Don't Believe Everything You Think: The 6 Basic Mistakes We Make in Thinking [Paperback]

Thomas E. Kida (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 2, 2006

Kida vividly illustrates these tendencies with numerous examples that demonstrate how easily we can be fooled into believing something that isn't true. In a complex society where success - in all facets of life - often requires the ability to evaluate the validity of many conflicting claims, the critical-thinking skills examined in this informative and engaging book will prove invaluable.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Thomas Kida (Amherst, MA) is a professor in the Isenberg School of Management at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and the author of many articles on decision-making.

Product Details

• Paperback: 286 pages
• Publisher: Prometheus Books (May 2, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1591024080
• ISBN-13: 978-1591024088
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 10.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (52 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #61,706 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

189 of 192 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Captivating!, August 2, 2006

By 

The Spinozanator "Spinozanator" (Harlingen, Texas) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Don't Believe Everything You Think: The 6 Basic Mistakes We Make in Thinking (Paperback)

One of my favorite quotes is from Robert Wright's "Moral Animal:" "...human beings are a species splendid in their array of moral equipment, tragic in their propensity to misuse it, and pathetic in their ignorance of the misuse." Although this book is not about the morality of our decision-making, it is completely about how we delude ourselves about ourselves, our situations, and others.

Borrowing heavily from Carl Sagan, Michael Shermer, Skeptic Magazine, and Skeptic Inquirer, Kida starts off with standard issue debunking of pseudoscience. Soon he zeroes in and concentrates on the faulty ways we reach assessments. These methods worked quite well in our small tribe hunting-gathering days, but nowadays we could do better.

At the risk of losing half the readers of this review, I'll spill the beans. Kida believes in statistics, whereas people evolved to believe in anecdotes. People confidently rely on intuition, then remember the hits and ignore the misses. People seek to confirm what they already believe and gloss over contradictory evidence. People rarely consider the role of chance and coincidence, preferring to give credit to metaphysical causes. People consistently misinterpret events to bolster their deluded self-images. People oversimplify complex situations, tending to shun the gray areas for black or white assessments. Finally, our memories are the pits - remolding and enhancing the original memory more and more as time goes by.

For the above data, Kida has documentation galore, but in the face of volumes of evidence, we continue to do more of the same. After blasting our anecdotal way of proving our theories, Kida uses his own anecdotes, saying "we evolved to love learning from stories." The difference is, the stories he tells survive sophisticated statistical analysis of the data.

There are fascinating stories on every page of this book, with conclusions that will bowl you over if you're not used to this kind of analysis - but it's so true to life. Every day, I hear people justifying their decisions on the basis of someone else's single experience, their own biased conclusion based on erroneous information, a TV show, a hot tip, or other bad data. Every day, I hear stories told that have been enhanced. Confrontations usually don't turn out quite as well as what is later reported to spellbound listeners.

I wish all high schools and colleges would offer a required course on critical thinking - for that group that really would like to take a more scientific approach, but didn't know it existed. Prepare to be blown away - this is a great book!

100 of 104 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Should be required reading!, May 17, 2006

By 

Kat Bakhu (Albuquerque, NM United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Don't Believe Everything You Think: The 6 Basic Mistakes We Make in Thinking (Paperback)

How much better of a country we would have if everyone was required to read and digest this book before getting a high school diploma. We would at least have a population that understands what science, and the scientific method are. The author's explanation of science and pseudo-science, and how they differ, is excellent.

The author covers six common factors that cause us to be mis-guided by our thoughts. Honestly, when I read the list of 6 factors, I had a kind of ho-hum attitude. I didn't see how he could make explicating such obvious things (e.g., we don't always perceive reality accurately) interesting. But he surprised me! His book is very interesting, page after page. His anecdotes and explanations have a way of popping open one's brain cells, allowing one to reflect with much deeper insight on how various factors cause our thinking to send us into wasteful, and even destructive, dead-ends. I particularly enjoyed how well the author demonstrated that if there is no way to show that a hypothesis is false, there is nothing more we can do with it.

I really enjoyed this book. Since we are all dictated by our thoughts, I think that everyone would benefit from reading it!

41 of 45 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Easy to read overview, February 8, 2008

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Robert Ashton (St. Louis, MO USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Don't Believe Everything You Think: The 6 Basic Mistakes We Make in Thinking (Paperback)

I'm not completely sure what it is that I don't like about the style of writers for management. Maybe it's the insistence on the superficial, chatty, bouncy style of writing. Thomas Kida is a professor in the Isenberg School of Management and adopts this style, which somewhat undermines the very important points he makes. Yes, it's easy to read but I wouldn't mind a little more challenge in a book about the sometimes critical decision errors that we make due to our evolutionary past.

The book is subtitle "the 6 basic mistakes..." - "the six pack of problems" as he calls them, which he lists in sequence. However, the majority of the book is not structured to follow that sequence. It seems to be rather an afterthought (or a good publicity idea).

He readily admits that the book is built on the work of others and it really is. Much of the discussion on weird beliefs and pseudoscientific thinking is a rehash of Shermer and Sagan (and he credits them both). Having said that it does bring together a lot of different information and work by others and does explain how and why we all make these errors in reasoning. For a book on decision making, he goes too much into UFO's, false memories etc. His discussions on probability and why we misjudge is much more interesting and helpful.

Overall, as I've said, it's an easy read and does cover a lot of interesting ground. However, it really doesn't bring much new for anyone who has read generally about these sorts of issues. A pretty good introduction but I just wish writers like this would credit their readers with a little more intelligence and literacy.