tug-of-war, where you can drag your opponent to your side if you pull hard enough on the rope. It’s more like a dance that hasn’t been choreographed, negotiated with a partner who has a different set of steps in mind. If you try too hard to lead, your partner will resist. If you can adapt your moves to hers, and get her to do the same, you’re more likely to end up in rhythm.

  In a classic study, a team of researchers led by Neil Rackham examined what expert negotiators do differently. They recruited one group of average negotiators and another group of highly skilled ones, who had significant track records of success and had been rated as effective by their counterparts. To compare the participants’ techniques, they recorded both groups doing labor and contract negotiations.

  In a war, our goal is to gain ground rather than lose it, so we’re often afraid to surrender a few battles. In a negotiation, agreeing with someone else’s argument is disarming. The experts recognized that in their dance they couldn’t stand still and expect the other person to make all the moves. To get in harmony, they needed to step back from time to time.

  One difference was visible before anyone even arrived at the bargaining table. Prior to the negotiations, the researchers interviewed both groups about their plans. The average negotiators went in armed for battle, hardly taking note of any anticipated areas of agreement. The experts, in contrast, mapped out a series of dance steps they might be able to take with the other side, devoting more than a third of their planning comments to finding common ground.

  As the negotiators started discussing options and making proposals, a second difference emerged. Most people think of arguments as being like a pair of scales: the more reasons we can pile up on our side, the more it will tip the balance in our favor. Yet the experts did the exact opposite: They actually presented fewer reasons to support their case. They didn’t want to water down their best points. As Rackham put it, “A weak argument generally dilutes a strong one.”

  The more reasons we put on the table, the easier it is for people to discard the shakiest one. Once they reject one of our justifications, they can easily dismiss our entire case. That happened regularly to the average negotiators: they brought too many different weapons to battle. They lost ground not because of the strength of their most compelling point, but because of the weakness of their least compelling one.

  These habits led to a third contrast: the average negotiators were more likely to enter into defend-attack spirals. They dismissively shot down their opponents’ proposals and doubled down on their own positions, which prevented both sides from opening their minds. The skilled negotiators rarely went on offense or defense. Instead, they expressed curiosity with questions like “So you don’t see any merit in this proposal at all?”

  Questions were the fourth difference between the two groups. Of every five comments the experts made, at least one ended in a question mark. They appeared less assertive, but much like in a dance, they led by letting their partners step forward.

  Recent experiments show that having even one negotiator who brings a scientist’s level of humility and curiosity improves outcomes for both parties, because she will search for more information and discover ways to make both sides better off. She isn’t telling her counterparts what to think. She’s asking them to dance. Which is exactly what Harish Natarajan does in a debate.

  DANCING TO THE SAME BEAT

  Since the audience started out favoring preschool subsidies, there was more room for change in Harish’s direction—but he also had the more difficult task of advocating for the unpopular position. He opened the audience’s mind by taking a page out of the playbook of expert negotiators.

  Harish started by emphasizing common ground. When he took the stage for his rebuttal, he immediately drew attention to his and Debra’s areas of agreement. “So,” he began, “I think we
disagree on far less than it may seem.” He called out their alignment on the problem of poverty—and on the validity of some of the studies—before objecting to subsidies as a solution.

  We won’t have much luck changing other people’s minds if we refuse to change ours. We can demonstrate openness by acknowledging where we agree with our critics and even what we’ve learned from them. Then, when we ask what views they might be willing to revise, we’re not hypocrites.

  Convincing other people to think again isn’t just about making a good argument—it’s about establishing that we have the right motives in doing so. When we concede that someone else has made a good point, we signal that we’re not preachers, prosecutors, or politicians trying to advance an agenda. We’re scientists trying to get to the truth. “Arguments are often far more combative and adversarial than they need to be,” Harish told me. “You should be willing to listen to what someone else is saying and give them a lot of credit for it. It makes you sound like a reasonable person who is taking everything into account.”

  Being reasonable literally means that we can be reasoned with, that we’re open to evolving our views in light of logic and data. So in the debate with Harish, why did Debra neglect to do that—why did she overlook common ground?