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

~ (Author)
Key Phrases: pseudoscientific thinking, confirming strategies, strong disbelief, United States, New York, White House (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Product Description

Do you believe that you can consistently beat the stock market if you put in the effort? —that some people have extrasensory perception? —that crime and drug abuse in America are on the rise? Many people hold one or more of these beliefs although research shows that they are not true. And it’s no wonder since advertising and some among the media promote these and many more questionable notions. Although our creative problem-solving capacity is what has made humans the successful species we are, our brains are prone to certain kinds of errors that only careful critical thinking can correct. This enlightening book discusses how to recognize faulty thinking and develop the necessary skills to become a more effective problem solver. Author Thomas Kida identifies "the six-pack of problems" that leads many of us unconsciously to accept false ideas:

· We prefer stories to statistics.

· We seek to confirm, not to question, our ideas.

· We rarely appreciate the role of chance and coincidence in shaping events.

· We sometimes misperceive the world around us.

· We tend to oversimplify our thinking.

· Our memories are often inaccurate.

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.

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; illustrated edition edition (May 2, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1591024080
• ISBN-13: 978-1591024088
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 5.9 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 10.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (39 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #12,378 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

  Popular in these categories: (What's this?)

  #14 in	Books > Health, Mind & Body > Psychology & Counseling > Cognitive
  #51 in	Books > Professional & Technical > Professional Science > Behavioral Sciences > Cognitive Science
  #51 in	Books > Professional & Technical > Professional Science > Behavioral Sciences > Cognitive Psychology

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

132 of 134 people found the following review helpful:

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

By	The Spinozanator (Waco, Texas) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)

Amazon Verified Purchase

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!

77 of 81 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 (REAL NAME)

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!

34 of 38 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A must-read for most of us, February 6, 2007

By	Robert G. Muller (Long Island, NY United States) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

After reading a review of this book in e-Skeptic, I immediately ordered a copy. If there's one thing that could transform the world into a better place, it's the implementation of informed critical thinking in the general population. I have always been a proponent of Plutarch's belief that the mind is not a vessel to be filled, but a fire to be lit, and am always in eager anticipation of books that may light those fires.

The title is a bit misleading, as it oversimplifies the author's scope. But the use of numbered lists in book and article titles (Ten Ways To Do This, Five Things You Can Do To Improve That, etc.) is a pretty standard marketing ploy to attract readers seeking simple answers.

If I had written of the review of the book after only 30-50 pages, I would not have given it a great review. It felt a bit choppy and lacking direction early on. The author seemed to worship statistics without the same level of skepticism applied to anecdotal evidence. All of this was fully rectified later in the book.

Kida's approach is not only theoretical. He uses real-life scenarios to show how decision-making based on poor information and/or improper processing of information affects our lives in negative ways.

There was one glaring omission: You can't talk about belief in the paranormal, superstition, and an aversion to fact-based and proven theory-based thinking without noting at some point that we live in a society where children are indoctrinated to believe in anti-science. Virgin births, the parting of seas at the will of a man, people walking on water, fat guys flying around the world with magic flying reindeer in a single night, rabbits delivering dyed chicken eggs, and so many more stories that are taught to children as fact brainwash them into believing in things that fly in the face of reason and fact. It shouldn't surprise us that these children grow up to accept bizarre claims, and make important decisions, without applying skepticism.

We're not much closer to an Age of Reason than we were during Thomas Paine's days, but at least there are books like this flying the flag and trying to warn us of the dangers of not using our "God-given" ability to think. As a whole, this is a book that can improve people's lives and, thereby, everything those lives touch.