Adam Grant's Think Again: Rethinking as Two Big Five Facets

Adam Grant's Think Again is about a skill most people never practice: changing your mind on purpose. His model is the scientist, who treats an opinion as a hypothesis to be tested rather than a possession to be defended. In a Thought Economics interview he names the tell: "I should be just as excited to find out I was wrong as to prove I am right." Almost nobody feels that by default. In the Big Five, the people who come closest run high on two facets.

Rethinking is Intellect plus Modesty

Grant spells out the raw materials in the same interview: "I think about a scientist as somebody who has the humility and curiosity to know what they don't know and to doubt some of their existing conventions as they try to discover new information." Those two words land straight on facets. Curiosity is Intellect (O5), the appetite for ideas and the willingness to entertain one you did not start with. Humility is Modesty (A5), the low-ego end where being wrong is not a threat to who you are. Rethinking needs both, because O5 supplies the curiosity to look again and A5 supplies the lack of ego to admit what you find.

This is a different claim from growth mindset, and worth keeping separate. Growth mindset is a belief about ability, that you can improve with effort, which leans on Conscientiousness. Grant's rethinking is a belief about your own ideas, that they are not you, which leans on Openness and low ego. You can hold a rock-solid growth mindset about your skills and still be a fortress about your opinions. The two facets Think Again targets are the ones that keep the fortress from forming.

So if you find it genuinely hard to lose an argument, that is usually A5 doing the defending and low O5 keeping the door shut on the alternative. Grant's practical move is to hold your views loosely enough that new evidence can actually get in. It costs you the comfort of certainty and buys you the odds of being right more often over time, a trade high-O5, high-A5 people tend to make without noticing.

Read the book: Think Again: The Power of Knowing What You Don't Know by Adam Grant.

See Where You Fall

Where do you actually fall? The 30-facet OCEAN personality test takes about 15 minutes and scores all five domains and the facets underneath them. Take the test

Research Citations