We've all been there - sitting through a terrible movie because we paid for the ticket, holding onto a failing stock because selling feels like admitting defeat, or making snap judgments about job candidates based on first impressions. Why do we sometimes make such poor choices when we should know better? Because your daily decisions only seem simple. They actually hide complex psychological patterns that affect how we think and act.Richard E. Nisbett's Mindware tackles these patterns head-on. The book...
Understanding Your Mind
You're sitting in your favorite chair, reading this. You think you chose to sit here simply because you like this spot. But did you really? The fascinating research shared by Nisbett reveals that your mind works in far more mysterious ways than you'd suspect.Let's start with something peculiar. Have you seen that illusion with two tables? The tables are identical, but we always see one as longer. This isn't a flaw - it's your brain doing its job, automatically adjusting...
Making Better Choices
When Benjamin Franklin had to make tough decisions, he did something quite clever - he took a piece of paper, drew a line down the middle, and made two columns: "Pro" and "Con." He then listed out his reasons, assigned weights to them, and crossed out equal ones until he could see where the balance lay. This, btw, is the simplest version of what we now call decision analysis.This brings us to an important question - what's the best way...
Detecting Relationships
Our third mindware lesson is detecting relationships between events before making decisions. And our best shot at this detection is statistics!Statistics isn't just about cold, hard numbers - it's about finding real relationships between things in our world - the correlation and the causation. Correlation is simply when two things change together - like when ice cream sales go up, drowning deaths also increase (but remember there’s no connection between the two - it’s just that more people eat ice...
Does A Really Cause B?
Alright! Let's now learn how to separate fact from fiction when it comes to cause and effect.Let's start with something we all face - conflicting advice. One day CNN tells new parents to keep their babies away from germs at all costs. A few months later, Canadian TV says exposure to germs might actually prevent allergies. Nisbett shows us how to navigate these contradictions using different levels of scientific evidence, from the most basic to the most reliable.At the most...
How Eastern and Western Minds Think Differently
Let's end with something fascinating - how humans from different parts of the world have completely different mindware, yet both approaches work brilliantly.The Western world has been devoted to formal logic for over 2,600 years. Western logic is sort of a mental toolkit where everything must be either true or false, with no middle ground. The Greeks, particularly Aristotle, started this tradition. They were obsessed with putting everything into neat categories and following strict rules of reasoning. Their core belief?...
Summary
So! That was both concerning and encouraging, right?On the concerning side, we've seen how our minds often fail us in ways we never suspected. Our intuitions are frequently unreliable, our judgments are plagued by biases we don't recognize, and our confidence in our own reasoning abilities far exceeds our actual capabilities. We make snap decisions based on insufficient data, see patterns where none exist, and cling to our existing beliefs even in the face of contradicting evidence. But there's a...
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About the Author
Richard Eugene Nisbett (born June 1, 1941)[1] is an American social psychologist and writer. He is the Theodore M. Newcomb Distinguished Professor of social psychology and co-director of the Culture and Cognition program at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. Nisbett's research interests are in social cognition, culture, social class, and aging. He received his Ph.D. from Columbia University, where his advisor was Stanley Schachter, whose other students at that time included Lee Ross and Judith Rodin.
More on: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_E._Nisbett
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