Transcript:

Adam Grant: When you and I are vibing, our brain waves actually start to synchronize, and so do our heartbeats. The highest sign of chemistry between people is not agreeing with them. It’s actually enjoying your disagreements with them. Don’t believe anything that can’t be verified. That’s just a precept of science. But also, don’t disbelieve anything that can’t be falsified. They’re a narcissist, a Machiavellian, or a psychopath.

Brian Keating: Check.

Adam Grant: I’m not qualified to diagnose you, Brian.

Brian Keating: Wharton’s Adam Grant runs the experiments on why some people click and others clash. At the end, he tells me why my somewhat snarky critique of his newest study has his team talking about a follow-up.

This book is a stealth physics book

Brian Keating: I want to start off because this book is a stealth physics book. I have a feeling, Adam, you’re a deeply closeted physicist. Because this book brings up one of physicists’ favorite topics, vibrations. Let me give you some quotes. Okay, not all these appear in the book, but some do. Max Planck, the originator of quantum theory: “All matter originates and exists only by virtue of a force which brings the particle of an atom to vibration.” Okay, that’s number one. Richard Feynman, our hero, right? “Light is waves and electric field. We represent it as a vibration.” So, this is a big deal, a big field. I used to use this as the ending of my podcast. I said, “What is the most succinct sentence that describes the most information?” And I got that from Feynman. He said that everything is a vibration. Little particles in perpetual motion. Okay, that’s Feynman. Michio Kaku, another podcaster, the highest profession, right? Podcasting professors, there aren’t many of us. Adam, “According to string theory, if we could magnify a point particle, we might see vibrating strings.” Brian Greene says the same thing. And then finally, of course, there is Tesla. “If you want to find the secrets to the universe,” Adam, “think in terms of energy, frequency, and vibration.” What does vibration mean to you?

Adam Grant: I had to cut out a lot of physics metaphors from this book for the average reader to find it hopefully interesting. But I think people throw around this word vibe and they say, “It’s a vibe,” or, “I like her vibe.” And what they’re overlooking is that a vibe doesn’t just sit there. It’s not just dormant in a place or a person. It comes alive in our interactions. So when I think about a vibe, I think about a high-quality connection between people. And I think about it happening in ways that neuroscientists can actually measure in the body and the brain. When you and I are vibing, our brain waves actually start to synchronize and so do our heartbeats. And so there is a physiological trace. And I don’t think we should find that surprising, right? We are literally vibrating on the same energy frequency. But I think when people hear vibe, they start to think of something that’s a little bit hippie or woo-woo. And they don’t realize, no, no, no. This is real. It’s observable.

Brian Keating: There’s so many physics quotes you left out, including one from my favorite Southern Californians. “I’m picking up good vibrations. She’s giving me excitations.” And then of course, Marky Mark, “Feel it, feel it, good vibrations.” There’s always this danger of woo-woo, and how do you avoid that woo patina? You’re a rigorous academician, scientist, and intellectual. How did you avoid that temptation to fall into the trap that Tesla and other people have so easily slipped into?

Adam Grant: I try to think about this in two ways. One is I built a reputation for being an evidence-based social scientist, and this is I think my seventh book. I hope by now anybody who comes to a book of mine knows that if anything, they’re going to complain that there were too many studies cited. There are too many meta-analyses. There are too many randomized controlled experiments and longitudinal studies, and I didn’t relegate enough of them to the footnotes or references. And I will always prefer to err on that side as opposed to the other. I think secondly, the part of the fun of being academic is to try to elicit the same enthusiasm in readers and listeners that we do in the classroom when students are really sitting there. And I know that for me, my favorite moments as a student were when a professor said, “Hey, here’s a concept that you have talked about in your everyday life, that you’ve experienced. Let me give you some data for it. Let me help you use the scientific method to try to understand it.” And so that’s really what I sat down to do with Vibe. I wanted to try to figure out what do we know about how to spark, strengthen, sustain, and scale connections between people and eventually into groups and communities. And the good news is there’s now about a century of evidence on how to do that more effectively. Starting point is always to say, what findings have been replicated independently and transparently and cumulated, ideally in a meta-analysis? I rely on those where I can. When we don’t have that, let’s try to look at the best individual studies and say, what do they teach us about how we can build more durable connections?

Two kinds of conflict

Brian Keating: So in the mid-1600s, Christiaan Huygens, a phenomenal, renowned physicist, put two pendulum clocks on a board and found that when they were independent of each other initially, they would eventually get in synchronicity and start swinging together. And I feel like if I ever gave a guest lecture on this topic, I’d bring in a lot of demonstrations. But it seems like what I learned from the book is you can’t force it. If you try to drive it, they won’t synchronize. They won’t resonate. And you make the point in the book that’s very counterintuitive, that sometimes you have to disagree, and the disagreement then causes a type of resonance to occur in the team, but not at first. Explain that paradox to me.

Adam Grant: Well, there are two kinds of conflict at a basic level that most people experience regularly at work. They’re called task conflict and relationship conflict. Most people, when they think about conflict, are thinking about relationship conflict. It’s personal, emotional. “I wish I didn’t have to work with you because I can’t stand you. And also, Brian, you kind of smell bad.” Not productive for collaboration. I can smell you even through the screen. It’s awful. Task conflict is different. It’s disagreeing about vision, strategy, decisions. We’re debating not because we have any kind of interpersonal animosity, but because we have different ideas about how to get to the best answer or how to produce the best product or how to solve the problem in front of us. And teams without task conflict fail. They fall victim to groupthink. It’s well documented. They tend to live in echo chambers and filter bubbles. Task conflict is necessary for surfacing creative ideas. It’s also really critical to making sure that unpopular opinions get the weight that they deserve. And I think that oftentimes people overreact to task conflict and they treat it as relationship conflict. They take it personally. Which is why I think the key to healthy conflict is actually setting expectations so that you know that when I disagree with you, it’s not because I dislike you or disrespect you, but rather because I want to try to get it right. I’m not trying to convince you that I am right. So how do you do this? There’s research by Corinne Bendersky which shows that even just saying, “Can we debate this?” is enough to foster healthy task conflict, because people have a mental model for what a good debate is. They know that we’re supposed to duke it out and ultimately maybe even listen to each other and learn something from each other. I think the highest sign of chemistry between people is not agreeing with them. It’s actually enjoying your disagreements with them.

The infant was almost guiding the parent

Brian Keating: What interested me most about one of your studies, and it’s clear that you’re phenomenal teacher, researcher, but also a parent, and that you take it very seriously, and you talk about dynamics between children and parents, and one story where it seemed to be that the infant was almost guiding the parent in a way, which is very, again, a lot of what you write about and teach about is counterintuitive. It kind of reminded me of that cartoon, an alien looks down at Earth, or Jerry Seinfeld routine, and sees this guy’s walking behind a dog and the dog is determining where he goes, and the person even gives the dog food and it picks up its poop. It’s crazy. You would think that the dog is in charge. What’s happening with parents and infants? How do the infants know how to synchronize the vibrational kind of resonance with the parents, or is it just natural and instinctive that a parent will want to follow the lead of the child?

Adam Grant: I think one of the things that I’ve learned just reading a fair amount of developmental psychology research, trying to figure out how do parents build a stronger family vibe, I didn’t know this, but one of the clearest early signals that parents and kids are going to bond is when parents observe their infant’s attention and then follow it. And I think we probably do have an evolutionary adaptation for this. I think that parents who couldn’t track their kid’s attention, they missed important signals. They didn’t notice a cry. They didn’t realize that their kid was thirsty or hungry. That is probably a recipe for not succeeding in raising a child that can go on to pass on its genes. I think there’s still a lot of variation, though, in our species. Some parents are much better at this than others. And I think that this is one of the first things that a lot of parents get wrong, is they think, “Look, it’s my job to be in charge,” and they end up doing what psychologists would call authoritarian parenting, which ultimately leads to either submissiveness or rebellion. What we’re looking for is what’s called authoritative parenting, which is a combination of being supportive and demanding. It’s setting high expectations. It’s also being warm and caring and nurturing, and the combination of unconditional love, but also saying, “I love you. I do not accept your behavior,” and expressing disappointment when kids fall short. That’s obviously easier to do when kids are 9 or 10 as opposed to 9 or 10 months. But setting boundaries for unacceptable behaviors starts early. I see a lot of parents who believe that their job is to run the show, and they basically just let their kids do whatever they want, as opposed to observing what their kids are doing and saying, “Okay, there are clear consequences for this behavior, and I’m going to let you know what is okay and what is not okay, and I love you regardless.”

They communicate in discontinuous bursts

Brian Keating: Can we explore a little bit of the quality of interaction between people, the intensity of the interaction, the kind of base levels of the hierarchy of needs? Some do stuff for companionship or closeness, and what is it, the chemistry, is so, it’s like the [inaudible], taste is not, this is not debatable, right? What are these important features, and then how can those be leveraged for teams like scientific collaborations in particular? One of the three leaders of a major scientific collaboration, what is it about the intensity, frequency, depth, regularity, etc., that can be used by teams like mine to inculcate a sense of shared values, maybe that we don’t actually have to agree, as you say, but how can we best leverage that in a scientific setting? Should it be more frequent Zoom meetings? What can we do to intensify the bonds and accentuate the outputs?

Adam Grant: I’m immediately thinking of Anita Woolley’s research on burstiness, which is a term she borrowed from physicists, looking at patterns of communication and signals being sent back and forth. But what Anita and her colleagues have done is they’ve studied collaboration, and they’ve been particularly interested in remote teams, because we live in a world now where it’s easier than ever to find a world expert to collaborate with remotely, and yet it may be harder than ever to make that collaboration productive because there’s so many differences and points of separation between us. So Anita was interested in, what are productive remote teams do differently? And she found that they do not communicate in consistent streams. There’s not a steady back and forth of daily calls and hourly Slacks and emails. No, they communicate in discontinuous bursts. They’ll go through a couple hours of high-intensity communication, and then they’ll go through maybe a couple hours or a couple days of not interacting at all. What’s happening there is people are going off to solve problems independently. There’s a rich literature on group brainstorming which shows that if we all come together thinking two heads are better than one and five heads are better than two. If instead we had generated ideas separately, working alone, we would have come up with more ideas and also better ideas. Because when we pool our perspectives, we tended to run into what psychologists call production blocking. We can’t all talk at once. Some ideas get lost. We fall victim to ego threat. “I don’t want to look like an idiot, so I bite my tongue on my most unconventional, unproven ideas.” And then there’s also conformity pressure. If a high-status person speaks up and the idea gets popular, then everyone wants to jump on the bandwagon. Sometimes that’s been called the HiPPO effect, the highest paid person’s opinion. As soon as that is known, right, we don’t get diversity of thought anymore. So the antidote that psychologists have studied to this problem is called brainwriting, where you give people the problem or the prompt. You let them generate their own ideas independently. Then everyone does separate assessments of all the contributions. And at that point you bring the group together, knowing individuals have more brilliant ideas than groups because of the variety and independent thought that they bring to the table. They also have more horrible ideas than groups, because we’re too close to our own ideas to judge them accurately. So we want to start with individual variety and then bring in group wisdom. And if you do that, you will find yourself in a nice pattern of burstiness where you collaborate intermittently. You’re going off to come up with ideas separately. You’re bringing the group together to try to figure out which of these possibilities are promising. Let’s evaluate them together. Let’s elaborate them together. And now we’re going to divide and conquer and move the project forward. Again, not all as a group. Brian, one other just little observation that Anita shared with me: when she studied burstiness, she found that there’s a motivation benefit of coming together intermittently, not just a knowledge combination benefit. So if you and I are collaborating remotely and we agree that between 1 and 3 p.m. on Tuesdays and Thursdays we’re going to be available to respond to each other, we are more motivated. I know that you are there if I need you. I know that you’re there waiting for my ideas or for my draft, and that allows me to feel that I’m not alone.

It’s a mistake to trust your gut

Brian Keating: Talk about the dangers of first impressions, because in some sense it helps out. Aren’t first impressions vitally, I mean, that spidey sense, that little tentative question that you have about somebody when you meet somebody, you seem to hint that maybe we should override that nagging doubt. What are the importances of holding first impressions loosely?

Adam Grant: I think when you meet somebody for the first time, it’s a mistake to trust your gut. You’re better off testing your gut. It may well be that your spidey sense is tingling for a good reason, and you’ve subconsciously picked up on a pattern suggesting that the person might have what psychologists would call dark triad traits of personality, which would be they’re a narcissist, a Machiavellian, or a psychopath.

Brian Keating: Check. Oh, no. [laughter] At least one of those I check. I have to say one of those I check, but I’m a professor.

Adam Grant: I’m not qualified to diagnose you, Brian. I’m not that kind of psychologist, I’m sorry to say. What I would say is, sometimes those cues are subtle, right? If you look at research by Dacher Keltner and Leanne ten Brinke and colleagues, what they show is there are these indications of superficial charm that you can catch if you’re paying close attention on a first impression. So somebody who is delightful when they first interact with you, but then you see them kind of subtly smile when somebody else fails. That schadenfreude is a signal that they might have some dark traits, but you might not be looking for it. And so you just get a weird feeling. Well, you might be right. It also might be the case that they smiled because a song they love came on in the background and you didn’t hear it and you don’t know that. And so you need to gather more information to figure out what is that cue telling you. And I think that’s what we see in research on personality over and over again, is when you meet somebody, you are only getting a snapshot of the person. Not only are you only limited to a slice of whatever traits they happen to present in that moment, you are also only seeing them in one role in one situation. And they might show up in different situations in different ways. I think about, for example, a colleague of mine who, if you showed up at a meeting and you were 5 minutes late, you would not like her. You would think that she’s unpleasant, that she’s judgmental of other people, because she’d give you a stern look and tell you that it’s not okay to show up late. Well, it turns out that’s a trigger for her. It’s a pet peeve of hers. If you met her in another setting, or you bothered to show up on time, you would see that she’s extremely warm and friendly and welcoming and caring and kind, and you would have a completely different perception of her. And I think it’s very common for us to clash with people in one context and click in another. And so ideally, we see people in a range of situations before we think we’ve actually found a signal in the noise.

Brian Keating: I think that’s what you call the fundamental attribution error. But at a certain point, when does it become okay to attribute motivation to people? Even if you don’t, I mean, you’ll never have complete theory of mind. So what threshold of evidence, in a Bayesian sense, do we need before I can say, “Brian’s a narcissist”?

Adam Grant: I wish we had a more precise answer to that question. I think it’s really hard to know exactly where to draw the line. My heuristic is I’m looking for consistent patterns of behavior over time and across situations and raters. So, as an example, if I’m doing a job interview and I see a red flag, and then somebody else who met that person in a different context has a similar red flag, now I’m wanting to know, okay, is there a third person who can triangulate that? And if I see that, okay, this person has a pattern of egotistical, self-centered behavior over now the course of a year or multiple years, and different people have seen it, and it’s not just shown up in a job interview where they’re trying to make a good impression and there’s a norm of self-promotion, now my eyebrows are raised.

The soloist versus the orchestra

Brian Keating: The other thing that speaks to me in this book, and my wife’s a musician, she plays a violin. I play an instrument. It’s called Spotify. But they always have these violinists that come in, and it seems to me there’s this duality, wave-particle duality, as we’d say in quantum mechanics, between the importance of the soloist versus the orchestra. And a lot of people want to be the soloist. How do you balance those dynamics? Like in physics this week, for the first time in 34 years, a single person, my friend, it turns out, Francis Halzen at University of Wisconsin-Madison, he won the Nobel Prize. He was the first solo winner of the physics Nobel Prize in 34 years. It’s incredible. Yet he led a team of hundreds, and there have been many thousands involved in projects. Our team that Mark Devlin, your colleague at Penn, and I and Suzanne Staggs and Jo Dunkley lead is called the Simons Observatory. We got 450 people. Some of those people are rock stars and soloists. How do you know what role you’re destined to play? It’s not something you can easily predict, right? And you see a student and you might see greatness in that student or whatever, but they might not live out their potential. How do you inculcate that? A little bit of swagger, but also the humility, balancing with a little bit of humility.

Adam Grant: What I’m always looking for is confident humility. That’s a quality that I seek out in people and I also try to cultivate in people. For me, confident humility is being secure enough in your strengths that you’re willing to acknowledge your weaknesses. It’s being confident enough in your expertise to admit what you don’t know. And I think this is ideally how we’re all trained as scientists, or social scientists for that matter, if you want to separate that out as a separate category.

Brian Keating: No, I think what you just said is the essence of a great scientist. I’m sorry to interrupt you, but I love to point this out. We have a lot of young students and Nobel Prize winners that listen, but what Adam just said is vitally important. I gave a TED talk, which has the logarithm of the number of views your TED talks have, but it was that you should have two pockets, and it comes from a Yiddish parable about, a man should have two pockets with a note in each one. One says that the whole world was made for you, and the other one says you’re nothing but dust and ashes. And what you just said is that confident humility is the essence of being a good scientist. I love the way you captured that.

Adam Grant: It also reminds me of a Nordic proverb that, well, actually it comes from the Law of Jante originally, I think, which is, you are no better than anyone else, but also nobody else is better than you. And I think that duality is important, because science requires audacity. It requires the courage to come up with bold ideas, to challenge conventional wisdom, to ask questions that have never been asked, and to contemplate answers that have never been dreamed up before. And it’s hard to imagine doing that without confidence. At the same time, you are a failure as a scientist if you cannot recognize that you might be wrong. I have come across too many scientists who are more motivated to prove that they’re right than they are to search for reasons why they might be wrong. And psychologists have long called that confirmation bias. I actually think that’s only part of the battle. Confirmation bias is trying to support your existing assumptions and beliefs and maybe discount contradictory information. Even worse is what’s called desirability bias, which is when you are motivated to support your hypothesis and shut down any information that might call them into question. Whether Thomas Kuhn got anything right in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions or not, I think the fundamental psychological dynamic that animates what’s often kind of the slow march to discovering that one of our major theories was incorrect, which is having a motivated group of people who are invested in supporting the status quo. And I think confident humility is what allows you to say, “You know what? I’m more interested in getting it right than I am in being right. I am not somebody who believes I found the truth. I’m somebody who’s committed to searching.”

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The future of the university

Brian Keating: I’m interviewing your colleague Ethan Mollick tomorrow, as it turns out, for his new book. His chapter 8, he talks about the future of the university, and I see us as very susceptible. I mean, the fact that during COVID we were remote for a year and a half. I think it was the same for you guys. Our experiment was shut down for a long time. Certainly seems to be hard to do what you do, let alone what we do, without being in person. And a lot of that kind of secret sauce was lost: the interactions, the intangibles, the vibration, the interaction, chemistry that you talk about in your book, Vibe. And I wonder, I would have thought that that would have been maybe the end of education. Our form of education, where the sage on the stage, a guy with a piece of rock in one hand scratching on another piece of rock with the other. That’s been around for a thousand years, since the University of Bologna, 1080. Why are universities so resilient to these situations where you take away the very essence of vibing with one another, and yet they’re just as good? And obviously AI can do the same thing. How come universities are so resilient to this phenomenon?

Adam Grant: Well, I don’t think all learning needs to happen in a classroom. I think there’s a reason we have homework, [laughter] obviously. I think also, I think it’s often said that necessity is the mother of invention. And in some of my research, I’ve wanted to complicate that a little bit and say actually the necessity of others is a mother of invention. Because if you’re only addressing your own need, it’s not going to gain acceptance, or your solution is not going to be useful to others. And it’s the desire to crack a problem out of both personal interest and a sincere commitment to trying to benefit others that ultimately leads people to come up with new ideas that are fundamentally useful to others. I think that’s what we had to do during COVID. I think that when we got shut down, I remember, Brian, having to teach my first Zoom class and feeling like I was violating one of the laws of thermodynamics, right? I know that energy can neither be created nor destroyed. And yet I was sending all of this energy out and nothing was coming back. At first I thought I was burning out. And then I read a whole bunch of research on this and discovered actually the term for it is boreout, not burnout. Zoom fatigue is not overstimulation. It turns out to be understimulation. And so I started thinking about what can I do to raise the stimulation level of the students. And one thing I realized was I was kind of stuck in talking head mode because I didn’t know how to lead a class discussion virtually. So I started taking some of the same tools that I use in the live classroom and bringing them into the chat window. So in a live classroom, what I normally do is I say, first of all, if you have a disagreement that you want to raise, hold up a pen, and that will signal to me that somebody wants to bring in a divergent thought and we’ve got an opportunity for debate, and I’m going to have you jump the line. Secondly, if you ever see 20 hands up and you just have a burning question or comment and you just can’t wait to get in, I’m gonna have you wave your name card and I will let you jump the line there and I’ll call on you right away. And I thought, why not do this in the chat window? So I gave my students hashtags, and I said, “Okay, if you want to debate, #debate. If you have a burning question or comment, #onfire.” And every 2, 3, 5 minutes I would pause. I would scan through the chat. I had some TAs who were also scrolling through it and prompting me. I’ve got to tell you, Brian, that although the energy level overall was lower in my Zoom classes than I had felt in the live classroom, I had richer discussions teaching over Zoom than I had ever had in the live classroom. And the reason for that was, instead of calling on a random hand that may or may not be relevant, I was able to read everybody’s questions and thoughts in the chat and choreograph a discussion that built, that challenged, that ultimately crescendoed to an aha moment. And ever since then, I’ve been looking for ways to do more of that in the classroom. But I think what happened was we were forced to innovate, and we did.

Brian Keating: In the age of AI, when I can have a conversation with Carl Sagan or Madame Curie, or, we got to get you a finger puppet, or Einstein or Galileo, my hero, my personal hero, why do we need the university system? I mean, if you could synthesize Adam Grant. I mean, you have one of the best rejection templates, the power of no. You write an email to Adam Grant, you can find his email, I’m not going to tell you where it is, but you can find it, you will get the most cordial, sophisticated, polite decline to ever hear from him again. And I respect that, but that’s probably born of the fact that you are incredibly in demand, and for good reason. So, but my students at UCSD can’t come and take a class with you in person, but what if they could take virtual Adam AI and have you? Isn’t that going to pose a threat to us, Adam, as professors?

Adam Grant: I don’t think it’s going to pose a threat. Number one, because we haven’t seen the same legitimacy of degrees for online learning only that are conferred by physical universities. But number two, more importantly, people learn best in communities. I do not know how to build and scale a classroom of hundreds or thousands of people that will challenge each other and question each other the way that we do in a live classroom on campus. I also think that students don’t just come to learn, they come to bond. And there is no substitute for face-to-face interaction if you want to get to know someone. I will say there’s a paper that came out earlier this year out of the Eastwick lab which shows that if you go on a Zoom date, if you control for the length of the date, they do tend to be twice as long in person as opposed to Zoom. But people are just as attracted to each other and they’re just as interested in going on a second date over Zoom. And that may just be because their expectations were low, and they [laughter] thought, “Wow, I never thought that this would be even remotely enjoyable, and I actually really liked that person.” But if you want to make a meaningful connection with somebody, it’s really hard to do that if you’ve never been in the same room with them. And I think people crave that. I think people want to come to universities where they can make lifelong friends, where they can get to know their professors personally and feel like their mentors actually have an understanding of their potential and their capabilities. And I think that it’s just unimaginable to me that that community is going to exist in a metaverse or in any kind of online class.

Judging Books by Their Covers

Brian Keating: I have a patented section of my podcast called Judging Books by Their Covers.

[Jingle] By the covers. We know we’re not supposed to do it, but [inaudible] the impossible, there’s nothing to it. Let’s take a look and judge some books.

Brian Keating: Which is another way of saying first impression. If somebody doesn’t know anything about you, I want you to take us through the cover. So, the title, the subtitle, The Secrets of Strong Connections in a Lonely World, and Reese Witherspoon. No, you don’t have to mention “with Reese Witherspoon,” but take us through the cover art, the title, and why you chose the subtitle.

Adam Grant: Vibe is, it’s in the zeitgeist. I think that Gen Z and Gen Alpha are trying to co-opt it, although it’s been used to describe the energy and interaction and the meaningful bonds we form since at least the Beach Boys, right? With “Good Vibrations.” So we can trace it back over half a century as a popular term. I think when people hear vibe, I wanted to make it clear that I’m interested in how do we form a bond with other people. And I think strong connections, it was just the easiest way to capture that. We actually A/B tested a whole bunch of other subtitles. And we had “successful relationships,” but relationships signaled marriage. And this book is about all kinds of interactions and connections. It’s about collaborations and partnerships. It’s about romantic relationships. It’s about friendships. And connection felt most encompassing. And the cover art came from a lot of bad ideas, trying to figure out how do we symbolize two things that seem like, on their face, they might not click, actually coming together. And we thought, okay, two puzzle pieces that are a misfit being zipped together. That’s a way to signal that you might be able to vibe with people that you don’t expect.

A Rosetta Stone between social science and physical science

Brian Keating: When I wrote about this wonderful article, it gave me great satisfaction to read your paper. But the tools and methodology that social scientists use are a little bit foreign to my audience, which skews more to physical science and maybe pure economics and stuff like that. Walk us through the methodology to give us a kind of a Rosetta Stone to translate between social science and the rigor that you apply as a real scientist, to what a physical scientist that may have a little bit too much arrogance and narcissism think they’re doing, the real science. Walk us through: what is the lexicon? How can I think about things like pre-registration? What should I hear when I hear things like that? And then why even do that at all?

Adam Grant: I’m an organizational psychologist, and I was trained to go out into the world and look for a phenomenon and try to either measure it or create it before then trying to pin it down and explain it. So oftentimes my first study will take place in the field. It might be an experiment. I did some experiments early in my career where I was studying fundraising callers at a university, and I randomly assigned some of them to have a five-minute interaction that a month later the average caller had more than doubled in weekly phone time and nearly tripled in weekly revenue. And the simple intervention was they got to hear a scholarship student talk about how his life had been changed by the money that the fundraising callers brought in. And all of a sudden, I think they knew that the money would go somewhere. They didn’t know who was benefiting from it. They could attach a living, breathing human being to the benefits of their work, and they knew what they were doing matters. So I do that experiment initially. They have a high turnover rate. So I’m able to replicate it with a bunch of new callers every semester in the call center. At that time pre-registration didn’t exist. And so I just went into the lab and designed an experiment where I had people do a helping task, and I randomly assigned some of them to actually just briefly see the student who was going to benefit, and then tracked whether they spent more time on the task. If I were doing that experiment now, what I would do with my research team is we would write out the hypothesis. We say, “We have a hypothesis that if you interact with or even just witness face to face the person that your task is benefiting, then we believe you’re going to spend more time on the task and you’re going to make fewer errors.” And then we would pre-register that. We’d tell you roughly how many participants we were expecting to get and where we were going to find them. And then we would run the study and see if we support the hypothesis or not.

Don’t disbelieve anything that can’t be falsified

Brian Keating: And I think, echoing back to Feynman, who we opened the conversation with, the first principle according to Feynman is that you shouldn’t fool yourself, and you are the easiest one to fool, according to Feynman. So Adam, I study the expanding universe, and there’s a concept called the event horizon, beyond which we cannot see, and that eventually our universe, if current trends hold, keep paying your taxes out there, but the universe will keep expanding until it reaches sort of this heat death where there’s no useful work that can be performed because of dilution and the vast sums of entropy that are impossible to reduce at that point. And it made me think about your title, it’s living in a lonely world. So the world is lonely. The universe is even lonelier. Hashtag lonely universe. But what one piece of advice would you like to leave my fairly science-heavy audience, who, as we say, one kind of thing would you give them, to give them the hope that all is not lost, to give them the courage to do as you’ve done, to go into the impossible, to fight against the entropy, the heat death, the isolation and loneliness? What would you tell my audience?

Adam Grant: I think what I would say is, don’t believe anything that can’t be verified. That’s just a precept of science. But also don’t disbelieve anything that can’t be falsified. And I think that’s important because, whether you’re talking about the heat death of the universe or any depressing theory in science, we don’t know for sure. We don’t know yet. And I think full certainty is a great way both to depress yourself and also isolate yourself from your peers. I think it’s much healthier to talk in conditional probabilities. I think we should all be good Bayesians, right? So I think my advice would be, when thinking about scientific models, to say these are models. They are the best approximations we have of the universe. We are going to gather a lot of data in the coming years and decades and centuries that may turn our thinking upside down. And just as we’ve been through a Copernican revolution and a quantum revolution, there are probably other revolutions to come that we can’t foresee. That’s part of what makes it exciting to be a scientist. It means every single answer that you discover raises probably dozens of new questions. And it should be the questions, not the answers, that animate us.

Brian Keating: And as our friend Pythagoras enjoined us many, many millennia ago, that there is a geometry in the vibration of the strings. But you’re absolutely right. If we had attributed settled science to that falsifiable argument, we would have lost out on 20 centuries of the scientific progress. And I think science is ultimately a hopeful subject, that it allows us to have agency. And there’s a lot of doom and gloom going around, especially when it comes to AI. I’m not a doomer. I’m like one of a few people who’s not a doomer. We’ll have to do a part two to explore your feelings on the future of AI. But this book is incredibly well written. I want everyone to buy every copy, but please do get the audio copy. The audiobook is an actual theatrical work, and I think in the age of AI, when you can get any summary of the book in two seconds, you can’t get this. It’s really a special thing. And Adam, you’re to be congratulated, and thank you for this wonderful gift of your time and the book.

The thoughtful critique you wrote

Adam Grant: Well, thank you, Brian. It’s very kind of you, and I just want to again commend the thoughtful critique you wrote of our op-ed on why narcissistic leaders resist remote work. You brought in several very compelling challenges that our team is actually talking about doing follow-up research on, which is great fun. Not every day that a cosmologist informs our research and sparks some new ideas. But I also really appreciated, you read our op-ed, and I think most people, if it’s outside your field, you would stop there. You actually went and read our research paper, and then you asked me why didn’t you include a couple of these nuances that were important for the findings in your studies in the op-ed, and sadly, space constraints were the short answer. You provided a really powerful model of how to engage with people in different disciplines, starting from the standpoint of curiosity and humility, and I think that was a real gift, and I’d love to see more people communicate across disciplines that way.

Brian Keating: The title of the paper is “Worship Me at the Office Altar,” and it’s about remote work and how CEOs that have high on the triad that you mentioned before, at least one dimension, towards narcissism, they were more likely, after reading certain inspirational quotes and other pre-registered topics, to display a propensity towards in-person work. And some of the hypotheses were generated around that’s to feed their own ego. And I said the most capable profession, where we could do everything on Zoom, because we did it all on Zoom, was not a hospital CEO or a United Airlines CEO, but would be professors. And I said, “If you need a narcissistic professor lab rat, Adam, I’m your man, my brother.” [laughter]

Adam Grant: At least you own up to it.

Brian Keating: What can I say? I’m there for you. Plug me into those electrodes. Get me on the couch. Do whatever you got to do. I’m here for it, my friend. Thank you, Adam. This is great.

Adam Grant: Thank you, Brian. I appreciate it.

Brian Keating: Adam just told us the best sign of chemistry isn’t agreement. It’s enjoying the disagreement. If that changes how you run your team, subscribe so you don’t miss what’s next, and tell me in the comments who is the person you argue with most and still trust the most. For a fun conversation with a scientist that I don’t always agree with, but always have respect for, watch my recent debate with Roman Yampolskiy, joined alongside Joscha Bach. We disagree about the dangers of superintelligence, but that’s okay. The bots will sort it out for us. See you next time on Into the Impossible.