Conversational Science
In Adam Grant’s Think Again he introduced to me the concept of how quickly we think and talk in modes. We do it. Others do it when we talk to them.
This made me think about the trainings I lead on diversity issues and how often I’d experience people in different modes. And I also became aware of going into the modes myself.
“We favor the comfort of conviction over the discomfort of doubt, and we let our beliefs get brittle long before our bones. We laugh at people who still use Windows 95, yet we still cling to opinions that we formed in 1995. We listen to views that make us feel good, instead of ideas that make us think hard.” (p.4, Think Again)
As a child, I lived through the integration of our school system. When I was in 4th grade, my school district was 99% white. The one non-white family was an interracial family that lived several blocks from me. Everyone in the district walked to school or was driven by parents. There were no school buses as everyone lived within ½ of a mile from the school. The year was 1970.
Lynette was in my class. Her older sister Lisa was in 6th grade. They were both top students and Lisa would be the school’s first student council president. Their mother was also a television celebrity, a weekend news anchor on the most popular television channel in the city. As I remember, she was the only African American news anchor on any of the three channels. She might have been the only African American on local television at the time.
Lisa was as poised and put together as her mother. I had gotten to know Lynette the year before when my handwriting improved, which had been the stated incentive for me to move to the top reading group where she and a few other students were reading above grade level.
Near as I could tell or remember no one thought much of it until at the end of 4th grade, we were told in just over a year, the elementary schools would enter the last phase of desegregation.
The high schools had desegregated before we moved to Lexington, when the students at Paul Laurence Dunbar High School were dispersed to the cities four other high schools. They took the downtown high school, closed it, and bused the students out before we moved there in 1969. The junior high schools followed shortly thereafter. The elementary schools would start desegregation in 1972.
This meant that in 1971, when I was in 5th grade Lynette was the only student of color in the entire school. Because my dad started being an elementary school principal and my mother taught special education at a downtown elementary school, I was privy to a lot more information.
I remember two students in my 5th grade class with lots of conviction and little doubt. One was for desegregation. One was against it. Often the rest of us were forced to witness their interactions. They could be loud. I always felt badly Lynette, who didn’t like either of them.
One was sure our school would be taken over by those bused in. The other was just as certain that he was completely out his mind. She was certain that slavery was wrong and that this was wrong. (Fifth grade was the introduction to US History).
They preached at each other a lot. I’m not sure how much they listened to each other. I know we all joined Lynette and tuning them out.
The next year, the busses and students who had come from Booker T. Washington arrived. I knew from my dad that each class would have 4-5 students in them and now each class would have around 28 students as opposed to 23 or 24.
The school didn’t fall apart, as was predicted. I did learn that Juanita (who was also in the top reading group with Lynette and myself) had to get up way earlier than I did to catch the bus, and got home after I normally did, even though I had 20-minute walk. That wasn’t fair. We got along and everyone got super excited when our class won field day over Mrs. Burrus’ class (they had won everything else that year).
The moment I really remember though was the student council election. Juanita became the first 6th grader to not win the student council election. And even at age 11, I knew this was about race.
But if I leaned anything from 5th grade it had been about the power of preaching, and its power to repel.
The same was also too for Brenda’s selling, her politicking, that all would be well. I’ll never forget the tears strolling down Juanita’s face after she learned she hadn’t been elected president of the student council. Today, given that I still remember that, I wonder how Juanita remembers it.
Adam Grant chronicles how we ready so often go into the modes of preacher (conviction), politician (selling), and prosecutor (defending) when we think and converse and use a combination of all of them.
The more Brenda went on the offensive, the more Jack went into the prosecutor role (defending) to back up his beliefs. They matched each other’s intensity. The problem was everyone else wanted none of it.
Conviction attracts those who share that conviction or who want conviction because they’ve been told conviction is what you must have conviction about. It tends to repel people.
One only needs to look at the statistics around religion. In 1972, 90% of Americans identified as Christian. In 2024, that’s down to 63%. Those who don’t identify as religious were at 5% in 1972 and now they are at 28%. Evangelicals were at 16% in 1972, peaked at 26% at 2007, but have dropped since then by 4 points.
This makes me wonder about several things. Foremost, it made me think people like faith and conviction to a point. But conviction becomes less appealing with the rise of lived experience and, as controversial as they are these days, facts. (Especially facts based on lived experience).
I suspect that part of the appeal of conviction and fundamentalism was it gave people comfort. People believed, for example, there was something wrong with same-sex marriage and latched on to evangelic beliefs around that. Yet as marriage became legal and the sky didn’t fall, the conviction of religious evangelism didn’t match the expectations or lived reality of people.
I have wondered if some of the evangelicals now disappointed with the ability of their fundamentalist religion to provide one answer on any number of things left to places like the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers, where they could find comfort with the like-minded. When 1 out of 5 evangelicals voted for Democrats, you can’t help but notice that everyone doesn’t share your conviction. One finds much comfort when everyone around you believes the same thing. It takes away the doubt.
Social media has allowed for more safe corners of preaching and finding like minded people. Conviction feels far safer than politicking or prosecuting because one can do it in “safety.”
And if you look at politicking, that has become more about trying to convince those who share your convictions to speak loudly and then try and catch a wider circle of people by envy, a sense of community, and finding the way to frame your conviction in a way that seems broader than it actually is, or without details of what it will mean.
Indeed, how we talk to each other is as much about how we say it as what we say. Create on wide statement where your conviction is apparent, people will agree with the statement and latch on to the conviction.
Or run from it. Or throw up your hands because you don’t have the time to get into the mess, you go with the statement you agree with. This may well be how many elections are won these days. People don’t even want the prosecution or the politicking. They just want it done.
We can look at our own lives. If we speak with conviction, we often silence others, possibly because they agree, possibly because they see us as a lost cause, and possibly because they don’t want to take the time to nuance things out.
I’ve come to believe there are four layers to conversations these days. One level is conviction. We go in our separate corners, speak our minds to whomever will listen and stay in that safety. Sort of like so many found during the pandemic, there were advantages to not having to go out into the world.
Prosecuting would be the next level where we defend what we believe. This also overlaps though with conviction, in that true prosecuting actually means hearing what the other person said. These days there’s so much reframing and stating differently what someone else said, mainly because it’s less risky than actually listening to someone else and risk having your mind changed or your argument changed.
Politicking is even riskier, especially at a moment when politics are a bad word. Mention the word and most people roll their eyes. More people run frantically in the other direction when you use the word than get excited to engage. Politicking does mean you’re engaging, having to defend your beliefs and, quite likely, being asked questions that don’t fit neatly into your convictions.
Yet, they are all perceived as easier, less time-consuming, and more efficient and “profitable” than Adam Grant’s other suggested way of looking at being in relationship with others and conversing: the scientist.
These two quotes from Think Again (p.25) say it better than I do.
“Thinking like a scientist involves more than just reacting with an open mind. It means being actively open-minded. It requires searching for reasons why we might be wrong—not for reasons why we must be right—and revising our views based on what we learn.”
“That rarely happens in the other mental modes. In preacher mode, changing our minds is a mark of moral weakness; in scientist mode, it’s a sign of intellectual integrity. In prosecutor mode, allowing ourselves to be persuaded is admitting defeat; in scientist mode, it’s a step toward the truth. In politician mode, we flip-flop in response to carrots and sticks; in scientist mode, we shift in the face of sharper logic and stronger data.”
Does it work? Brene Brown tells the story of European researchers gathered entrepreneurs for training. They were there to learn better ways to be entrepreneurial. More than a hundred people were divided into two groups. They learned business strategy, how to build a viable product and then refine it, and how to interview potential customers. There was however a basic difference. One group was a control group. The other was a scientific group—where the group was taught to look at what they were doing like a scientist—examine results and make decisions based on whether their hypotheses were supported or refuted.
The participants in each group were followed for over a year. Those in the control group made just less than 300 dollars per entrepreneur on average. Those in the scientific group brought in more 12,000 dollars in revenue. Why?
They pivoted more often than the control group and they were able to let go of their original hypotheses and rethink their model.
Simple math tells you that’s a difference of 1:40. In other words, left in their groups, it would take the control group 40 years to make what the scientific group made in 1 year.
Why do so often we approach conversations with the idea that we know everything? If you’ve never been in a meeting where someone wasn’t sure they were the smartest person in the room, I’d love to hear more. I suspect we could all think of time when we’ve been in a meeting with someone whose conviction drowned out everyone else.
How we think affects how we converse. We live in a moment that values conviction over science—at least to the point of getting more attention. Yet I can’t help but wonder if that leads to less value like the European researchers found.
And I still wonder what would happen if Jack and Brenda would have listened to each other all those years ago. Or if they listen now?
I do hope and suspect that Lynette and Juanita have created better lives for the next generations that followed them.
I would love to listen to all of them now, because I bet, I’d be better for it.
Tomorrow: identities and conversation