Think Again

Grant's subject is the ability to revise your own position, which he argues is a skill rather than a temperament, and one that is rarely taught. His starting point is that people defend beliefs the way they defend identity, so the arrival of contrary evidence feels like an attack, and confidence in an idea can be highest where knowledge is thinnest. He is also willing to turn his own field's advice against itself, arguing that persistence can be counterproductive when it means holding onto a plan past the point where the evidence supports it. The book moves outwards in three stages: rethinking as an individual skill, then the question of how to help other people reconsider, where he argues that presenting more evidence usually fails and asking questions works better, and finally the cultures of schools, workplaces and governments, which he says reward looking certain and therefore make rethinking expensive for anyone in them. It is a popular treatment of research by a working academic.

Written from the publisher description, Open Library.

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• Adam Grant