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Decision Making and Rationality in the Modern World (Fundamentals in Cognition) by Stanovich Keith E. (2009-07-30) Paperback
Excellent Book
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First published January 1, 2009
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About the author
Keith E. Stanovich
23 books169 followersKeith E. Stanovich is Emeritus Professor of Applied Psychology and Human Development at the University of Toronto and former Canada Research Chair of Applied Cognitive Science. He is the author of over 200 scientific articles and seven books. He received his BA degree in psychology from Ohio State University in 1973 and his PhD in psychology from the University of Michigan in 1977.
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
April 2, 2019
When is it rational to be rational? Such a question is most likely to appear in a pop psychology book, in which an author argues that everything is achievable. All one has to do is change their negative mindset and just start making better decisions; the world is yours for the taking, goddammit! Luckily for people interested in actual science and cognitive processes that underlie human actions, there are still plenty of well-researched, non-trivial books on the subject, and Decision Making and Rationality in the Modern World counts as one of them.
The book in itself is a serious tour de force across every substantial process that is foundational to human decision-making faculties. Thus, Stanovich highlights heuristics and biases that sometimes impede human judgment and distort factual frameworks that constitute the reality. He also draws from Bayes' theorem, arguably one of the most important mathematical concepts, to describe the theoretical possibility of maximizing potential outcome out of many possible choices, as the formula is used to show, in his own words,
Stanovich begins his book by introducing two types of rationality: instrumental (maximizing the potential outcome under given circumstances with available mental and physical resources) and epistemic (juxtaposing individual beliefs and the actual structure of the world). By acknowledging the importance of emotions, which can serve a positive inhibitory role in rational decision-making processes by stoping combinatorial explosion of possibilities that could impede human judgment, he defines rationality as the maximization of subjective expected utility. In this, he follows the argument presented by Baron in Thinking and Deciding, who asserts that every kind of thinking that helps maximize one's potential outcome can be called rational.
It is, however, worth of emphasizing - and the author does it compellingly - that in reality we are not rational agents with stable, pre-existing preferences for each of the options presented in a contextual decision-making situation. For instance, it has been authoritatively shown (vide: Judgment under Uncertainty and Heuristics and Biases) that people are prone to alter their choices due to objectively irrelevant changes in the way the alternatives are presented to them (the so-called framing effect). It is important to realize that people's choices might, in certain circumstances, come from an outside party that wield the power to shape the environment and determine how narratives are phrased. Combined with other factors, such as fear and extra-legal means, it can create an inert and docile society. Obviously, it must be noted that if warned, people tend to be more careful and are more receptive to even minor changes in narratives. Stanovich (per Tversky and Kahneman) details a fair share of heuristics and biases under which people operate on a daily basis, e.g. the framing effect, endowment effect and outcome bias.
The most important feature in this book is, in my opinion, the introduction of the dual-process framework with its fundamental premise that the goal structures of Type 1 (fast, instinctive and often inaccurate thinking) and Type 2 (slow, long-term and mostly accurate thinking) processing are different in terms of their evolutionary adaptiveness. This mental dichotomy is not particularly innovative but I am impressed how Stanovich managed to draw from different fields of research, set together the findings and extract really important conclusions.
As a side note to his primary effort, Stanovich also debunks pop psychology experts' claims who oftentimes present psychological, or sensu largo scientific, findings in a shallow manner. He gives an example of Malcolm Gladwell who in his book Blink alleges that people with damage to their ventromedial brain area (which is responsible for the inhibition of emotional responses and for the decision making) are perfectly rational and even though they lack judgment, they are, in his opinion, highly functional. At first, it might seem (or not) like a reasonable line of argument. However, is it rational to not being able to change your reckless behavior in the face of constant feedbacks from your family and supervisors at work? According to Gladwell, such people are rational thinkers because they lack affective tools of responding to emotional stimuli that, in his mind, only complicate things. He does not seem to care that it might preclude having a family or maintaining a job for a longer period of time.
That being said, my impression of the book would be much greater, if it was not for the repetitions that made the reading less enjoyable. I think I understand a premise behind the idea of repeating important notions but, subjectively, it was too much for me. I think it would be interesting to also see neurophilosophy at work. Paul M. Churchland's eliminative materialism could actually be an added-value to Stanovich's epistemological standing as it posits that certain classes of mental states that most of us believe in do not exist (vide: Scientific Realism and the Plasticity of Mind).
All in all, I would recommend this book to people interested in the science of decision-making processes and its (ir)rationality, and to anyone who wants to read a substantial book about how and why people tend to behave the way they behave.
The book in itself is a serious tour de force across every substantial process that is foundational to human decision-making faculties. Thus, Stanovich highlights heuristics and biases that sometimes impede human judgment and distort factual frameworks that constitute the reality. He also draws from Bayes' theorem, arguably one of the most important mathematical concepts, to describe the theoretical possibility of maximizing potential outcome out of many possible choices, as the formula is used to show, in his own words,
how the belief in a particular hypothesis should be updated based on the receipt of new evidence that is relevant to the hypothesis.Alternative or parallel explanations that underlie the book's topic are also taken from such scientific fields as evolutionary psychology and neurobiology.
Stanovich begins his book by introducing two types of rationality: instrumental (maximizing the potential outcome under given circumstances with available mental and physical resources) and epistemic (juxtaposing individual beliefs and the actual structure of the world). By acknowledging the importance of emotions, which can serve a positive inhibitory role in rational decision-making processes by stoping combinatorial explosion of possibilities that could impede human judgment, he defines rationality as the maximization of subjective expected utility. In this, he follows the argument presented by Baron in Thinking and Deciding, who asserts that every kind of thinking that helps maximize one's potential outcome can be called rational.
It is, however, worth of emphasizing - and the author does it compellingly - that in reality we are not rational agents with stable, pre-existing preferences for each of the options presented in a contextual decision-making situation. For instance, it has been authoritatively shown (vide: Judgment under Uncertainty and Heuristics and Biases) that people are prone to alter their choices due to objectively irrelevant changes in the way the alternatives are presented to them (the so-called framing effect). It is important to realize that people's choices might, in certain circumstances, come from an outside party that wield the power to shape the environment and determine how narratives are phrased. Combined with other factors, such as fear and extra-legal means, it can create an inert and docile society. Obviously, it must be noted that if warned, people tend to be more careful and are more receptive to even minor changes in narratives. Stanovich (per Tversky and Kahneman) details a fair share of heuristics and biases under which people operate on a daily basis, e.g. the framing effect, endowment effect and outcome bias.
The most important feature in this book is, in my opinion, the introduction of the dual-process framework with its fundamental premise that the goal structures of Type 1 (fast, instinctive and often inaccurate thinking) and Type 2 (slow, long-term and mostly accurate thinking) processing are different in terms of their evolutionary adaptiveness. This mental dichotomy is not particularly innovative but I am impressed how Stanovich managed to draw from different fields of research, set together the findings and extract really important conclusions.
As a side note to his primary effort, Stanovich also debunks pop psychology experts' claims who oftentimes present psychological, or sensu largo scientific, findings in a shallow manner. He gives an example of Malcolm Gladwell who in his book Blink alleges that people with damage to their ventromedial brain area (which is responsible for the inhibition of emotional responses and for the decision making) are perfectly rational and even though they lack judgment, they are, in his opinion, highly functional. At first, it might seem (or not) like a reasonable line of argument. However, is it rational to not being able to change your reckless behavior in the face of constant feedbacks from your family and supervisors at work? According to Gladwell, such people are rational thinkers because they lack affective tools of responding to emotional stimuli that, in his mind, only complicate things. He does not seem to care that it might preclude having a family or maintaining a job for a longer period of time.
That being said, my impression of the book would be much greater, if it was not for the repetitions that made the reading less enjoyable. I think I understand a premise behind the idea of repeating important notions but, subjectively, it was too much for me. I think it would be interesting to also see neurophilosophy at work. Paul M. Churchland's eliminative materialism could actually be an added-value to Stanovich's epistemological standing as it posits that certain classes of mental states that most of us believe in do not exist (vide: Scientific Realism and the Plasticity of Mind).
All in all, I would recommend this book to people interested in the science of decision-making processes and its (ir)rationality, and to anyone who wants to read a substantial book about how and why people tend to behave the way they behave.
February 6, 2023
کتاب قبل از کتاب کانمن نوشته شده، در نتیجه بخش هایی از کتاب برای خوانندگان تفکر کند و سریع تکراری ه
اما فکر میکنم برای فهم فرمال تر روانشناسی تصمیم گیری و احتمال اگر به دنبال کتاب نسبتا خلاصه ای هستید بهترین گزینه همینجاست.
اما فکر میکنم برای فهم فرمال تر روانشناسی تصمیم گیری و احتمال اگر به دنبال کتاب نسبتا خلاصه ای هستید بهترین گزینه همینجاست.
June 30, 2025
Excellent read providing that you have read books from Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews