Mindware: Tools For Smart Thinking

Richard E. Nisbett “Mindware: Tools For Smart Thinking” Farrar, Straus & Girdux 2015, 282 pp.

What we know of scientific concepts and their use can have a dramatic effect on how we approach and solve problems.  Yet, these tools remain unknown and uninteresting to most people.  In this book, Nisbett presesents these ideas in clear and understandable detail.  Nisbett has made a career of studying and teaching such problem-solving concepts as the law of large numbers, statistical regression, cost-benefit analysis, sunk costs and opportunity costs, and causation and correlation, and how to use them effectively in users daily lives.  To effectively use these concepts involves knowing how to frame them so that scientific statistical principles can be applied.

People who don’t normally buy many fruits or vegetables, for instance, buy substantially more produce when told the average number of produce items that other shoppers at the store purchase. Desire to conform to a perceived norm can also motivate undergraduates to drink less alcohol and citizens to stop cheating on their taxes. Social influence is just one of many behavioral levers that Nisbett considers. Taxpayers are more likely to support education funding when schools are the voting location. When people vote in churches, they’re more likely to outlaw late-term abortions. Judges are more likely to grant parole immediately after lunch than just before.

We generally fail to realize how easily situational factors influence our perceptions. If you asked a hungry judge why he denied an inmate’s parole, he would point to any number of rational reasons, even if after a nice lunch he would grant parole to a prisoner with an identical record. This post hoc search for legitimating reasons for a given opinion sometimes leads to what Nisbett and other psychologists call the fundamental attribution error: the tendency to overestimate the importance of dispositional factors and underestimate the influence of situational ones.

This book is much like Sunstein and Thaler’s “Nudge” and Kahneman’s “Thinking, Fast and Slow”, other books I have read and, I think, previously reported.

My Notes:

Pg. 15:  Psychological research has produced three major insights about the way the mind works.  The first is the proposition that our understanding of the world is always a matter of construal—of inference and interpretation.  Our judgments about people and situations, and even our perceptions of the physical world, rely on stored knowledge and hidden mental processes and are never a direct readout of reality.  Second, the situations we find ourselves in affect our thoughts and determine our behavior far more than we realize.  Peoples dispositions, on the other hand—their distinctive traits, attitudes, abilities, and tastes are much less influential than we assume.  Finally, psychologists have increasingly come to recognize the importance of the unconscious mind, which registers vastly more environmental information than the conscious mind could possibly notice. 

Pg. 61:  The most important thing to know about the unconscious is that it’s terrific at solving certain kinds of problems that the conscious mind handles poorly if at all.  But although the unconscious mind can compose a symphony (think Mozart) and solve a mathematical problem that's been ’round for centuries, it can’t multiply 173 by 19.  Ask yourself to figure that out as you drift off to sleep and see if the product pops into your mind while you’re brushing your teeth the next morning.  It won’t.

Pg. 105:  Loss consideration tend to loom too large relative to gain considerations by a factor of 2 to 1.  We’re overly susceptible to the endowment effect—valuing a thing more than we should simply because it’s ours. 

Pg. 136:  Rorschach testing has been found to be useless.  Hundreds of thousands of hours and scores of millions of millions of dollars were spent using the test before anyone bothered to see whether there was any actual association between responses and symptoms.  And then for decades after the lack of association was established the illusion of correlation kept the test in circulation.

Pg. 170:  Society pays a high cost for experiments not carried out.  Because of failure to carry our randomized experiments, we don’t know whether the $200 billion paid for Head Start was effective in improving cognitive abilities or not.

Pg. 175:  In many instances, Multiple Regression Analysis (MRA) gives one impression about causality, and actual randomized control experiments give another.  In such cases we should believe in the results of the experiments.  For instance, MRA studies by highly regarded investigators tell us that, net of average income of families in the school district, size of the school, IQ test performance city size and geographic location average class size is uncorrelated with student performance.  The implication: we now know we needn’t waste money on decreasing the size of classes.  Scientists in Tennessee conducted a randomized experiment in which they varied class size substantially.  The study found that smaller classes produced about a .22 Std. Deviation improvement in standardized test performance.

There are countless examples of MRA studies finding one thing and experiment finding another.  For example, experiments have found vitamin E to be useless in contrast to MRA findings of usefulness.  In fact, taking multivitamins does little or no good, and very high doses of some vitamins can do genuine harm.  There is almost no evidence one way or another about the effects of any of the other fifty thousand or so food supplements that are on the market.  Unfortunately, lobbying by the supplement industry resulted in Congress exempting supplements from federal regulation, including any requirement that manufactures do experimental studies of actual effectiveness.