A fantastic look at how science is understanding "heuristics" and trap doors of our brains.

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Product Description

"Fascinating and insightful. . . . I cannot recall a book that has made me think more about the nature of thinking." — Richard C. Lewontin

Harvard University

Everyone knows that optical illusions trick us because of the way we see. Now scientists have discovered that cognitive illusions, a set of biases deeply embedded in the human mind, can actually distort the way we think.

In Inevitable Illusions, distinguished cognitive researcher Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini takes us on a provocative, challenging, and thoroughly entertaining exploration of the games our minds play. He opens the doors onto the newly charted realm of the cognitive unconscious to reveal the full range of illusions, showing how they inhibit our ability to reason—no matter what our educational background or IQ. Inevitable Illusions is stimulating, eye-opening food for thought.

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Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #349215 in Books
• Published on: 1996-11
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 256 pages

From Library Journal
Minimally, how many people must there be in a room to allow a better than 50 percent chance that two of them will have the same birthday? Your answer may reveal the presence of a cognitive illusion-a mental tunnel that confounds rational thought. Piattelli-Palmarini, director of the Cognitive Science Institute in Milan and a research associate at MIT, offers fascinating examples of such illusions to show how spontaneous, intuitive judgment can lead us astray. Our failure to grasp basic probability, for example, can lead to catastrophic decisions in law and medicine. The author describes the seven deadly mental sins and suggests ways to overcome bias and "mental sloth." This thoughtful, often disturbing book will challenge even those readers with a firm grounding in probability and statistics. For academic and large public libraries.
Laurie Bartolini, Legislative Research, Springfield, Ill.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Review
"A delightful informal survey...the best popular book yet in theis peculiar field" -- Nature

"A fascinating and insightful look." -- R. C. Lewontin, Harvard University

Language Notes
Text: English (translation)
Original Language: Italian

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Customer Reviews

Overwrought But Fun
This is a collection of "optical illusions of the mind," i.e., puzzles to which the intuitive answers are wrong. It gives several examples with non-technical discussions but is mostly a framework around the "Monty Hall" problem, a classic demonstration that probabilities can be tricky things. The book's sub-title is overblown -- it is not an explanation of how the brain works or doesn't work, or of consistent ways in which the mind distorts reality -- and the author's writing style is hyperbolic. Some readers have seen this book as an important discussion of the human mental process; it is not that. Read around the pretention, though, and it is fun.

Interesting and informative
Most people are familiar with term "optical illusion". One well-known example is the picture of two equally long lines, but one has arrow-heads at the end turned inward, while the other has arrow-heads turned outward. The arrow-heads make the lines appear to be of different lengths. They look something like this:

<------->

>-------<

However, most people are NOT aware that there are similar mental illusions that affect how we make decisions. This book describes what researchers have found in this field in the last decades, and it is a very interesting read.

For example, there is an effect called framing, which means that the way a question or a problem is phrased has a large impact on how we answer it. In an experiment, doctors were told that when using a certain medical procedure, the probability that the patient is alive two years later is 93%.

Another group of doctors were told that with another procedure there was a 7% chance of the patient dying within two years. Both groups of doctors were asked whether they would recommend the procedure or not. Significantly more doctors would recommend the procedure as stated in the first case than in the second, even though the two cases are identical! This shows how powerful the framing effect is.

Another example: A wheel is spun, giving a number from 0 to 100. After seeing the number, people are asked to estimate the percentage of African nations that are part of the UN. If the number on the wheel was high, people give a high estimate of the percentage, if low a low estimate is given, even though people know that the number on the wheel has nothing to do with the actual percentage. This mental illusion is known as anchoring.

There are many more mental illusions discussed in the book, and there are lots of entertaining (and revealing) examples. I found the book very interesting and informative, and it has made me look out for mental illusions in my own decision making.

It is also interesting to note that it doesn't always help to be aware of a certain illusions - you can still be fooled by them. This is analogous to how the lines above still seem to be of different lengths even though we know that they are not.

My one criticism of the book is that the language is a little bit difficult and sometimes it doesn't flow as well as it could. But this is a minor problem. Also, there is a similar book that concentrates on mental illusions when it comes to money. It is called "Why Smart People Make Big Money Mistakes" by Belsky and Gilovich, and is also highly recommended, even though a lot of the material they cover is the same as in this book.

A Good Lay Intro to the Cognitive Biases Literature
The negative reviews (especially by the evolutionary psych devotee) are grossly unfair. This book is not written for those already familiar with the cognitive biases literature, especially not for graduates students in psychology. Instead it is an expansion of a popular article that appeared in Bostonia magazine in 1991, written for intelligent laypeople. As such it is effective, more accessible than anything else I've found, and excellent supplemental reading for basic classes in logic or statistics. The author's lack of appreciation of evolutionary psych in no way detracts from the book's value in making people aware of cognitive illusions. It does fall down however in lacking adequate discussion of methods for avoiding these illusions, such as the natural frequencies approach, and needs to be supplemented (e.g., with one of the popular books by Gigerenzer).