Name: Mindware
Rating: 3.9 (114 reviews)
Author: Richard E. Nisbett

What’s in it for me? Upgrade your reasoning skills.

Did you ever watch a friend do something incredibly stupid? Did it make you wonder, “How can such a smart person be such a fool?” Actually, we all act foolishly. Often, because we’re prone to making some very common reasoning mistakes.

These blinks lay out tools and methods, also known as “mindware,” that will help you think more logically and avoid such simple mistakes in the future. In these blinks, you’ll also learn how to best synthesize the information you get from study results, other people and the news in order to see the most objective picture possible.

By reading these blinks, you’ll also find out

about a fear that’s making you miss out on superb deals;
what ice cream has (or doesn’t have) to do with polio; and
what’s so great about your own coffee mug.

Correlation is not causation.

Have you ever heard that countries with a higher average IQ also enjoy higher average wealth? It’s true, but does that mean that being a smarter country makes you a richer one?

Actually, it’s easy to falsely assume that one thing causes another just because those two things occur at the same time, especially if it confirms something we already believe. But before we get ahead of ourselves, let’s define some basic statistical terms. For instance, correlation: if A and B occur simultaneously, then A positively correlates to B. But if A only occurs without B and B only without A, then the relationship is a negative correlation.

This is important because we tend to assume that A caused B, or vice versa, simply because they are correlated. For example, take the following scientifically proven correlation: on average, people who go to church are less likely to suffer premature death than those who don’t.

Given this information, if you believe in God, you might assume that believing in God increases a person’s lifespan. And there you have it: you’ve transformed a correlation into a causation. However, just because both events correlate to each other doesn’t mean that one causes the other.

In fact, assuming causation between events that are simply correlated can lead to major errors. For example, during the summers throughout the 1950s, there was a clear correlation between cases of polio and ice cream consumption; lots of people were eating ice cream and lots of people were contracting polio. But would banning ice cream have helped combat the polio epidemic? Definitely not.

That’s because ice cream obviously doesn’t cause polio. However, polio germs are transmitted by swimming in pool water and, just like ice cream, swimming pools are popular during the summertime.

Now that you know correlation isn't the same as causation, let's take another look at our first example:

Instead of assuming that intelligent citizens are what make countries wealthy, it'd be wiser to look at it from another angle: wealthy countries usually have superior health-care and education systems, and that produces people with higher IQs.

We favor evidence that matches our assumptions.

Everyone wants to think of themselves as an objective, rational person, not as someone who’s easily misled. But the truth is that we rely heavily on mental shortcuts that distort our judgment.

In fact, certain objects or traits can predispose us to seeing a relationship between things even if none exists. We do this because, we see some things and characteristics as representative of others. For instance, genitals represent sexuality and weapons signify aggression.

Humans fear risk more than they relish gain and tend to overvalue what they own.

Imagine someone approached you with a wager. They’d flip a coin: tails you win $120, heads you lose $100. The deal is obviously great, but does that mean you would take it?

In all likelihood, you wouldn’t. People are much more interested in avoiding losses than in accruing gains. Economists call this loss aversion. Various studies show that people would prefer to completely avoid the possibility of loss than take a risk, even if the chance of winning is high. For most people, the pain of losing is twice as acute as the pleasure of winning.

Conduct your own research and don’t believe everything the media says.

In these times of media overload, it can be difficult to know who to trust. For instance, say you have a baby, and then you hear an expert on TV say that small children should be kept away from germs as much as possible. Is this sound advice?

Well, luckily there’s an easy way to find out and it doesn’t require you to experiment on your own baby:

Applying the laws of logic can protect you from subjective responses.

Do you ever find yourself listening to the illogical ramblings of a politician and wondering, “What’s this even supposed to prove?” Well, Aristotle likely had the same thought when listening to the weak arguments thrown back and forth in the Athenian assembly. As a result, the philosopher came up with principles of reasoning that enable anyone to analyze the validity of an argument.

These principles are the building blocks of formal logic, an approach that’s just as useful now as it was back in the days of Ancient Greece.

Key ideas in Mindware