Think Again

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.

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 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.

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 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.

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 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.

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 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.

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 There’s evidence that graduates of universities in England and Wales were more likely to change
career paths than those who studied in Scotland. It isn’t a culture effect—it’s a timing effect. In
England and Wales, students had to start specializing in high school, which limited their options for
exploring alternatives throughout college. In Scotland, students weren’t allowed to specialize until
their third year of college, which gave them more opportunities to rethink their plans and develop
new interests. They ended up being more likely to major in subjects that weren’t covered in high
school—and more likely to find a match.

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 I originally recommended career checkups for students to avoid tunnel vision, but I’ve learned that
they can also be useful for students at the opposite end of the rethinking spectrum: overthinkers.
They often report back that when they’re dissatisfied at work, knowing a reminder will pop up twice
a year helps them resist the temptation to think about quitting every day.

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 I think the absurdity was best captured by humorist Richard Brautigan: “Expressing a human need,
I always wanted to write a book that ended with the word Mayonnaise.” He wrote that line in the
penultimate chapter of a book, and delightfully went on to end the book with the word—but
deliberately misspelled it “mayonaise” to deprive the reader of closure. Human need, unfulfilled.

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 Had thought earlier about showing my edits throughout the book, but didn’t want to inflict that on
you. Slogging through half-baked ideas and falsified hypotheses wouldn’t be the best use of your
time. Even if you’re a huge fan of Hamilton, you probably wouldn’t love the first draft—it’s much
more exciting to engage with the product of rethinking than the process.

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 Too whimsical. Early readers want more gravitas here—several have reported that they’re handling
dissent differently now. When they confront information that challenges their opinions, instead of
rejecting it or begrudgingly engaging with it, they’re taking it as an opportunity to learn something
new: “Maybe I should rethink that!”

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 Challenge network says updating a “fun fact” from the book is too trivial.

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 A big unanswered question here is when rethinking should end—where should we draw the line? I
think the answer is different for every person in every situation, but my sense is that most of us are
operating too far to the left of the curve. The most relevant data I’ve seen were in chapter 3 on
superforecasters: they updated their predictions an average of four times per question instead of twice
per question. This suggests that it doesn’t take much rethinking to benefit from it, and the downsides
are minimal. Rethinking doesn’t always have to change our minds. Like students rethinking their
answers on tests, even if we decide not to pivot on a belief or a decision, we still come away knowing
we’ve reflected more thoughtfully.

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 For my part, I had assumed the phrase “blowing smoke up your arse” came from people gifting
cigars to someone they wanted to impress, so you can imagine how intrigued I was when my wife
told me its real origin: In the 1700s, it was common practice to revive drowning victims with tobacco
enemas, literally blowing smoke up their behinds. Only later did they learn that it was toxic to the
cardiac system.

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 I started not with answers but with questions about rethinking. Then I went looking for the best
evidence available from randomized, controlled experiments and systematic field studies. Where the
evidence didn’t exist, I launched my own research projects. Only when I had reached a data-driven
insight did I search for stories to illustrate and illuminate the studies. In an ideal world, every insight
would come from a meta-analysis—a study of studies, where researchers cumulate the patterns
across a whole body of evidence, adjusting for the quality of each data point. Where those aren’t
available, I’ve highlighted studies that I find rigorous, representative, or thought provoking.
Sometimes I’ll include details on the methods—not only so you can understand how the researchers
formed their conclusions, but to offer a window into how scientists think. In many places, I’ll
summarize the results without going into depth on the studies themselves, under the assumption that
you’re reading to rethink like a scientist—not to become one. That said, if you felt a jolt of
excitement at the mention of a meta-analysis, it might be time to (re)consider a career in social
science.

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 This looks like good news for countries like the United States, where self-assessments came fairly
close to reality, but that doesn’t hold across domains. In a recent study, English-speaking teenagers
around the world were asked to rate their knowledge in sixteen different areas of math. Three of the
subjects listed were entirely fake—declarative fractions, proper numbers, and subjunctive scaling—
which made it possible to track who would claim knowledge about fictional topics. On average, the
worst offenders were North American, male, and wealthy.

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 My favorite example comes from Nina Strohminger, who once lamented: “My dad called this
morning to tell me about the Dunning-Kruger effect, not realizing that his daughter with a Ph.D. in
psychology would certainly know the Dunning-Kruger effect, thereby giving a tidy demonstration of
the Dunning-Kruger effect.”

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 There’s an ongoing debate about the role of statistical measurement issues in the Dunning-Kruger
effect, but the controversy is mostly around how strong the effect is and when it occurs—not whether
it’s real. Interestingly, even when people are motivated to accurately judge their knowledge, the least
knowledgeable often struggle the most. After people take a logical reasoning test, when they’re
offered a $100 bill if they can correctly (and, therefore, humbly) guess how many questions they got
right, they still end up being overconfident. On a twenty-question test, they think they got an average
of 1.42 more questions right than they actually did—and the worst performers are the most
overconfident.

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 That reaction can vary based on gender. In Basima’s study of investment professionals, impostor
thoughts helped the task performance of both men and women, but were more likely to spur extra
teamwork among men. Men were driven to compensate for their fear that they might fall short of
expectations in their core tasks by doing extra collaborative work. Women were more dependent on
confidence and more likely to feel debilitated by doubts.

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 I was studying the factors that explain why some writers and editors performed better than others at
a travel guide company where I was working. Performance wasn’t related to their sense of autonomy,
control, confidence, challenge, connection, collaboration, conflict, support, self-worth, stress,
feedback, role clarity, or enjoyment. The best performers were the ones who started their jobs
believing that their work would have a positive impact on others. That led me to predict that givers
would be more successful than takers, because they would be energized by the difference their
actions made in others’ lives. I went on to test and support that hypothesis in a number of studies, but
then I came across other studies in which generosity predicted lower productivity and higher burnout.
Instead of trying to prove them wrong, I realized I was wrong—my understanding was incomplete. I
set out to explore when givers succeed and when they fail, and that became my first book, Give and
Take.

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 It’s possible to change even your deep-seated beliefs while keeping your values intact.
Psychologists recently compared people who walked away from their religions with those who were
currently religious and never religious. Across Hong Kong, the Netherlands, New Zealand, and the
United States, they found a religious residue effect: people who de-identified with religion were just
as likely to keep volunteering, and gave more money to charity than those who were never religious.

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 If you choose to make fun of yourself out loud, there’s evidence that how people react depends on
your gender. When men make self-deprecating jokes, they’re seen as more capable leaders, but when
women do it, they’re judged as less capable. Apparently, many people have missed the memo that if a
woman pokes fun at herself, it’s not a reflection of incompetence or inadequacy. It’s a symbol of
confident humility and wit.

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