Skeptic: Promoting Science and Critical Thinking

Don’t Believe Everything You Think:
The 6 Basic Mistakes We Make in Thinking

This enlightening book discusses how to recognize faulty thinking and develop the necessary skills to become a more effective problem solver. Author Thomas Kida identifies “the six-pack of problems” that leads many of us unconsciously to accept false ideas:

1. We prefer stories to statistics.
2. We seek to confirm, not to question, our ideas.
3. We rarely appreciate the role of chance and coincidence in shaping events.
4. We sometimes misperceive the world around us.
5. We tend to oversimplify our thinking.
6. Our memories are often inaccurate.

Kida vividly illustrates these tendencies with numerous examples that demonstrate how easily we can be fooled into believing something that isn’t true.