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Everyday Irrationality: How Pseudo- Scientists, Lunatics, And The Rest Of Us Systematically Fail To Think Rationally (This Is Not Naxos)

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Potential readers of this book should first of all be careful not to confuse it with the usual debunking books that tell amusing stories about how foolish we are to believe what we believe. This is a different kind of book altogether. There is only a trace of "debunking" here, regarding a few of the authors' pet peeves, such as the overemphasis on self-esteem by many psychologists, the sexual abuse/memory recovery controversies, and the usefulness of clinical experience vs. statistical predictive models. However, those are certainly not discussed sufficiently to get the book for that purpose.

This is also not a book on critical thinking, or one listing all the various ways thinking can go wrong. There are much better books on those subjects as well.

This is specifically a book describing a certain type of yet poorly understood cognitive mechanisms that the Dawes feels is at the root of much of our irrational thinking. He considers the theories that assume out emotion leads us astray, and decides that even within cold thinking processes devoid of strong emotion, there are tendencies toward irrationality. He makes the point for example that most support of Nazi fascism was not motivated by rage so much as cold cognitive processes: a suppression of sympathetic emotion more than the expression of hatred.

Dawes defines irrationality is a very specific way, as self-contradictory thinking processes and conclusions. He then points out that there are a number of easily demonstrated biases in human thinking, even when there is no strong emotions involved.

Dawes does not believe that we understand this very well yet, but his central culprit is our failure to make sufficient comparisons in our thinking. He is quick to point out that this is not usually because there are too many choices to consider; that even when we only have two options, we often fail to consider the second one. Dawes does not really offer much of a unifying explanation for cognitive irrationality biases, though he alludes to some of the theories very briefly.

What he does do is to point out that human thinking is fundamentally irrational by default in some ways, and he believes it can be corrected if we understand and pay attention to the comparisons we make in our thinking.

This book has technically solid explanations, good examples, and useful scientific content. On the other hand, I found it a pretty dull book to read, it felt a little more like it should have been an informal version of a journal article on decision theory and heuristics than a book.

Philosophers, church fathers, and psychoanalysts have long shared the sinking feeling that rationality is more an ideal than a reality. In his new book, Robyn Dawes expertly reviews and critiques several traditional approaches to rationality. His own definition is simple: Judgments and decisions are rational if they avoid outright contradictions. With this definition, Dawes avoids many of the contradictions and circularities that economists run into when they try to equate rationality with the effective pursuit of self-interest.

Dawes argues that lots of contradictions occur because sages and fools alike tend to think associatively instead of comparatively. To use one of Dawes's favorite examples, we may reasonably expect a dyslexic person to make many typos, but it does not follow that a poor speller is a dyslexic. Associative thinking suggests that inferences are symmetrical, whereas comparative thinking does not. Throughout the book, Dawes emphasizes the relationship between irrationality and social (or individual) ills, such as genocide, addictions, false memories and false accusations, and motley superstitions. This is where it gets interesting: Although Dawes defines rationality without reference to its consequences, he makes the empirical case that we are better served by rational than associative reasoning. The argument made by evolutionists and ecologists that associative reasoning also has its benefits, he finds loathsome. The reader is not off the hook. Everyone needs to find an answer to the question of how much effort to invest into rational thought.

Robyn Dawes is a distinguished psychological researcher whose personal contributions to understanding human behavior have been prescient and pathbreaking. This is very lively, informal, and humorous commentary on our society based on rigorous psychological research undertaken by Daniel Kahneman, Amos Tversky,Richard Thaler, and their coworkers over the past few decades. I know other readers found this book tedious, but I'm not sure why. Perhaps because it has some math in it? At any rate, I treated the book like pleasant light reading.

Dawes claims to hold a very tight definition of rationality, but in fact, he uses the term to describe a host of different behaviors, including holding unfounded beliefs, having weird personal moral values, or just ignoring the evidence. I use a

very narrow definition of rationality in my work (preference consistency is the substance of it), and I generally disapprove of throwing the term "rationality" around ad libidem---academics invoke rationality to justify their prejudices in the same manner clergy invoke God to justify theirs. But Dawes is sloppy in such a disarming way in his usage that it is hard to fault him.

Dawes actually relies on only a couple of well document psychological phenomena (he could have dealt with several more). One is a framing effect, in which if a choice is framed in terms of losses, people choose one way, and if in terms of gains, a very different way. It is actually closely related to loss aversion, which Dawes does not discuss.

A second phenomenon is ignoring base rates. For instance, suppose you learn that a test for HIV is 90% accurate, and you ask people what is the probability they have HIV is they test positive. Most say 90%. However, suppose only one person out of

100 is HIV positive. Take a group of 1000 people. Ten will be HIV positive (on average...) and nine will test positive. But 990 will be HIV negative and 99 of these will test positive. Thus, if you test positive, your chances of being HIV positive are only 9/(99+9)=8.33%.

This is an important phenomenon, but "irrational" is a bit strong here, as elsewhere in the book. We expect experts to know how to do conditional probabilities, but it is no more "irrational" to get this wrong than to fail to solve third order partial differential equations.

I very much liked Dawes' treatment of Sexual Abuse Hysteria. In this chapter, he really does show the aberrant reasoning of the judges and attornies associated with the incredible miscarriages of justice associated with this dark period in American history.

This book is a social scientific study of the tendency towards irrational conclusions to make or interpret a point. I found the examples provocative but the math is beyond me.

The book held my interest and I found much of it very convincing.

This is a thought provoking and insightful book, even if at times it displays a somewhat heavy prose. If find it odd, though, that the author doesn't mention the "congnitive dissonance theory" which (to my eyes at least) seems to overlap with parts of his arguments and examples.

This book covers in some detail some hows and whys of irrational thinking in adults with some excellent examples.

Dawes definition of irrationality is more broad than I suspect most people would consider. Dawes regards as irrational what most people would regard as simply sloppy thinking. In a couple of places I was unconvinced that there was irrationality per se just dodgy inferences. For example in the preface Dawes mentions a commentator who assumes because a person was a supporter of a "peace organisation" in the late 1950s that person was a communist. Perhaps a dodgy inductive inference but hardly profoundly irrational even by the author's own criteria of self-contradiction.

However this is a minor quibble. My major grief with this book is the convolutions the author occasionally seems to get himself into where simple words and concepts could be invoked to aid the reader. A book that is all about making inferences but doesn't mention "control" or "induction" is a very strange book indeed.

Everyday Irrationality by Robyn Dawes was not at all what I thought it would be. I chose to purchase this book because I thought it would be an exposé (possibly entertaining) of the ridiculous, illogical behavior exhibited by everyone. That is a topic upon which I frequently harp. Unfortunately, Everyday Irrationality is a tedious book of another color.

Contrary to what the full title might suggest, this book is less about HOW pseudo-scientists, lunatics, and the rest of us systematically fail to think rationally and more of an explanation of WHY. Dawes is a psychologist, and nearly all of his examples of irrationality come from that field. While pointing out the poor logic of psychology, as with faith or astrology, is similar to shooting fish in a barrel of self-contradiction, the irony, though delicious, was barely enough to keep my attention.

Dawes defined irrationality as an argument involving self-contradictions. The author, however, frequently found his contradictory evidence for irrationality from outside the argument. If assumptions are amended to an argument, then one is no longer testing the consistency of the same reasoning. Because of this, 'irrationality' is different than 'logic,' and it is unclear to me whether or not Dawes is simply interested in the 'truth' of a statement over its internal consistency.

What were the most interesting were the self-contradictory arguments presented to explain various irrationalities. The obvious example is Chapter 7 where Dawes selects several anecdotes to explain why stories of individual incidents are not useful to describe generalities.

Another example occurs in Chapter 3 where Dawes investigates the public health argument that anyone irresponsible enough to be addicted to heroine would not be interested in using sterile needles to avoid HIV. Dawes claims that this argument is irrational because, as people "...are not paragons of consistently good - or, for that matter, bad - health practices, there is nothing contradictory about engaging in one unhealthy habit while refraining from another." (p. 31) Granted, such contradictory behavior is clearly popular - I myself have tried to reduce the saturated fats in my diet, but I have made no plans to put down my pipe or the occasional cigar. However, commonplace or not, concern over the effects of a variable on a potential undesirable outcome while ignoring other variables that could lead to the same outcome is self-contradictory and, therefore, irrational according to our working definition. Can a self-contradictory statement be used to demonstrate the irrationality of another?

Everyday Irrationality does provide a bright spot or two. There is a brief but successful introduction to hypothesis testing using statistics and limited logical symbolism. Where arithmetic is involved, it may be possible to expect 'truth.' In addition, Dawes does a fine job of suggesting the causes (incomplete specification, etc.) of irrationality that everyone should be aware of in their everyday thinking and thoughting.