New Research Confirms Adam Grant Is Right: To Be Smarter and More Successful, Think More Like a Scientist

Ask a host of experts how to be smarter, and they’ll give you the same counterintuitive answer: acknowledge all the ways you’re probably being dumb.

Warren Buffett’s right-hand man Charlie Munger recommends “trying to be consistently not stupid, instead of trying to be very intelligent.” Jeff Bezos famously looks for people who are willing to admit mistakes and learn from them in job interviews.

A string of high-profile professors agree that this kind of intellectual humility is one of the most effective ways to be smarter. Psychologist David Dunning, who is famous for studying stupidity, claims the best way to avoid being dumb is to look out for your own overconfidence. Harvard’s Steven Pinker suggests focusing on being right rather than feeling right.

Why everyone should think like a scientist

Star Wharton psychologist Adam Grant puts this another way. In his book Think Again, he advises people to try to think like a scientist more often. To do so, “you favor humility over pride and curiosity over conviction,” he explains. “You look for reasons why you might be wrong, not just reasons why you must be right.”

All of this advice boils down to the same thing — not getting too attached to your ideas, actively looking for evidence to support or refute them, and then changing your thinking when evidence disproves your beliefs. Which is a pretty good basic summary of the scientific method.

These smart people say this scientific approach will make you smarter, and several hundred years of history proves it works for investigating the natural world. Now a new study provides evidence it will make you more successful in the business world too.

Benefits for entrepreneurs

The research comes out of European business school Insead and was recently published in the Strategic Management Journal. It looked at 759 startups in Milan and London, evaluating what approach to building a company produced the best odds of success. The answer wasn’t the Lean methodology or any other business school system. It was thinking like a scientist.

“My colleagues and I found that companies that embraced the practice of rigorously formulating and testing hypotheses consistently outperformed their peers,” writes Chiara Spina in Insead Knowledge.

Founders who used this approach were not only more likely to successfully pivot when necessary but also made more money.

“Of the top 25 percent of revenue generators in our latest study, those using the scientific method made an average of €28,000 more than counterparts in the control group over the course of the experiment. For the top 5 percent, the difference was €492,000,” Spina reports.

How to think like a scientist

Thinking like a scientist can make anyone in business smarter, Spina concludes. “For investors and policymakers, it offers a potential framework for evaluating and supporting new ventures,” she writes, offering a helpful four-point framework to help business leaders apply a more scientific approach:

• Start with a theory: Begin with your strongest intuition, but be prepared to test alternative theories if necessary.
• State your hypotheses: Clearly articulate your specific individual assumptions about your business idea.
• Validate your hypotheses: Design experiments to test your hypotheses.
• Refine and retest: Continuously refine your theories based on experimental results.

Grant too has offered specific advice on how entrepreneurs can think more like scientists in an interview with Inc.com’s Lindsay Blakely. His ideas include actively coming up with ways you might be wrong, leaning on trusted colleagues to stress-test your ideas, and celebrating when you realize you’re wrong.

Other experts have yet more ideas, such as forcing yourself to picture the worst case scenario in a given situation, constantly reminding yourself of your areas of ignorance, and learning to think in probabilities.

The specific ways you implement this approach will be different in different situations, but one thing seems glaringly consistent no matter what you’re trying to achieve — you’ll be smarter in how you go about it and more likely to be successful if you try to think a little more like a scientist.