Preacher or Prosecutor Mode
“It starts for me with intellectual humility, which is about knowing what you don’t know.”
Adam Grant makes great stuff. So much so that I’ll listen to pretty much any podcast where he’s a guest, even (and especially) if I know he’s going to say things I’ve heard him say before.
Grant was a guest on The Knowledge Project Podcast and there' were a few blurbs I had to share, especially given the state of discourse in the U.S. over the past few years. I’ve you’ve logged onto Facebook lately you know that everyone has… opinions, to say the least.
Clip 1 (0:00 to 0:30) from Adam Grant:
“Yeah, you're entitled to your own opinion… if you keep your opinion to yourself.
“If you decide to say it out loud, then I think you have a responsibility to be open to changing your mind in the face of better logic or stronger data. And so, I think if you're willing to voice an opinion, you should also be willing to change that opinion.
“It goes right back to something we talked about earlier, which is to say, ‘Okay, when would I change my mind?’ If you can't answer that question, you are no longer thinking like a scientist, you have gone into a preacher or prosecutor mode.”
Clip 2 (5:15 to 7:00) between Adam Grant and Shane Parish:
Adam Grant: “…anytime I see a 21-year-old, and a 61-year-old grapple with the same exact problem, I think there's something really important and interesting to explore. So here we are.”
Shane Parrish: “Yeah, definitely. We always say it's easy to see that other people should rethink things like we're looking at them going like, ‘Oh, you know, that's Blockbuster. They should have rethought that, or they should be rethinking that.’ It's really hard for us to rethink ourselves. Why is that?”
Adam Grant: “There are probably multiple reasons for it, but I think two of the reasons why people are really hesitant to rethink things are one, it makes the world feel much more unpredictable. You know, if my views aren't fixed, then who am I? And, how do I navigate a really confusing and often turbulent world? And two, it makes me feel like I am not an expert, right? And a lot of us take pride in our knowledge. You know, when I think about power, there's a French and Raven framework, where they said, look, there's expert power, there's what's called referent power, which is basically being liked and respected. And then, there's coercive reward and legitimate power. And most of the bases of power that people have in life come from a position that they happen to hold, right. So, my ability to reward you or punish you, my ability to get you to listen to me, because I have a role of authority is not something I can carry with me. And so, the knowledge I have is one of the few things that I get to hold on to, and the idea that that might be fragile… it not only questions my identity, it also I guess, questions, my status and my standing in the world, which is something pretty uncomfortable to do.”
Clip 3 (9:30 to 11:17) from Adam Grant:
“Look, when you have a belief, you have two options. One is you can subject it to a rethinking cycle. The other is you can fall victim to an overconfidence cycle. So, an overconfidence cycle is, you know, something we've all both committed, and witnessed probably too many times. The basic idea is we start by being proud of something that we think we know, and that leads us then to feel a lot of conviction that kind of launches us into confirmation bias where we look for information that confirms our expectations, as well as desirability bias… where we look for information that basically reinforces what we want to be true. And then, we see what we expected to see and what we wanted to see and we get validated and that only makes us prouder of what we know and less open to rethinking.
“The rethinking cycle is very much the opposite. It starts for me with intellectual humility, which is about knowing what you don't know. You know, no matter how much of an expert you are in a given field or a given topic, you have a long list of things that you're clueless about and being aware of what your ignorance is, leads you to doubt your convictions. It makes you curious about what you don't know and that opens your mind to new discoveries and then every time you learn something new, it's not the sign that ‘Oh, now I'm an expert.’ It's this sense that well, there's so much more to learn, right, and I've made a tiny, tiny dot of progress in, you know, a whole universe of knowledge, and I can't wait to see what I learn next.
“And so, I think one of the things we need to do is we need to give ourselves permission to enter rethinking cycles.”
Clip 4 (12:00 to 13:11) from Shane Parrish:
“…and that's something I learned when I was working for the intelligence agency, right. Like, it wasn't about me having the best idea, is like who's got the best idea because that's going to get the best outcome and then, you sort of grow up in an environment where that becomes, I would say, the norm by in large. It's hard in a knowledge environment though, right, because you have so much of your worth, you want to contribute to something — and I think there's a biological need to contribute to something larger than us — and” […] “you're not mechanically making something you can't see there's nothing tangible to what you're producing then, you effectively, are a knowledge worker in one way or another and then you're paid for your judgment. So, if your judgment isn't right, what is it?
And then, what you do is you force your way, right, like you don't intentionally sabotage other people, but you only look for confirming evidence. You're not open to changing your mind because your sense of identity is tied to being right because that's how you contribute to the organization.”