Adam Grant: Don't Trust Your Gut. Test It.

When two people are vibing, their brainwaves synchronize and so do their heartbeats. That is not a metaphor. It is a measurable physiological event, and organizational psychologist Adam Grant has spent his career figuring out how to make it happen on purpose. Subscribe if you want science with evidence, not speculation.

Grant’s new book Vibe is his seventh. It argues that the science of human connection has been hiding in plain sight for a century, and that most of what people do to build relationships is either backwards or unnecessary.

The episode covers why the highest sign of chemistry between people is enjoying your disagreements rather than avoiding them, why remote work produces boreout rather than burnout, and why your first impression of someone is a snapshot of one situation that may not represent the whole person. It also covers burstiness, confident humility, and why universities have survived COVID, AI, and every other disruption that was supposed to end them.

What you’ll hear:

Why the pendulum clock experiment from 1665 explains what happens when people stop trying to force a connection

What the HiPPO effect does to a team and why the highest paid person’s opinion kills creative ideas

Why Grant ran experiments on university fundraising callers that tripled their revenue with a five-minute intervention

What desirability bias is and why Grant thinks it is more dangerous than confirmation bias

Why Grant A/B tested the subtitle of his own book and what “relationships” signaled that “connections” did not

What Grant and Brian agree on about false certainty and thinking in conditional probabilities

“The highest sign of chemistry between people is not agreeing with them. It’s enjoying your disagreements.” — Adam Grant

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