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Inevitable Illusions: How Mistakes of Reason Rule Our Minds (Hardcover)

~ (Author) "St. Louis, Missouri, can be proud of possessing the largest optical illusion ever created by the hand of man..." (more)
Key Phrases: irrational prudence, cognitive ecologists, drawn card lands, New York, United States, Tunnel Exits (more...)
3.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (25 customer reviews)
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  Hardcover, October 19, 1994 $35.00 $1.80 $0.25
  Paperback, October 31, 1996 $11.53 $5.41 $4.68

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Inevitable Illusions: How Mistakes of Reason Rule Our Minds + How We Know What Isn't So: The Fallibility of Human Reason in Everyday Life + Don't Believe Everything You Think: The 6 Basic Mistakes We Make in Thinking
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Editorial Reviews

From Library Journal

Minimally, how many people must there be in a room to allow a better than 50 percent chance that two of them will have the same birthday? Your answer may reveal the presence of a cognitive illusion-a mental tunnel that confounds rational thought. Piattelli-Palmarini, director of the Cognitive Science Institute in Milan and a research associate at MIT, offers fascinating examples of such illusions to show how spontaneous, intuitive judgment can lead us astray. Our failure to grasp basic probability, for example, can lead to catastrophic decisions in law and medicine. The author describes the seven deadly mental sins and suggests ways to overcome bias and "mental sloth." This thoughtful, often disturbing book will challenge even those readers with a firm grounding in probability and statistics. For academic and large public libraries.
Laurie Bartolini, Legislative Research, Springfield, Ill.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.


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"A delightful informal survey...the best popular book yet in theis peculiar field" -- Nature

"A fascinating and insightful look." -- R. C. Lewontin, Harvard University --This text refers to the Paperback edition.
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Product Details

  • Hardcover: 256 pages
  • Publisher: Wiley (October 20, 1994)
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-10: 0471581267
  • ISBN-13: 978-0471581260
  • Product Dimensions: 9.5 x 6.4 x 1 inches
  • Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
  • Average Customer Review: 3.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (25 customer reviews)
  • Amazon.com Sales Rank: #1,439,750 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

    Popular in this category: (What's this?)

    #89 in  Books > Health, Mind & Body > Psychology & Counseling > By Topic > Reasoning

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More About the Author

Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini
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Front Cover | Table of Contents | First Pages | Index | Back Cover | Surprise Me!
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First Sentence:
St. Louis, Missouri, can be proud of possessing the largest optical illusion ever created by the hand of man. Read the first page
Key Phrases - Statistically Improbable Phrases (SIPs): (learn more)
irrational prudence, cognitive ecologists, drawn card lands, mental tunnels, cognitive subconscious, disjunction effect, probability blindness, conjunction effect, cognitive illusions, probabilistic intuitions, mental sloth, certainty effect, judgment under uncertainty, cognitive unconscious
Key Phrases - Capitalized Phrases (CAPs): (learn more)
New York, United States, Tunnel Exits, Amos Tversky, Soviet Union, Bertrand Russell, North Korea, Gerd Gigerenzer, Stanford University
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39 of 41 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars Overwrought But Fun, March 4, 2000
By S. Robertson "steve44" (Tucson, Arizona USA) - See all my reviews
  
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This review is from: Inevitable Illusions: How Mistakes of Reason Rule Our Minds (Paperback)
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.
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17 of 17 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars Interesting and informative, June 2, 2001
This review is from: Inevitable Illusions: How Mistakes of Reason Rule Our Minds (Paperback)
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.

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16 of 18 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars A Good Lay Intro to the Cognitive Biases Literature, March 2, 2005
This review is from: Inevitable Illusions: How Mistakes of Reason Rule Our Minds (Paperback)
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).
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Most Recent Customer Reviews

4.0 out of 5 stars Life is an illusion. We need illusions to live live.
Life is an illusion.


We choose some illusions conciously, and some we fall into. Read more
Published 4 months ago by Geno

2.0 out of 5 stars Taking an exciting topic and rendering it boring and needlessly complex
I came to this book hoping to get a little more insight into the work of Tversky and Kahneman; instead I was treated to needlessly complex prose, poor layout, gee whiz logic and a... Read more
Published 4 months ago by Allison M. Perkel

5.0 out of 5 stars Get Out Your Dictionary, Notebook, Thinking Caps... Italian Translator?
I found Inevitable Illusions extremely beneficial and enlightening. The author of the book (originally published in Italian) presents us with our own "tunnel vision" - exposing... Read more
Published 8 months ago by James A. Winkler

4.0 out of 5 stars Is Reno west or east of San Diego?
Did you say east simply because Nevada is east of California? It's actually west of San Diego. In inevitable illusions (sic), Palmarini, the mediator of the great debate between... Read more
Published on August 9, 2007 by The Doctor

3.0 out of 5 stars Too many promises
This book is a nice review of the work of two prominent psychologists, Tversky and Kahnenan. If you are familiar with their work, there is little reason to read this book. Read more
Published on July 3, 2007 by Michael Greenstein

2.0 out of 5 stars Academic With Little Practical Application
This book reminds me of a girl I knew once -- she promised a lot but never delivered. If you're a psychologist or a statistics professional, you may enjoy this book, but if... Read more
Published on June 12, 2007 by D. Weisberg

4.0 out of 5 stars A Tough But Rewarding Read
This was a tough read for me because this book covers a lot of concepts related to probability with which I've always had trouble. Read more
Published on March 27, 2007 by bronx book nerd

3.0 out of 5 stars Mental Tunnels & Hopeful Avoidance
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... Read more
Published on August 26, 2006 by James East

2.0 out of 5 stars how to make a complex subject obtuse
The study of cognitive illusions within the discipline of social psychology is fascinating but not always easily accessible to the layperson. Read more
Published on August 9, 2006 by T. Randall

3.0 out of 5 stars Enticing, but ultimately unsatisfying
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... Read more
Published on April 1, 2006 by Paul Rogers

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