Everyday Irrationality: How pseudo-scientists, lunatics, and the rest of us
systematically fail to think rationally by Robyn Dawes, Westview Press,
$25, ISBN 081336552X
IF YOU鈥橵E ever come home from a family visit wishing that just for once you
could show your brother-in-law what a moron he is, then you鈥檒l understand the
appeal of Everyday Irrationality.
Robyn Dawes, a psychologist at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh,
Pennsylvania, wants to show us how to recognise thinking that is not merely
muddy or wrong, but 鈥渋rrational鈥� in a strict sense, in that it leads the thinker
into a self-contradiction.
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Dawes developed the book partly from classes he teaches. It is a grab bag of
entertaining anecdotes, detailed critiques of particular irrational arguments,
rigorous explanations of probability theory and logic, along with a few forays
into the great philosophers.
Although frequently entertaining and challenging, the book鈥檚 organisation is
spotty, jumping from subject to subject. Some of Dawes鈥檚 digressions into
technical arguments would be more at home on the letters pages of an academic
journal.
His thesis is that people can learn to recognise their irrationality and
correct for it. But you finish the book with the feeling that very few
people鈥攁nd certainly not your brother-in-law鈥攅ver will.