Do you believe that you can consistently beat the stock market if you put in the effort? —that some people have extrasensory perception? —that crime and drug abuse in America are on the rise? Many people hold one or more of these beliefs although research shows that they are not true. And it’s no wonder since advertising and some among the media promote these and many more questionable notions. Although our creative problem-solving capacity is what has made humans the successful species we are, our brains are prone to certain kinds of errors that only careful critical thinking can correct. This enlightening book discusses how to recognize faulty thinking and develop the necessary skills to become a more effective problem solver. Author Thomas Kida identifies "the six-pack of problems" that leads many of us unconsciously to accept false ideas:

· 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.

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!

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

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.

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.

One of my favorite quotes from this book:

"why do we hold many pseudoscientific beliefs? Probably the main reason is that we want to believe them. As the noted astronomer Carl Sagan observed, pseudoscience and other weird beliefs often meet our emotional needs [...] we want simplicity in our lives, and belief in superstition, fate, the supernatural, and other pseudoscientific beliefs often provide simple explanations for life's events [p.040...] characteristics of pseudoscientific thinking: preconceived notion of what to believe, search for evidence to support a preconceived belief, ignore evidence that would falsify a claim or belief, disregard alternative explanations for a phenomenon, hold extraordinary beliefs, accept flimsy evidence to support an extraordinary claim, rely heavily on anecdotal evidence, lack of tightly controlled experiments to test a claim, employ very little skepticism [p.041]."

-r.c.