Thinking 101
How to Reason Better to Live Better
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4.6 • 14 Ratings
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
“An INVALUABLE RESOURCE to anyone who wants to think better.” —Gretchen Rubin
Award-winning YALE PROFESSOR Woo-kyoung Ahn delivers “A MUST-READ—a smart and compellingly readable guide to cutting-edge research into how people think.” (Paul Bloom)
“A FUN exploration.” —Dax Shepard
Psychologist Woo-kyoung Ahn devised a course at Yale called “Thinking” to help students examine the biases that cause so many problems in their daily lives. It quickly became one of the university’s most popular courses. Now, for the first time, Ahn presents key insights from her years of teaching and research in a book for everyone.
She shows how “thinking problems” stand behind a wide range of challenges, from common, self-inflicted daily aggravations to our most pressing societal issues and inequities. Throughout, Ahn draws on decades of research from other cognitive psychologists, as well as from her own groundbreaking studies. And she presents it all in a compellingly readable style that uses fun examples from pop culture, anecdotes from her own life, and illuminating stories from history and the headlines.
Thinking 101 is a book that goes far beyond other books on thinking, showing how we can improve not just our own daily lives through better awareness of our biases but also the lives of everyone around us. It is, quite simply, required reading for everyone who wants to think—and live—better.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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.
