Don't Believe Everything You Think: The 6 Basic Mistakes We Make in Thinking

· We prefer stories to statistics.

· We seek to confirm, not to question, our ideas.

· We rarely appreciate the role of chance and coincidence in shaping events.

· We sometimes misperceive the world around us.

· We tend to oversimplify our thinking.

· Our memories are often inaccurate.

Kida vividly illustrates these tendencies with numerous examples that demonstrate how easily we can be fooled into believing something that isn’t true. In a complex society where success—in all facets of life—often requires the ability to evaluate the validity of many conflicting claims, the critical-thinking skills examined in this informative and engaging book will prove invaluable.

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All Customer Reviews
Average Customer Review:
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful:

Great Intro into Critical Thinking (Beware...This Book Will Challenge You)!, 2008-12-05
This book serves as an excellent foray into critical thinking. The author challenges us to assess and confront our beliefs. He uses examples from everyday life which makes it a very enjoyable and entertaining read. For me personally, reading this book forced me to examine some of my own silly, pseudoscientific beliefs (which I was hanging onto by a thread) and finally let them go. It also served as my introduction into scientific skepticism. For that, I will always be grateful to the author.

Send a copy to the person in your life who is sure he/she has bad luck or who insists that their dream was a precognition. But don't forget to read it yourself, you will most likely find yourself questioning some of your own beliefs as well - and what's more fun and exciting than that?!?


0 of 0 people found the following review helpful:

You need to read this book!, 2008-12-02
Kida has written a wonderful handbook for becoming a better critical thinker. In an enjoyable and easy-to-understand style, he summarizes the major judgment fallacies that ALL are influenced by. I consider myself to be a reasonably skeptical person so I was shocked as I discovered that many of my own decision processes were susceptible to Kida's judgment fallacies.

This book will definitely change the way you think!


1 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

Interesting topic, boring book, 2008-11-27
I were expecting much more from this book. It is very basic and repetitive. Probably the author can make a 20 pages summery without missing any important concept.

(later)... I take a breath and finish it, and have to recognise the last part of the book is better, so add some 30 more pages to the summery


6 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

Okay presentation of material - not the best, 2008-04-29
I think this book does a decent job organizing and giving example for categories of "mistakes in thinking." I have not test-driven it with one of my social psychology or cognitive psychology classes to see what our students think of it and how much they absorb from it (more important from my point of view).

As a clinician, I was unimpressed with misinformed comments on the Rorschach and other projective tests. These days very few clinicians assume thematic face validity of people's responses to Rorschach card (i.e., seeing buttocks, female clothing, and indeterminate gender in ink blots means homosexual - p. 124). This sounds like a hold over from the days when homosexuality was a disorder listed in the DSM (approx. 1973).

If people would like to run the Rorschach through its paces, they need to critique the Exner system of scoring responses rather than the presumption that the administrating clinician believe they can magically "read" and interpret someone's subconscious from their responses. I'm all for skepticism and sturdy criticism, but do it well and be informed.

FYI - no clinician worth their salt utilizes any test in isolation or out of context, even tests that are well regarded as psychometrically sound.


1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

A way to rethink your thinking, 2008-04-28
I was looking for something to stir my thought process as lately we've been bombarded with a variety of viewpoints from a variety of sources (TV newspapers, blogs, etc etc etc).

It was a good reminder on how to analyze information - without jumping to conclusions based on minimal evidence. I've found myself falling into that same trap a few times and being given viewpoints based on someone's personal experience or sound bites on television. We're constantly bombarded with snippets of information and "psuedo" science T.V. where only one side is presented or the entire background information is conveniently ignored.

I've yet to complete the book, but thus far I've found it interesting and educating. Worth a read to remind oneself of traps we easily fall into when digesting information from our various sources.

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