Mindware
Tools for Smart Thinking
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- £4.99
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- £4.99
Publisher Description
An enlightening and practical guide to the most powerful tools of reasoning ever developed, by one of the world's most renowned psychologists
Many scientific and philosophical ideas are so powerful that they can be applied to our lives to help us think smarter and more effectively about our behaviour and the world around us. Surprisingly, many of these ideas remain unknown to most of us. Drawing on his own groundbreaking research, Richard Nisbett presents these ideas in clear and accessible detail to offer a tool kit for better thinking and wiser decisions. Mindware shows how to reframe common problems - whether professional, business, or personal - in such a way that these powerful scientific and statistical concepts can be applied to them.
'A devastating and persuasive refutation of all those who believe intellectual ability is fixed at birth. Few Americans have done as much to deepen our understanding of what it means to be human.'
Malcolm Gladwell
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Psychology professor Nisbett (Intelligence and How to Get It) again makes a challenging topic accessible in this witty exploration of common errors in thinking (e.g., mistaking correlation for causation). Nisbett challenges long-held assumptions and patterns of thought, having "compared people's reasoning to scientific, statistical, and logical standards and found large classes of judgments to be systematically mistaken." Most readers will emerge with a far better understanding of why they make the errors that they do, and perhaps how to avoid them. Nisbett capably presents dense material in digestible form; statistical analysis will never be child's play, but it's hard to imagine someone doing a better job in explaining the tools it has to offer everyone, and how to employ them. His frequent use of anecdotes from his own life, such as the friend who had to weigh the pros and cons of a job switch, aids comprehension, and he also offers ways of interpreting conflicting scientific (and pseudoscientific) findings.