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Good Thinking: Seven Powerful Ideas That Influence the Way We Think, by Denise D. Cummins
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After reading this book, you will be wiser in two ways: You will know how the best and brightest thinkers judge the ways we decide, argue, solve problems, and tell right from wrong. But you will also understand why, when we don't meet these standards, it is not always a bad thing. The answers are rooted in the way the human brain has been wired to make us kinder and more generous than economists think we ought to be, but more resistant to change and persuasion than scientists and scholars think is good for us.
- Sales Rank: #1509478 in Books
- Brand: Brand: Cambridge University Press
- Published on: 2012-04-16
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 9.21" h x .55" w x 6.14" l, .80 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 212 pages
- Used Book in Good Condition
Review
Cambridge University Press Staff Pics: Top 5 Recommended Reading and Gifts, Dec, 2012.
"an entertaining and accessible review of the classical theories of reasoning and decision making." -- Dr. Mike Oaksford, University of London
"...considers both the strengths and weaknesses of our mental machinery" Daniel L. Schacter, Professor of Psychology, Harvard
"In Good Thinking, psychologist and philosopher Denise Cummins reveals how economists, philosophers and other experts have helped to define what makes a decision rational or a judgment moral. She lays out the seven basic tenets that guide our critical thinking and explores tactics to correct faulty logic."--Victoria Stern, Mind Books Roundup, Scientific American, Nov, 2012
"By serendipity, I came across Good Thinking, and I am glad I did. I thought I had a fairly decent reading knowledge of Behavioral Economics, and I had not come across a number of ideas in this book. I have found Cummins' observations very useful additions on my work on financial decision-making under uncertainty. -- Charles Faulkner, featured in The New Market Wizards, The Intuitive Trader, and others as well as the author of several programs on metaphoric change.
"...a witty and articulate overview of critical aspects of human thought processes...The astute examples anchor the topics squarely in readers' everyday experience." --Dr. Richard Gerrig, Professor of Psychology and Psycholinguistics, SUNY at Stonybrook
"Good Thinking will take you on a quick and engaging tour of the landscape of human thinking, surveying the phenomena that psychologists and philosophers have found there."
Keith Holyoak, Distinguished Professor of Psychology, University of California, Los Angeles
"... the book illuminates the strengths and the pitfalls of the ways people think; readers may be surprised at human cognitive fallibility ... offers a compelling discussion of the current work in cognitive neuroscience that reveals the neural complexities of thought process ... readers who choose to look at this interesting book will be making a good decision ... Recommended ..."
B. C. Beins, Choice
"...Good Thinking is cleverly written and well pitched to a college- or university-level audience of undergraduates who would benefit from an excellent survey of concepts and theories that are not likely to be seen elsewhere in a single collection, and it represents some of the more powerful ideas that our intellectual culture considers as the basis for rationality. Virtually every idea in Good Thinking can be gotten elsewhere either in its original form or as part of extended volumes on a specific topic, but having them tied together in a single book written by a single hand gives more life and cohesiveness to the ensemble than might otherwise be the case ... a pleasant way to stimulate the appetite for more ... For some time to come, Good Thinking will be a relevant and useful resource for educators as well as those who seek to reflect on our Western thought traditions and their origins."
Dr Donald MacGregor, Senior Research Scientist, Decision Science Research Institute, Eugene, Oregon
"Denise Dellarosa Cummins - philosopher and psychologist - explores the way experts across various fields argue and deal with very challenging issues that directly impact our lives ... A very interesting book for philosophical practitioners, mainly due to the author's interdisciplinary approach and ability to summarize relevant outputs from both human and neurosciences."
Fernando Salvetti, Philosophical Practice: Journal of the APPA
From the Author
Good Thinking: Seven Questions for Denise Cummins
From This Side of the Pond
By CambridgeBlog ⋅ May 7, 2012
Why did you decide to write Good Thinking?
Over the course of my teaching career, I became aware of something rather alarming: Science majors know all about hypothesis-testing, philosophy majors know all about argumentation, and business students know about economic theories. But they know very little about research in disciplines outside of their majors. And then these bright and well-educated people are asked to evaluate proposed economic, legal, or medical policies, and sometimes even to vote on them. How are they to do that when there are holes in their knowledge bases where crucial pieces of information should be?
You're a professor of psychology, but in this book you explore decision-making in many different fields: economics, philosophy, science, etc. How did you go about discovering more about their methods?
Most people equate psychology with psychotherapy. In my first book, The Other Side of Psychology, I introduced audiences to the science of psychology: psychologists who study how we perceive, learn, think, and decide. Experimental psychologists conduct scientific investigations into these questions, and we are well-trained in scientific methodology. Daniel Kahneman is an experimental psychologist who won the Nobel Prize in Economics for his research and theorizing on decision-making. My own training has included cognitive science, philosophy, computer science, and business.
Was there anything that surprised you while you were researching and writing the book? Is there something you learned from it that you've incorporated into your own thinking?
The controversy over mammogram screening surprised me-that women were paying no attention to the science underlying the recommendations and were instead outraged over what they saw as a corner-cutting decision at the expense of their health. I incorporated that controversy into the book so that patients would better understand evidence-based medicine, how it is done, and what it means for their own lives and thinking about health.
When have you used some of these seven decision-making tools?
I use hypothesis-testing in my research on human reasoning and decision-making. I keep Bayes firmly in mind when evaluating medical screening recommendations or investment choices. And I seek Nash equilibrium when choosing weekend activities with my husband-that is, I rather do something together that is not my top choice rather than do my top choice by myself.
Some of these seven ideas have become hot topics in the last decade, like rational choice or game theory. But you also devote attention to the power of analogy, calling it "the core of cognition." Why does it have so much power?
The simple answer is that our minds seem to be wired that way. We tend to notice similarities among people and events, and then assume that what is true of one is true of everything that looks or seems the same. This is a very powerful strategy, but can lead to disastrous consequences (as in stereotyping). The upside is that analogy is a powerful means of making people understand things, because it helps them to see something unfamiliar in familiar terms. For example, when Ben Bernanke persuaded us to approve the bailout of the financial industry, he did so by telling us the banking industry was like an irresponsible neighbor who smoked in bed and set fire to his house in your neighborhood of houses made of wood. This was a very powerful and very persuasive analogy. And only time will tell whether it was the right analogy to draw.
You illustrate many times when our brains lead us to different conclusions than experts do. Why are we so prone to error?
One of the messages of the book is that when we reach a different conclusion than experts, we have not necessarily made an error. The market now is awash in books bemoaning human irrationality and stupidity. But I think that vastly undersells human intelligence.
You can see this in the idea of rational choice. Most people don't appreciate that the core of economic theory is the concept of a rational agent where "rational" means "self-interested." When people "make mistakes" in economic game-based research, their "mistakes" don't focus solely on how they will benefit from a course of action but how it will affect others as well. This is considered "error" according to standard treatments of rational choice. Experimental economists have had to introduce the notions of fairness and inequity-aversion into economic theory in order to predict and explain how people behave. I don't think these concepts are evidence of "faulty" thinking, and I am not alone in that.
Are there ways that we can use our "faulty" reasoning for the better?
The best way to improve decision-making is to be aware of built-in biases that can be disastrous if exploited by others. Politicians often use analogy to persuade us to support their plans because analogy is a very powerful means of making people think about something new in terms of something they already understand. So we can be lured into believing something is simpler than it really is. Be suspicious of simplistic analogies. Because we tend to accept conclusions that jibe with our beliefs, we tend to ignore the quality of the argument leading up to them. This is called belief bias, and we can arm ourselves against it by evaluating the argument, not just its conclusion. We avoid risk when there is a chance to gain money, but we become risky when there is a chance that we will lose money. If you know that, then you are less likely to (for example) hold on to a bad investment hoping it will gain value again (risky choice) rather than cutting your losses short (safer choice). --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
About the Author
Dr. Denise Dellarosa Cummins is retired Adjunct Professor of Psychology and Philosophy at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign. Her research interests include reasoning and decision-making from evolutionary, comparative, and developmental perspectives. She is the author of The Other Side of Psychology: How Experimental Psychologists Find Out About the Way We Think and Act, and co-editor of Mind, Brains, & Computers and The Evolution of Mind. In her spare time, she enjoys hiking, horseback riding, and watching vintage movies with her husband and daughters.
Most helpful customer reviews
7 of 7 people found the following review helpful.
A fascinating overview of the thinking process
By John Gibbs
Most people have a limited understanding of the ideas that shape the way we think, according to Denise Cummins in this book. Lawyers understand argumentation, stockbrokers understand decision theories that drive equity markets, psychologists understand how the brain is wired, and scientists understand scientific investigation, but very few people have an understanding of all of these fields.
The seven ideas which the book discusses are:
* Rational choice, which means making decisions aimed at producing the most desired outcome.
* Game theory, which involves making decisions which are affected by the simultaneous decisions of other people.
* Moral judgment, which includes identifying what is right and what is wrong.
* Scientific reasoning, which includes the use of reason to determine causality, and also the construction and testing of hypotheses.
* Logic, which involves discerning truth from a series of propositions.
* Problem solving, which means searching for solutions which produce a desired result.
* Analogical reasoning, which is about using one situation to help explain another.
In pursuing these different aspects of thinking, the author takes the reader on a journey through an extraordinary range of disciplines including economics, cognitive science, philosophy, morality, mathematics, experimental science, theoretical science, law and business management. We get to see how easily and frequently people are misled into making poor decisions, different ways in which people distinguish right from wrong, the most effective ways of testing hypotheses, and how insights really happen.
I thoroughly enjoyed reading the book, which I found to be as entertaining as it is informative. Most readers will benefit by having their understanding of what is meant by "thinking" considerably broadened by the book's cross-disciplinary approach.
6 of 6 people found the following review helpful.
A Gem of a Book on Reasoning
By Book Fanatic
This is not really a practical book although the reader can certainly glean some tips on how to improve their thinking by reading it. It is more an examination of the ways in which we think and what is right and wrong with them. The author in the introduction says:
"After reading this book, readers should be empowered to decide for themselves whether human reasoning is as frail or as strong, as dangerous or as benign, or as superfluous or as crucial as it has been made out to be."
The book is relatively short (about 180 pages of text) and thus is a fairly easy read. One certainly does not have to slog through it. It is written in a friendly style and only occasionally gets technical. The author does not go deep into any one type of reasoning but presents seven different modes of thinking (thus the subtitle of the book) on a broader scale. However, despite that one comes away from the book with a decent understanding of each. The seven modes are Rational Choice, Game Theory, Moral Judgement, Scientific Reasoning, Logic, Problem Solving, and Analogical Reasoning.
I really liked this book and can easily recommend it. If you interested in the human mind I think you will like it.
7 of 8 people found the following review helpful.
Good thinking, bad writing
By CollectedReader
The topic of the book really interested me, as I've read many texts on this and related subjects. But by page 6, I was already getting skeptical of the relevance of this book. Why? because on page six the author mentions "..when we've learned about Bayesian decision making..". Um, we didn't (in the book anyway). Then the author goes on with a rash of definitions with no depth or explanations by the Game Theory section, chapter 2. The next chapter doesn't get any better.
So now I question if the other reviewers read the book at all. Am I the only one? I'm not saying that the book isn't useful. If you are looking for a brief description of various topics on this subject area then this book will be for you. Though I'm not sure how useful that is.
What I expected was a better explanation with proper examples than a myriad of definitions. This is not helpful for the lay person that the book is intended for.
I'd give it about 2.5 stars rather than three. I was tempted to give 2 stars but I didn't complete reading the book so I'm giving some benefit of the doubt.
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