WHEN I WAS a graduate student at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, doing research in cognitive psychology, our lab group went out every now and then for nachos and beers. It was a great opportunity for us to ask our adviser about things that wouldn’t likely come up in our more formal meetings. At one of those gatherings, I summoned up the courage to ask him a question that had been on my mind for some time: “Do you think cognitive psychology can make the world a better place?” I had asked a simple yes-or-no question, so he chose a simple answer: “Yes.”
Over the course of the next 30 years, I’ve tried to answer that question myself by working on problems that I hope have real-world applications. In my research at Yale University, where I’ve been a professor of psychology since 2003, I’ve examined some of the biases that can lead us astray—and developed strategies to correct them in ways that are directly applicable to situations people encounter in their daily lives.
I also saw how “thinking problems” cause troubles that go far beyond our individual concerns. These errors and biases contribute to a wide range of societal issues, including political polarization, complicity in climate change, and ethnic profiling. They can also come into play for people who run businesses—how they hire staff, interact with their colleagues, set strategies.
I introduced a course called “Thinking” to show students how psychology can help them recognize and tackle some of these real-world problems and make better decisions. Now I’ve written a book, Thinking 101, to make these lessons more widely available. And here I’m presenting a sample of the kind of material you’ll find in it.
My book is not about what is wrong with people. Thinking problems happen because we are wired in very particular ways. Reasoning errors are mostly byproducts of our highly evolved cognition, which has allowed us to survive and thrive as a species. As a result, de-biasing is notoriously challenging.
To avoid these errors in running
