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Mindware: Tools for Smart Thinking, by Richard E. Nisbett
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Scientific and philosophical concepts can change the way we solve problems by helping us to think more effectively about our behavior and our world. Surprisingly, despite their utility, many of these tools remain unknown to most of us.
In Mindware, the world-renowned psychologist Richard E. Nisbett presents these ideas in clear and accessible detail, offering a tool kit for better thinking and wiser decisions. He has made a distinguished career of studying and teaching such powerful problem-solving concepts as the law of large numbers, statistical regression, cost-benefit analysis, sunk costs and opportunity costs, and causation and correlation, probing how best to teach others to use them effectively in their daily lives. In this groundbreaking book, he shows that a course in a given field--statistics or economics, for example--often doesn't work as well as a few minutes of more practical instruction in analyzing everyday situations. Mindware shows how to reframe common problems in such a way that these powerful scientific and statistical concepts can be applied to them. The result is an enlightening and practical guide to the most powerful tools of reasoning ever developed--tools that can easily be used to make better professional, business, and personal decisions.
- Sales Rank: #159428 in Books
- Published on: 2016-08-02
- Released on: 2016-08-02
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.24" h x .89" w x 5.50" l, .0 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 336 pages
Review
“Mindware should offer us all an opportunity to understand and react more intelligently to the confusing world around us.”
―Leonard Mlodinow, The New York Times Book Review
“[Mindware] is friendly and practical and aimed squarely at the lay reader. [Nisbett] sees his book as rather like a crash course in making better decisions and learning what scientifically proven theory to apply to which problem, enabling the reader to ‘perceive the world more accurately and behave more sensibly’. To this end, he offers insights from social and behavioural psychology, neuroscience and philosophy, he explains what constitutes bad, flawed and good science, when to trust statistics, how to think about economics and carry out a cost-benefit analysis, when to follow instinct and when this can lead you astray.”
―Emma Smith, The Sunday Times (UK)
“Compelling . . . With clear explanations of relevant principles from statistics, formal logic, economics, and psychology, Nisbett does indeed assemble a powerful toolkit for examining the validity of claims made by marketers, politicians, and scientists. Just as important, he encourages us to turn these tools inward and test the legitimacy of our own easily swayed opinions and beliefs.” ―Nick Romeo, The Boston Globe
“Nisbett . . . immerses his readers in a great depth of knowledge but with such clear teaching and precise examples that they will enjoy the exercise and the result . . . A joy to own and mark up, a great gift of enlightenment from an expert and exemplary teacher. The section on Logic and Dialectical Reasoning, comparing cultures East and West, rewards readers who can accept uncertainty as the cost of deeper insight.” ―E. James Lieberman, Library Journal
“The bad news is that our intuitive ways of thinking about the world are wrong. The good news is that it isn't hard to set them right. Nobody knows more about these things than the eminent psychologist Richard E. Nisbett, who has dedicated his life to understanding the shortcomings of the human mind and to finding ways to fix them. This book should be required reading at every university.” ―Daniel Gilbert, author of Stumbling on Happiness
“Anyone who wants to think better, make better decisions, and be happier should read this brilliant book by the world's most eminent living social psychologist. In other words, everyone should read this book, and the sooner the better!” ―Timothy D. Wilson, Author of Redirect: Changing the Stories We Live By
“All the wisdom of twentieth- and twenty-first-century psychological research has been distilled into one superb book--for your everlasting benefit! You will take a giant step on the path to better decisions in your life.” ―Carol Dweck, author of Mindset: The New Psychology of Success
“Mindware will make you a better thinker, investor, parent, consumer, and leader. There are surprises and delights on each page. Every country should scrap a year or two of math education and require all citizens to read this book instead.” ―Jonathan Haidt, author of The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion
About the Author
Richard E. Nisbett is a professor of psychology at the University of Michigan and one of the world's most respected psychologists. He has been awarded the Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award of the American Psychology Association, the William James Fellow Award for Distinguished Scientific Achievements, and the Donald T. Campbell Award for Distinguished Research in Social Psychology, among others. His books The Geography of Thought: How Asians and Westerners Think Differently . . . and Why and Intelligence and How to Get It: Why Schools and Cultures Count have won multiple awards and been translated into more than ten languages.
Most helpful customer reviews
111 of 118 people found the following review helpful.
A worthy addition to the literature about rational thinking
By Alberto Cairo Touriqo
If you've read books like 'Thinking Fast and Slow', 'The Invisible Gorilla', 'How Not to Be Wrong', or 'Naked Statistics' already, much of the content of this book will sound familiar. That said, there's something beautiful about how Richard E. Nisbett transforms what could have been a tedious and repetitive discussion of cognitive biases into a textbook on how to overcome them. The advice in his book is accessible to anyone, regardless of previous knowledge of statistics or Mathematical thinking, and immensely relevant. The main message in the book is that rules of rational thinking can be taught and learned. The main reason to do so, as Nisbett himself says, is that "you simply can't live an optimal life in today's world without basic knowledge of statistics." True.
26 of 29 people found the following review helpful.
A Fascinating Look at Human Thought, With Practical Applications
By Amp Van Zandt
This book really had me captivated all the way through. I find psychology to be very interesting. The book is about the limitations and shortcomings of our thinking, and how we are generally unaware of just how shaky our everyday conclusions are. The book goes into detail about the split between our conscious and unconscious processing of events, and how much of what is behind the scenes in the formation of our perceptions is unavailable to us. In the later chapters you get a nice "course" on statistics and and great information on theories of logic. These serve as a contrast to the overconfident and less than rational methods of thought most of us are prone to. I say "course" on statistics because this is nothing like the torture you may have endured or would have anticipated from a college course on statistics (I happen to enjoy statistics but I march to the beat of my own drum). Instead, you get a very easily understandable explanation of how claims like "people who have larger wedding ceremonies are more likely to stay married" are not what they're sometimes cracked up to be (namely that even if that statement is true, it does not necessarily mean that having a large ceremony will improve your chances of staying married longer. It may be that the people who have larger ceremonies do so because they have more money, and therefore have less fights over finances, and/or less stress, and/or better access to counseling services. The name given to this notion is "correlation does not equal causation").
To sum it up, this book looks at human thought, it various pitfalls, and ways to improve it from several angles. If you've read Thinking...Fast and Slow or Predictably Irrational, or similar books, this one may have a similar feel, and it may re-iterate some of the things you learned in those books. However, it does offer much information not contained in those books, and it is a much easier read than some of them. Thinking...Fast and Slow was, for me, a very interesting book but a little dry in parts. I can say that not one chapter of this book was dry in the least. I walked away from it quite satisfied and consider it money well spent.
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful.
Essential reading for students of psychology
By Coert Visser
As a psychology student in the 1980s I first learned about the work of the Richard Nisbett. Together with Lee Ross (who coined the term fundamental attribution error; which I will come back to later) he wrote the classic book Human Inference (1980) about how people use rules of thumb in social judgment and decision making and about how we often systematic mistakes in the way we judge events and people. Nisbett & Ross' work build on and was closely related to the work done by Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman.
Nisbett was also known for work he had done together with Timothy Wilson about how many mental processes are inaccessible to our conscious awareness. I came across Nisbett's work again when his book Intelligence and how to get it (2009) was published. He agreed to an interview by email with me about this fascinating book but this interview was never published because it was interrupted when we were halfway through the questions. So instead I wrote this post about the book.
His new book Mindware: tools for smart thinking (2015) revisits many of the topics he has written about in the past. The main idea behind the book is that our personal and professional lives can be improved by learning about effective judgement and reasoning. In the beginning of the book he explains that we do not perceive the world as it is. Instead, we rely on schemas, cognitive frameworks, templates or rule systems, to make sense of what we encounter. Two problems with these schemas (for example stereotypes) are that they are often mistaken and that we are often unaware of them.
A prime example of schemas are heuristics, rules of thumb (often unconsciously applied) for solving problems. Nisbett discusses examples such as the effort heuristic, the price heuristic, the scarcity heuristic, the familiarity heuristic, the representativeness heuristic, and the availability heuristic. These heuristics are often helpful but also rather crude strategies which in many cases lead to inaccurate judgments. I'll mention two of them specifically: (1) the representativeness heuristic: events are judged as more likely if they’re similar to the prototype of the event than if they’re less similar, (2) availilbility heuristic: The more easily examples of the event come to mind, the more frequent or plausible they seem.
One of the most important ways, if not the most important way, we systematically judge ourselves and others inaccurately is in that we underestimate the influence of situations and overestimate the influence of personal characteristics. This is called the fundamental attribution error. We underestimate both subtle factors and factors which are plain to see (such as social roles). By the way, we are somewhat less inclined to apply to make the fundamental attribution error when we are judging our own behavior than when we are judging others' behaviors. Also, Asians seem to be less vulnerable to this error of judgment than Westerners.
While much of our thinking is unconscious and inaccessible to us we are very active in coming up with explanations for our behaviors en judgments. These explanations, as many experiments have demonstrated, are often wrong. We can totally miss actual factors actually influencing us and we can be completely confident that something influenced us which actually didn't. We often do not know why we do and think what we do and think. That our unconscious mind uses heuristics which are often not very reliable does not mean that the unconscious mind is inferior to the conscious mind. In several ways it is superior such as detecting complex patterns, and processing information which cannot be easily described verbally.
Nisbett then devotes a few chapters to the science of behavioral economics discussing concepts like cost benefit analysis, the sunk cost rule, opportunity costs, loss aversion, the endowment effect, and choice architecture. To explain a few: (1) the sunk cost rule is a rational but counterintuitive principle which says you should only take into account future costs and benefits of your choices and not 'cry over spilt milk', (2) the endownment effect is our tendency to overvalue things we possess, (3) choice architecture: the way we present choice options has great influence on how people choose.
In the next part of the book he discusses the important topic of statistics. Two main functions of statistics are to describe phenomena accurately and to determine relations between phenomena accurately. We tend to make several types of errors in our statistical reasoning. One is that we tend to base our conclusions on too few observations. Nisbett points to the importance of the law of large numbers which says that the more observations you make, the closer you get to the true score. Another error is that we do not take into account the phenomenon of regression to the mean which is that the phenomenon that if a variable is extreme on its first measurement, it will tend to be closer to the average on its second measurement.
Another problem is confirmation bias: we tend to only look for evidence which is supportive of our hypothesis. Also, we notice and remember events better when they confirm our hypothesis. Confirmation bias contributes to the problem that we see correlation when they are not there. Yet another problem is that we fail to see correlations which are actually there, in particular when we do not expect these correlations. We tend to only see unsuspected correlations when they are rather strong and when the two events are close to each other in time. The previously mentioned representativeness heuristic often underlies which correlations we expect.
Then Nisbett proceeds to comparing the relative value of correlational techniques and experiments. Experiments are vastly superior. In experiments only the variable of interest is varied which makes it possible to draw conclusions about causality. Any differences in experimental groups and control groups must be due to the variable which was different in those conditions. Correlation studies are a different matter. As is well-known to many people, correlations do not imply causality. The fact that variable A and B are associated does not say that A causes B. The reason is there may be different explanations for the correlation. For example, B may cause A. Or a third variable may cause both A and B.
A specific correlational technique which is very popular in economics, psychology and epidemiology is multiple regression analysis (MRA). In MRA you try to predict a variable of interest (the criterion) based on a set of other variables (predictor variables). The idea behind MRA is control for all variables which may influence the criterion by subsequently pulling their correlations out of the mix so as to get at the true causal relation between the predictor and the criterion. In practice however, it is unlikely that we will be able to determine which variables may be influential and also that we will be able to measure each of these variables validly. The practice of MRA findings is that they often are different from experimental findings. In MRA often both non-existing effects are found, and existing effects remain hidden. The book contains a few compelling examples of this.
As I mentioned, self-reports about mental processes are often highly unreliable. But also survey results must be approached with great caution. The problem with survey results go way beyond the problem of social desirability (the tendency to give answers that make you look good). As it turns out what people report is very much dependent on the way questions are phrased. One example of this is the reference group effect. When people are not asked to compare their self-assessments to a specific reference group they will compare themselves to a reference group which is salient to them.
This effect in combination with the so-called self-enhancement bias, also known as the Lake Wobegon effect, which means that people in most cultures believe they are superior to most others in their group, can lead to some strange findings. For example, Italians describe themselves as more conscientious than the Japanese. However, research using behavioral measures (instead of self-report measures) paint a different picture. As Nisbett says: "the less conscientious a nation is as measured by behavioral indices, the more conscientious its citizens are as measured by self-report."
In the rest of the book Nisbett discusses topics like (1) logic and dialectical reasoning: he says that there are some systematic differences in the ways Easterners and Westerners approach situations and problems (and the former may be superior in many social situations), (2) reductionism and the principle of parsimony, and (3) the rise and fall of postmodernist views in science.
Review: The book gives an interesting and good overview over the topic of human judgment. For psychology students it is an excellent introduction to these important topics, for psychologists it is a good way to maintain and refresh one's knowledge (for example, I found the reminder of the weaknesses of MRA useful). The dissemination of the type of knowledge beyond psychologists is very important. Lack of awareness of much of what is described in this book by the general public is the reason that many people are vulnerable to assertions which are not true. Getting more people to know about these concepts and findings can help people protect themselves from errors of judgement and from charlatans.
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