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Steven Pinker’s books—How the Mind Works, The Blank Slate, The Better Angels of Our Nature, Enlightenment Now, and his latest, Rationality—offer a consistent and important message: Smart, critical thinking attends less to anecdotes that tug at the heart than to realities revealed by representative data.
Year after year, 7 in 10 Americans, after reading the news, tell Gallup there has been more crime than in the prior year. In Better Angels, Pinker documents the reality: a long-term crime decline, along with other subsiding forms of violence, including wars and genocide. Enlightenment Now details other ways—from the environment, to life expectancy, to human rights, to literacy, to quality of life—in which, contrary to our news-fed sense of doom, the world actually is getting better.
The same thinking-with-data theme pervades Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters. For my money, Chapter 4 (“Probability and Randomness”) alone is worth the book’s price of admission. It’s a chapter I wish I could assign to every AP and college introductory psychology student. Here, according to Pinker are some noteworthy outcomes of our flawed thinking:
“The press is an availability machine,” Pinker observes. “It serves up anecdotes that feed our impression of what’s common in a way that is guaranteed to mislead.” By contrast, unreported good news typically consists “of nothing happening, like a boring country at peace.” And progress—such as 137,000 people escaping extreme poverty each day—creeps up silently, “transforming the world by stealth. . . . There was never a Thursday in October in which it suddenly happened. So one of the greatest developments in human history—a billion and a quarter people escaping squalor [in the last 25 years]—has gone unnoticed.”
This latest offering from one of psychology’s public intellectuals joins kindred-spirited data-based perspectives by Hans Rosling (Factfulness: Ten Reasons We’re Wrong About the World—and Why Things are Better Than You Think), Max Roser (ourworldindata.org), and William MacAskill (Doing Good Better), as well as my Intuition: Its Powers and Perils. Together, they help us all to think smarter by advocating reality-based, statistically literate, rational decisions that can help us spend and give more wisely, and sustain a flourishing world.
(For David Myers’ other essays on psychological science and everyday life, visit TalkPsych.com. Follow him on Twitter: @davidgmyers.)
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