Customer Reviews

Inevitable Illusions: How Mistakes of Reason Rule Our Minds

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(7)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(7)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

This is a collection of "optical illusions of the mind," i.e., puzzles to which the intuitive answers are wrong. It gives several examples with non-technical discussions but is mostly a framework around the "Monty Hall" problem, a classic demonstration that probabilities can be tricky things. The book's sub-title is overblown -- it is not an explanation of how the brain works or doesn't work, or of consistent ways in which the mind distorts reality -- and the author's writing style is hyperbolic. Some readers have seen this book as an important discussion of the human mental process; it is not that. Read around the pretention, though, and it is fun.

Most people are familiar with term "optical illusion". One well-known example is the picture of two equally long lines, but one has arrow-heads at the end turned inward, while the other has arrow-heads turned outward. The arrow-heads make the lines appear to be of different lengths. They look something like this:

<------->

>-------<

However, most people are NOT aware that there are similar mental illusions that affect how we make decisions. This book describes what researchers have found in this field in the last decades, and it is a very interesting read.

For example, there is an effect called framing, which means that the way a question or a problem is phrased has a large impact on how we answer it. In an experiment, doctors were told that when using a certain medical procedure, the probability that the patient is alive two years later is 93%.

Another group of doctors were told that with another procedure there was a 7% chance of the patient dying within two years. Both groups of doctors were asked whether they would recommend the procedure or not. Significantly more doctors would recommend the procedure as stated in the first case than in the second, even though the two cases are identical! This shows how powerful the framing effect is.

Another example: A wheel is spun, giving a number from 0 to 100. After seeing the number, people are asked to estimate the percentage of African nations that are part of the UN. If the number on the wheel was high, people give a high estimate of the percentage, if low a low estimate is given, even though people know that the number on the wheel has nothing to do with the actual percentage. This mental illusion is known as anchoring.

There are many more mental illusions discussed in the book, and there are lots of entertaining (and revealing) examples. I found the book very interesting and informative, and it has made me look out for mental illusions in my own decision making.

It is also interesting to note that it doesn't always help to be aware of a certain illusions - you can still be fooled by them. This is analogous to how the lines above still seem to be of different lengths even though we know that they are not.

My one criticism of the book is that the language is a little bit difficult and sometimes it doesn't flow as well as it could. But this is a minor problem. Also, there is a similar book that concentrates on mental illusions when it comes to money. It is called "Why Smart People Make Big Money Mistakes" by Belsky and Gilovich, and is also highly recommended, even though a lot of the material they cover is the same as in this book.

The negative reviews (especially by the evolutionary psych devotee) are grossly unfair. This book is not written for those already familiar with the cognitive biases literature, especially not for graduates students in psychology. Instead it is an expansion of a popular article that appeared in Bostonia magazine in 1991, written for intelligent laypeople. As such it is effective, more accessible than anything else I've found, and excellent supplemental reading for basic classes in logic or statistics. The author's lack of appreciation of evolutionary psych in no way detracts from the book's value in making people aware of cognitive illusions. It does fall down however in lacking adequate discussion of methods for avoiding these illusions, such as the natural frequencies approach, and needs to be supplemented (e.g., with one of the popular books by Gigerenzer).

The study of cognitive illusions within the discipline of social psychology is fascinating but not always easily accessible to the layperson. There is already a wealth of jargon that has to be explained in order to help the reader better understand this phenomena, and this author, by introducing the metaphor of "tunnels" and the like, manages to create confusion rather than clear it up. I suggest, without qualification, that the reader purchase Thomas Gilovich's book instead "How We Know What Isn't So." It was published about the same time and is a MUCH better guide. Also Scott Plous offers a straightforward, albeit less stylistically appealing and anecdotal presentation of many of the same illusions in his book "The Psychology of Judgment and Decision-Making."

The book has a great promise, delivers half-way, then peters out. I'd hoped for a wide-ranging discussions of cognitive "illusions", but found the book focuses almost entirely on the fact that we can't do statistical problems naturally without training. No real surprise there. Some of the "illusions" turned out to be stuff you learn how to do in undergrad statistics classes. I'd hoped for other areas to be covered: affects of social pressure, of vested interests, of faulty memory, etc.

I'd hoped for explanations of the evolutionary or cognitive reasons behind the "illusions", but perhaps they are not yet known. In any case, the author instead spends paragraphs in bombastic calls to rationality. The book can't decide whether to be an explanation of how we really think or a self-help book.

Still, all-in-all, it is a good place to start on this subject; but I'd appreciate a more complete, balanced if anyone could recommend one.

I'll admit it--I began reading this book with skepticism. After all, how many mental traps could folks (or *I*) really be subject too? And at first I was ready to put the book down. The first few examples seemed weak. "What? I learned a long time ago not to fall for THAT!" But as I (fortunately) progressed, I started coming across more convincing arguments and examples. I saw that, yes, there were innate mental traps that I fell into. Eventually I was convinced.

While the start was slow for me, the book is overall a very good read. A bit thick at times, but the translation was excellent. I'd recommend it to anyone interested in how the mind works, how people think, and other such cognitive studies.

Inevitable Illusions is worthy of any collection for the study of human nature and its sometimes cognitive tricks for our evolutionary adaptation has not ever caught up to our increasingly innovative, and busy world. The author gives warnings to his (thesis) "Mental Tunnels" which we often go down to our detriment. Descriptions are provided via studies that have confirmed such events and via illusions that we play on ourselves in a very enlightening and educational way. These warnings are irrespective of whether the illusion is visual or probabilistic in nature. The many examples vary from the probabilistic in the "Monty Hall Dilemma" (i.e. doors #1, 2, or 3), to the "Third Prisoner Dilemma", to the failure to account for the conjunctive aspects of mathematical scenarios.

Though this book is good, if you have not previously read either authors Cialdini, Gilovich, or Plous, I would maybe start here but don't pass on the other author's works. The point the author wants to leave one with is the knowledge of the Mental Tunnels and a hopeful wish that once we have been advised of the tunnels, we may avoid them in the future (but probably doubtful) but wishing anyway.

I had high hopes for this book and after reading the intro and first couple paragraphs assigned it as an extra credit/optional text for a course on critical thinking and logic. As I continued reading however, I realized that I had made a mistake. The level of sophistication that is expected of the reader is extremely uneven. Sometimes concepts that are simple and easily understood are explained in greater detail than necessary. More frequently, in the middle and later chapters (the real meat of the book), complicated concepts and issues that ought to be introduced and explained are not; instead the author seems to assume that the reader knows all about them--which is a bad assumption for a popularization/intro-to-the-layperson book to make.

What I wanted for my students was a book that discussed empirical findings about how humans actually reason to motivate their learning about how we ought to reason. This book looked like a good option, but disappointed me. I found a better option in Ken Manktelow's _Reasoning and Thinking_. However, perhaps I should learn my lesson from my experience with _Inevitable Illusions_ and _finish_ reading the Manktelow book before recommending it.

The book discribes a lot of typical mental errors that we make in our every day life when we make judgements. This is interesting and helpful. We tend to overvalue our minds, and this book helps to put it back to the ground. All the time while reading it I thought about how much Voltaire and his friends 200 years ago were adoring the human brain, and what would have they said if they had read this book! However, some of the examples seemed to me too much black-and-white. I have made the tests in the book upon my friends, and the results were not according to the results in the book. May be Europeans think in a different way than Americans? Anyhow, the book is interesting, easy to read, but does not live up its the title.

"Let the thinker beware" could be the motto for this excellent and very useful book. Author Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini has done a masterful job of arraying some of the most serious and most commonplace errors of judgment, estimation and deduction. The style is mostly straightforward, if academic, and makes the meat of the book's message accessible to the general reader. One quibble is that the author's explanation of certain probability calculations (especially Bayes' theorem) leaves them less clear than they could be. That aside, we give this book the highest recommendation, especially for those who like to consider how people understand their world. If you are devoted to clear thinking, you could practically use it to conduct a daily scrutiny of your mental processes - an examination of cognition similar to the monastic examination of conscience - to identify and correct any inclinations to serious cognitive sin.