The 14 Big Ideas:

• Need to teach people how to reason, not just learn more facts

• Create environments and conditions that give people the best chance of making the right choice

• We never see an unbiased reality

• Allow your unconscious mind to solve certain problems

• We see patterns where none exist

• Best predictor of future behavior is past behavior

• Fundamental Attribution Error – we forget the circumstances that affect people’s behavior

• Social pressure can be a powerful motivator

• Example of the power of the unconscious mind

• Experts have a hard time explaining the recipe for their success

• Start writing, begin the rough draft – this is where the thinking begins

• The power of the default option

• When you want to create action, give people limited choices, not too many

• Inquiry is fatal to certainty

My Highlights From the Book:

Need to teach people how to reason, not just learn more facts:

Can Reasoning Really Be Taught? But can people actually be taught to think more effectively? Not just to know more things, such as the capital of Uzbekistan or the procedure for extracting square roots, but actually to reason more correctly and solve personal and professional problems more satisfactorily.

Create environments and conditions that give people the best chance of making the right choice:

The key is learning how to frame events in such a way that the relevance of the principles to the solutions of particular problems is made clear, and learning how to code events in such a way that the principles can actually be applied to the events.

If you’re beginning to suspect that psychologists have a million of these, you wouldn’t be far wrong. The most obvious implication of all the evidence about the importance of incidental stimuli is that you want to rig environments so that they include stimuli that will make you or your product or your policy goals attractive.

And behavioral economists are beginning to move into the business of helping people to make choices. They’re not only telling you how to make choices, they’re engineering the world so that you make choices they believe to be optimal.

We never see an unbiased reality:

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. A full appreciation of the degree to which our understanding of the world is based on inferences makes it clear how important it is to improve the tools we use to make those inferences.

Remember that all perceptions, judgments, and beliefs are inferences and not direct readouts of reality.

Allow your unconscious mind to solve certain problems:

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. Many of the most important influences on our perceptions and behavior are hidden from us. And we are never directly aware of the mental processes that produce our perceptions, beliefs, and behavior. Fortunately, and perhaps surprisingly, the unconscious is fully as rational as the conscious mind.

The most important thing I have to tell you—in this whole book—is that you should never fail to take advantage of the free labor of the unconscious mind.

We see patterns where none exist:

The basketball error is characteristic of a huge range of mistaken inferences. Simply put, we see patterns in the world where there are none because we don’t understand just how un-random-looking random sequences can be. We suspect the dice roller of cheating because he gets three 7s in a row.

Best predictor of future behavior is past behavior:

The lesson here is one of the most powerful in all psychology. The best predictor of future behavior is past behavior. You’re rarely going to do better than that. Honesty in the future is best predicted by honesty in the past, not by whether a person looks you steadily in the eye or claims a recent religious conversion.

Fundamental Attribution Error – we forget the circumstances that affect people’s behavior:

A direct consequence of this “context blindness” is that we tend to exaggerate the influence of personal, “dispositional” factors—preferences, personality traits, abilities, plans, and motives—on behavior in a given situation.

The fundamental attribution error gets us in trouble constantly. We trust people we ought not to, we avoid people who really are perfectly nice, we hire people who are not all that competent—all because we fail to recognize situational forces that may be operating on the person’s behavior.

Pay more attention to context. This will improve the odds that you’ll correctly identify situational factors that are influencing your behavior and that of others. In particular, attention to context increases the likelihood that you’ll recognize social influences that may be operating. Reflection may not show you much about the social influences on your own thinking or behavior.

Social pressure can be a powerful motivator:

The general point has been made in scores of subsequent experiments. People perform more energetically not just when they’re in competition with others but even when other people are merely observing. The social facilitation effect on performance has even been found for dogs, possums, armadillos, frogs, and fish.

Example of the power of the unconscious mind:

On April 17, 2012, the Annals of Mathematics received a paper from an obscure mathematician at the University of New Hampshire that claimed a giant leap toward verifying the twin primes conjecture.12 The author was fiftysomething Yitang Zhang, who had spent many years adrift in jobs such as accountant and even Subway employee before he finally got a job at UNH.

Mathematics journals are constantly fielding grandiose claims from obscure mathematicians, but the editors at the Annals found Zhang’s arguments plausible on the surface and promptly sent the paper out for review. Three weeks after receipt of the paper by the Annals—warp speed by academic standards—all the referees pronounced the claims valid. What Zhang proved was that there are infinitely many pairs of prime numbers that differ by 70 million or less. No matter how far you go into the region of spectacularly large prime numbers, and no matter how infrequent they become, you will keep finding prime pairs that differ by less than 70 million.

Number theorists pronounced the result “astounding.” At the invitation of Harvard University, Zhang gave a lecture on his work to a huge crowd of Cambridge academics. His talk impressed his hearers as much as the paper had wowed reviewers.

Zhang had worked on the twin prime conjecture for three years, making no progress whatsoever. Then the solution suddenly came to him, not while he was toiling away on the problem in his office, but while he was sitting in a friend’s backyard in Colorado while he waited to leave for a concert. “I immediately knew that it would work,” he said. Now that the unconscious had done its part, the hard conscious work began. It took Zhang several months to work out all the details of the solution.

Zhang’s experience is quite typical of creative problem solving at the very highest level. There’s a striking uniformity in the way creative people—artists, writers, mathematicians, and scientists—speak about how they created their products. The American poet Brewster Ghiselin collected into one volume a number of essays on the creative process by a variety of highly inventive people from Poincaré to Picasso.13 “Production by a process of purely conscious calculation seems never to occur,” Ghiselin says. Instead, his essayists describe themselves almost as bystanders, differing from observers only in that they are the first to witness the fruits of a problem-solving process that’s hidden from conscious view.

Experts have a hard time explaining the recipe for their success:

When players become genuinely expert, they once again can no longer accurately describe the rules they’re using. This is partly because they no longer have conscious representation of many of the rules they learned as an intermediate player and partly because they have induced unconsciously the strategies that made them masters or grandmasters.

Start writing, begin the rough draft – this is where the thinking begins:

Consciousness seems to be essential for identifying the elements of a problem, and for producing rough sketches of what a solution would look like. The New Yorker writer John McPhee has said that he has to begin a draft, no matter how crummy it is, before the real work on the paper can begin. “Without the drafted version—if it did not exist—you obviously would not be thinking of things that would improve it. In short, you may be actually writing only two or three hours a day, but your mind, in one way or another, is working on it twenty-four hours a day—yes, while you sleep—but only if some sort of draft or earlier version already exists. Until it exists, writing has not really begun” (McPhee, 2013). Another good way to kick the process off, McPhee says, is to write a letter to your mother telling her what you’re going to write about.

The power of the default option:

The economist Richard Thaler and the legal scholar Cass Sunstein have shown numerous ways we can make the status quo bias work in our favor. 7 Some of the most important work rests on a single concept, namely “default option.”

We’re a lazy species: we hang on to the status quo for no other reason than that it’s the way things are. Put laziness to work by organizing your life and that of others so that the easy way out is actually the most desirable option. If option A is better than option B, give people option A as the default and make them check a box to get option B.

When you want to create action, give people limited choices, not too many:

Choice is way overrated. Too many choices can confuse and make decisions worse—or prevent needed decisions from being made. Offer your customers A or B or C. Not A through Z. They’ll be happier and you’ll be richer. Offering people a choice implies that any of the alternatives would be rational to pick; spare people the freedom of making a wrong choice in ignorance of your opinion of what would be the best alternative. Tell them why you think option A is best and what the considerations are that might make it rational to choose something different.

Inquiry is fatal to certainty:

Inquiry is fatal to certainty. —Will Durant, philosopher