Cognitive Illusions. Our Spontaneous Intuitions: Angels or Demons?. A Brief Speleology of the Mind: An Easy Tunnel. Probability Illusions. Calculating the Unknown, or Bayes' Law. The Fallacy of Near Certainty. The Seven Deadly Sins. How to Emerge from the Tunnel of Pessimism. The Principle of Identity and the Psychology of Typicality. A (Rationally) Optimistic Conclusion. A Super-Tunnel. Appendices. Tunnel Exits. Sources. Suggested Reading. Index.
MASSIMO PIATTELLI-PALMARINI, Ph.D., is a Principal Research Associate of the Center for Cognitive Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Director of the Department of Cognitive Science at the Institute of San Raffaele in Milan, Italy. His books The Will to Study and the Italian edition of Inevitable Illusions were international bestsellers.
Minimally, how many people must there be in a room to allow a better than 50 percent chance that two of them will have the same birthday? Your answer may reveal the presence of a cognitive illusion-a mental tunnel that confounds rational thought. Piattelli-Palmarini, director of the Cognitive Science Institute in Milan and a research associate at MIT, offers fascinating examples of such illusions to show how spontaneous, intuitive judgment can lead us astray. Our failure to grasp basic probability, for example, can lead to catastrophic decisions in law and medicine. The author describes the seven deadly mental sins and suggests ways to overcome bias and "mental sloth." This thoughtful, often disturbing book will challenge even those readers with a firm grounding in probability and statistics. For academic and large public libraries.-Laurie Bartolini, Legislative Research, Springfield, Ill.
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