Thinking 101: How to Reason Better to Live Better

Ahn, a psychology professor at Yale University, debuts with an informative guide to improving one’s judgment and reasoning. Drawing on cognitive psychology, she examines common errors and biases in thinking and how to combat them. The author describes psychologist Peter C. Wason’s experiments in the early 1960s that led him to formulate “confirmation bias,” or the tendency to only attend to information that supports one’s beliefs, and she encourages readers to consider multiple possible explanations and to consider evidence that might disprove one’s suppositions. She warns that anecdotal evidence can be misleading and explains that people often overgeneralize based on small amounts of possibly unrepresentative data, as when managers make hiring decisions based on in-person interviews that might not reflect how the applicants perform day-to-day. Ahn discusses a study that found subjects rated hamburgers as healthier if they were described as “75 percent lean” instead of “25 percent fat” to demonstrate that people tend to focus on negative descriptors over positive ones, even when they convey the same information. To counteract this, she recommends reframing how one views situations and decisions. Ahn excels at illustrating how psychological concepts manifest in everyday life, and her suggestions provide sensible techniques readers can use to push back against cognitive biases. This heady volume provides plenty of food for thought. (Sept.)