1. Russell 1950/2009.
2. Spinoza 1677/2000, Ethics, III, preface.
3. Data on human progress: Pinker 2018.
4. Kalahari San: Lee & Daly 1999. The San, previously known as the Bushmen, comprise the Ju/ ’hoan (formerly !Kung), Tuu, Gana, /Gwi, and Khoi peoples, variously spelled.
5. Hunter-gatherers: Marlowe 2010.
6. Liebenberg works with the !Xõ, /Gwi, Khomani, and Ju/ ’hoan (formerly !Kung) San. Examples here are from the !Xõ. Liebenberg’s experiences with the San, and his theory that scientific thinking evolved from tracking, are presented in The Origin of Science (2013/2021), The Art of Tracking (1990), and Liebenberg, //Ao, et al. 2021. Additional examples are from Liebenberg 2020. For other descriptions of hunter-gatherer rationality, see Chagnon 1997; Kingdon 1993; Marlowe 2010.
7. A video of a pursuit hunt, narrated by David Attenborough, may be seen here: https://youtu.be/826HMLoiE_o.
8. Liebenberg 2013/2021, p. 57.
9. Personal communication from Louis Liebenberg, Aug. 11, 2020.
10. Liebenberg 2013/2021, p. 104.
11. Liebenberg 2020 and personal communication, May 27, 2020.
12. Moore 2005. See also Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life 2009, and note 8 to chapter 10 below.
13. Vosoughi, Roy, & Aral 2018.
14. Pinker 2010; Tooby & DeVore 1987.
15. Amos Tversky (1937–1996) and Daniel Kahneman (1934– ) pioneered the study of cognitive illusions and biases; see Tversky & Kahneman 1974, Kahneman, Slovic, & Tversky 1982, Hastie & Dawes 2010, and Kahneman’s bestseller, Thinking, Fast and Slow (2011). Their lives and collaboration are described in Michael Lewis’s The Undoing Project (2016) and Kahneman’s autobiographical statement for his 2002 Nobel Prize (Kahneman 2002).
16. Frederick 2005.
17. The psychologists Philip Maymin and Ellen Langer have shown that simply asking people to be mindful of their visual surroundings reduced reasoning errors in 19 of 22 classic problems from the cognitive psychology literature.
18. Frederick 2005.
19. Frederick 2005, p. 28. Actually, “A banana and a bagel cost 37 cents. The banana costs 13 cents more than the bagel. How much does the bagel cost?”
20. Wagenaar & Sagaria 1975; Wagenaar & Timmers 1979.
21. Goda, Levy, et al. 2015; Stango & Zinman 2009.
22. Citations omitted to spare embarrassment to two friends.
23. US deaths (7-day rolling average): Roser, Ritchie, et al. 2020, accessed Aug. 23, 2020. American lethal hazards: Ritchie 2018, accessed Aug. 23, 2020; data are from 2017.
24. Wason 1966; see also Cosmides 1989; Fiddick, Cosmides, & Tooby 2000; Mercier & Sperber 2011; Nickerson 1996; Sperber, Cara, & Girotto 1995.
25. van Benthem 2008, p. 77.
26. Since, logically speaking, the P choice could disconfirm the rule as easily as the not-Q choice, the explanation in terms of confirmation bias is a bit subtler: participants deploy reasoning to justify their initial, intuitive choice, whatever it is; see Nickerson 1998 and Mercier & Sperber 2011. Winning arguments: Dawson, Gilovich, & Regan 2002; Mercier & Sperber 2011.
27. Quoted in Grayling 2007, p. 102.
28. From Novum Organum, Bacon 1620/2017.
29. Popper 1983. Wason task vs. scientific hypothesis-testing: Nickerson 1996.
30. Peculiarity of the selection task: Nickerson 1996; Sperber, Cara, & Girotto 1995.
31. Cheng & Holyoak 1985; Cosmides 1989; Fiddick, Cosmides, & Tooby 2000; Stanovich & West 1998. A different take: Sperber, Cara, & Girotto 1995.
32. Ecological rationality: Gigerenzer 1998; Tooby & Cosmides 1993; see Pinker 1997/2009, pp. 302–6.
33. The problem was originated by the recreational mathematician Martin Gardner (1959), who called it the Three Prisoners problem; it was named after Monty Hall by the statistician Steven Selvin (1975).
34. Granberg & Brown 1995; Saenen, Heyvaert, et al. 2018.
35. Crockett 2015; Granberg & Brown 1995; Tierney 1991; vos Savant 1990.
36. Crockett 2015.
37. Vazsonyi 1999. My Erdös number is 3, thanks to Michel, Shen, Aiden, Veres, Gray, The Google Books Team, Pickett, Hoiberg, Clancy, Norvig, Orwant, Pinker, Nowak, & Lieberman-Aiden 2011. The computer scientist Peter Norvig has coauthored a report with fellow computer scientist (and Erdös coauthor) Maria Klawe.
38. To be fair, normative analyses of the Monty Hall dilemma have inspired voluminous commentary and disagreement; see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monty_Hall_problem.
39. Try it: Math Warehouse, “Monty Hall Simulation Online,” https://www.mathwarehouse.com/monty-hall-simulation-online/.
40. Such as Late Night with David Letterman: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EsGc3jC9yas.
41. Vazsonyi 1999.
42. Suggested by Granberg & Brown 1995.
43. Rules of conversation: Grice 1975; Pinker 2007, chap. 8.
44. History and concepts of probability: Gigerenzer, Swijtink, et al. 1989.
45. vos Savant 1990.
46. Thanks to Julian De Freitas for running and analyzing the study. The design was similar to one summarized informally in Tversky & Kahneman 1983, pp. 307–8. The items here were chosen from a larger set pretested in a pilot study. The differences were found in comparisons of the ratings participants gave either for the conjunction or for the single conjunct before they had seen the other one (that is, in a between-participants comparison). When we compared the ratings of both items by the same participant (a within-participant comparison), the conjunction fallacy was seen only with the Russia and Venezuela items. Still, 86 percent of the participants committed at least one conjunction error, and with every item, a majority of participants rated the probability of the conjunction as greater than or equal to the probability of the conjunct.
47. Donaldson, Doubleday, et al. 2011; Tetlock & Gardner 2015.
48. Kaplan 1994.
49. Declines in war, crime, poverty, and disease: Pinker 2011; Pinker 2018.
50. Tversky & Kahneman 1983.
51. Gould 1988.
52. Quoted by Tversky & Kahneman 1983, p. 308.
53. Tversky & Kahneman 1983, p. 313.
54. Quoted in Hertwig & Gigerenzer 1999.
55. Hertwig & Gigerenzer 1999.
56. Hertwig & Gigerenzer 1999; Tversky & Kahneman 1983.
57. Kahneman & Tversky 1996.
58. Mellers, Hertwig, & Kahneman 2001.
59. Purves & Lotto 2003.
60. AI fails: Marcus & Davis 2019.
61. Pinker 1997/2009, chaps. 1, 4.
62. Pinker 2015.
63. Federal Aviation Administration 2016, chap. 17.
1. Justified true belief, and counterexamples showing that it is necessary but not sufficient for knowledge: Gettier 1963; Ichikawa & Steup 2018.
2. James 1890/1950.
3. Carroll 1895.
4. Just do it: Fodor 1968; Pinker 1997/2009, chap. 2.
5. Nagel 1997.
6. Myers 2008.
7. For many examples, see the sources in note 79 to chapter 10 below.
8. Stoppard 1972, p. 30.
9. Hume 1739/2000, book II, part III, section III, “Of the influencing motives of the will.”
10. Cohon 2018.
11. Though that’s not what he literally believed about taste in art and wine, as expressed in “Of the standard of taste” (Gracyk 2020). His point here was only that goals are inherently subjective.
12. Bob Dylan, “Mr. Tambourine Man.”
13. Pinker 1997/2009; Scott-Phillips, Dickins, & West 2011.
14. Ainslie 2001; Schelling 1984.
15. Mischel & Baker 1975.
16. Ainslie 2001; Laibson 1997; Schelling 1984. See also Pinker 2011, chap. 9, “Self-Control.”
17. Frederick 2005.
18. Jeszeck, Collins, et al. 2015.
19. Dasgupta 2007; Nordhaus 2007; Varian 2006; Venkataraman 2019.
20. MacAskill 2015; Todd 2017.
21. Venkataraman 2019.
22. Ainslie 2001; Laibson 1997.
23. McClure, Laibson, et al. 2004.
24. Homer 700 BCE/2018, translation by Emily Wilson.
25. Baumeister & Tierney 2012.
26. Nudges and other behavioral insights: Hallsworth & Kirkman 2020; Thaler & Sunstein 2008. Nudge skeptics: Gigerenzer 2015; Kahan 2013.
27. Rational ignorance: Gigerenzer 2004; Gigerenzer & Garcia-Retamero 2017; Hertwig & Engel 2016; Williams 2020; see also Pinker 2007, pp. 422–25.
28. Schelling 1960.
29. Chicken: J. S. Goldstein 2010. The game played in the movie is a bit different: the teenagers drive their cars toward a cliff, each trying to jump out second.
30. Hotheadedness as a paradoxical tactic: Frank 1988; see also Pinker 1997/2009, chap. 6.
31. Sagan & Suri 2003.
32. Crazy love as a paradoxical tactic: Frank 1988; Pinker 1997/2009, chap. 6, “Fools for Love.”
33. Novel by Dashiell Hammett; screenplay by John Huston.
34. Tetlock 2003; Tetlock, Kristel, et al. 2000.
35. Satel 2008.
36. For example, Block 1976/2018.
37. Reframing taboo tradeoffs: Tetlock 2003; Tetlock, Kristel, et al. 2000; Zelizer 2005.
38. Hume 1739/2000, book II, part III, section III, “Of the influencing motives of the will.” Hume’s moral philosophy: Cohon 2018.
39. Rachels & Rachels 2010.
40. Stoppard 1972, p. 39.
41. Gould 1999.
42. Plato 399–390 BCE/2002. Plato’s moral philosophy brought to life: R. Goldstein 2013.
43. God commands child murder: Pinker 2011, chap. 1.
44. “ ’Tis as little contrary to reason to prefer even my own acknowledg’d lesser good to my greater, and have a more ardent affection for the former than the latter.”
45. Morality as impartiality: de Lazari-Radek & Singer 2012; R. Goldstein 2006; Greene 2013; Nagel 1970; Railton 1986; Singer 1981/2011.
46. Terry 2008.
47. Self-interest, sociality, and rationality as sufficient conditions for morality: Pinker 2018, pp. 412–15. Morality as a strategy in positive-sum games: Pinker 2011, pp. 689–92.
48. Chomsky 1972/2006; Pinker 1994/2007, chap. 4.
1. Eliot 1883/2017, pp. 257–58.
2. Leibniz 1679/1989.
3. Accessible introductions to logic: McCawley 1993; Priest 2017; Warburton 2007.
4. Based on Carroll 1896/1977, book II, chap. III, §2, example (4), p. 72.
5. Donaldson, Doubleday, et al. 2011.
6. Logical words in logic versus conversation: Grice 1975; Pinker 2007, chaps. 2, 8.
7. Emerson 1841/1993.
8. Liberman 2004.
9. McCawley 1993.
10. From the Yang 2020 website, retrieved Feb. 6, 2020: Yang 2020.
11. Curtis 2020; Richardson, Smith, et al. 2020; Warburton 2007; see also the Wikipedia article “List of fallacies,” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fallacies.
12. Mercier & Sperber 2011; see Norman 2016, for a critique.
13. Friedersdorf 2018.
14. Shackel 2014.
15. Russell 1969.
16. Basterfield, Lilienfeld, et al. 2020.
17. A common saying loosely based on a passage from Henrik Ibsen’s Enemy of the People: “The majority never has right on its side. . . . The majority has might on its side—unfortunately; but right it has not.”
18. Proctor 2000.
19. For discussion of one example, see Paresky, Haidt, Strossen & Pinker 2020.
20. Haidt 2016.
21. The story is found in many textbooks, usually attributed to Francis Bacon in 1592, but its real source, even as a parody, is obscure, and probably from the early twentieth century; see Simanek 1999.
22. Ecological rationality: Gigerenzer 1998; Pinker 1997/2009, pp. 302–6; Tooby & Cosmides 1993.
23. Cosmides 1989; Fiddick, Cosmides, & Tooby 2000.
24. Weber 1922/2019.
25. Cole, Gay, et al. 1971, pp. 187–88; see also Scribner & Cole 1973.
26. Norenzayan, Smith, et al. 2002.
27. Wittgenstein 1953.
28. Not all philosophers agree: Bernard Suits (1978/2014) defines a game as “the voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles.” See also McGinn 2012, chap. 2.
29. Pinker 1997/2009, pp. 306–13; Pinker 1999/2011, chap. 10; Pinker & Prince 2013; Rosch 1978.
30. Armstrong, Gleitman, & Gleitman 1983; Pinker 1999/2011, chap 10; Pinker & Prince 2013.
31. Goodfellow, Bengio, & Courville 2016; Rumelhart, McClelland, & PDP Research Group 1986; Aggarwal 2018. For critical views, see Marcus & Davis 2019; Pearl & Mackenzie 2018; Pinker 1999/2011; Pinker & Mehler 1988.
32. Rumelhart, Hinton, & Williams 1986; Aggarwal 2018; Goodfellow, Bengio, & Courville 2016.
33. Lewis-Kraus 2016.
34. The word “algorithm” was originally reserved for such formulas, and they were contrasted with “heuristics” or rules of thumb. But in common parlance today, the word is used for all AI systems, including ones based on neural networks.
35. Marcus & Davis 2019.
36. Kissinger 2018.
37. Lake, Ullman, et al. 2017; Marcus 2018; Marcus & Davis 2019; Pearl & Mackenzie 2018.
38. Ashby, Alfonso-Reese, et al. 1998; Evans 2012; Kahneman 2011; Marcus 2000; Pinker 1999/2011; Pinker & Prince 2013; Sloman 1996.
39. Pinker 1999/2011, chap. 10; Pinker & Prince 2013.
1. Letter to Miss Sophia Thrale, 24 July 1783, in Johnson 1963.
2. Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations. The citation does not lead to a primary source, but it was probably a letter to Max Born in 1926. A variant occurs in a letter to Cornelius Lanczos, quoted in Einstein 1981, and three more may be found in Einstein’s Wikiquote entry, https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Albert_Einstein.
3. Eagle 2019; randomness as incompressibility, usually called Kolmogorov complexity, is discussed in section 2.2.1.
4. Millenson 1965.
5. Gravity poster: http://www.mooneyart.com/gravity/historyof_01.html.
6. Gigerenzer, Hertwig, et al. 2005.
7. Quoted in Bell 1947.
8. Interpretations of probability: Gigerenzer 2008a; Gigerenzer, Swijtink, et al. 1989; Hájek 2019; Savage 1954.
9. Quoted in Gigerenzer 1991, p. 92.
10. Gigerenzer 2008a.
11. Tversky & Kahneman 1973.
12. Gigerenzer 2008a.
13. Combs & Slovic 1979; Ropeik 2010; Slovic 1987.
14. McCarthy 2019.
15. Duffy 2018; see also Ropeik 2010; Slovic 1987.
16. Figures from 2014–15, referenced in Pinker 2018, table 13-1, p. 192. See also Ritchie 2018; Roth, Abate, et al. 2018.
17. Savage 2013, table 2. The figure is for commercial aviation in the United States.
18. Gigerenzer 2006.
19. “Mack the Knife,” lyrics by Bertolt Brecht, from The Threepenny Opera.
20. Cape Cod sharks: Sherman 2019. Cape Cod traffic deaths: Nolan, Bremer, et al. 2019.
21. Caldeira, Emanuel, et al. 2013. See also Goldstein & Qvist 2019; Goldstein, Qvist, & Pinker 2019.
22. Nuclear vs coal: Goldstein & Qvist 2019; Goldstein, Qvist, & Pinker 2019. Coal kills: Lockwood, Welker-Hood, et al. 2009. Nuclear replaced by coal: Jarvis, Deschenes, & Jha 2019. Even if we accept recent claims that authorities covered up thousands of Chernobyl deaths, the death toll from sixty years of nuclear power would still equal about one month of coal-related deaths.
23. Ropeik 2010; Slovic 1987.
24. Pinker 2018, table 13-1, p. 192; Mueller 2006.
25. Walker, Petulla, et al. 2019.
26. Averages are for 2015–19. Number of police shootings: Tate, Jenkins, et al. 2020. Number of homicides: Federal Bureau of Investigation 2019, and previous years.
27. Schelling 1960, p. 90; see also Tooby, Cosmides, & Price 2006. Pearl Harbor and 9/11 as public outrages: Mueller 2006.
28. Chwe 2001; De Freitas, Thomas, et al. 2019; Schelling 1960.
29. Baumeister, Stillwell, & Wotman 1990.
30. Hostility to data on public outrages: Pearl Harbor and 9/11, Mueller 2006; George Floyd killing, Blackwell 2020.
31. Made popular by the Obama chief of staff Rahm Emanuel, but first used by the anthropologist Luther Gerlach. Thanks to Fred Shapiro, editor of The Yale Book of Quotations.
32. For an extended argument of this kind regarding terrorism, see Mueller 2006.
33. https://twitter.com/MaxCRoser/status/919921745464905728?s=20.
34. McCarthy 2015.
35. Rosling 2019.
36. Crisis-driven media and political cynicism: Bornstein & Rosenberg 2016.
37. Lankford & Madfis 2018.
38. https://ourworldindata.org/.
39. From Paulos 1988.
40. Edwards 1996.
41. Many books explain probability and its pitfalls, including Paulos 1988; Hastie & Dawes 2010; Mlodinow 2009; Schneps & Colmez 2013.
42. Batt 2004; Schneps & Colmez 2013.
43. Texas v. Pennsylvania 2020. Motion: https://www.texasattorneygeneral.gov/sites/default/files/images/admin/2020/Press/SCOTUSFiling.pdf. Docket: https://www.supremecourt.gov/docket/docketfiles/html/public/22O155.html. Analysis: Bump 2020.
44. Gilovich, Vallone, & Tversky 1985.
45. Miller & Sanjurjo 2018; Gigerenzer 2018a.
46. Pinker 2011, pp. 202–7.
48. Krämer & Gigerenzer 2005.
49. Krämer & Gigerenzer 2005; Miller & Sanjurjo 2018; Miller & Sanjurjo 2019.
50. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DBSAeqdcZAM.
51. Scarry’s criticism is described in Rosen 1996; see also Good 1996.
52. Krämer & Gigerenzer 2005.
53. Krämer & Gigerenzer 2005; Schneps & Colmez 2013.
54. Paper: Johnson, Tress, et al. 2019. Critique: Knox & Mummolo 2020. Reply: Johnson & Cesario 2020. Retraction: Cesario & Johnson 2020.
55. Edwards 1996.
56. Mlodinow 2009; Paulos 1988.
57. Fabrikant 2008; Mlodinow 2009; Serwer 2006.
58. Gardner 1972.
59. Open Science Collaboration 2015; Gigerenzer 2018b; Ioannidis 2005; Pashler & Wagenmakers 2012.
60. Ioannidis 2005; Simmons, Nelson, & Simonsohn 2011. “The garden of forking paths” was coined by the statistician Andrew Gelman (Gelman & Loken 2014).
61. The cognitive psychologist Michael Corballis.
62. For example, the Center for Open Science’s OSF Registries, https://osf.io/prereg/.
63. Feller 1968; see Pinker 2011, pp. 202–7.
64. Kahneman & Tversky 1972. Originally shown by William Feller (1968).
65. Gould 1988.
1. Rationality Community: Caplan 2017; Chivers 2019; Raemon 2017. Prominent members include Julia Galef of Rationally Speaking (https://juliagalef.com/), Scott Alexander of Slate Star Codex (https://slatestarcodex.com/), Scott Aaronson of Shtetl-Optimized (https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/), Robin Hanson of Overcoming Bias (https://www.overcomingbias.com/), and Eliezer Yudkowsky, who started Less Wrong (https://www.lesswrong.com/).
2. Arbital 2020.
3. Gigerenzer 2011.
4. More accurately, prob(Data | Hypothesis) is proportional to the likelihood. The term “likelihood” has slightly different technical meanings in different statistical subcommunities; this is the one commonly used in discussions of Bayesian reasoning.
5. Kahneman & Tversky 1972; Tversky & Kahneman 1974.
6. “In his evaluation of evidence, man is apparently not a conservative Bayesian: he is not Bayesian at all.” Kahneman & Tversky 1972, p. 450.
7. Tversky & Kahneman 1982.
8. Hastie & Dawes 2010.
9. Tversky & Kahneman 1974.
10. Overheard; there’s no print version I can find.
11. Hume, Bayes, and miracles: Earman 2002.
12. Hume 1748/1999, section X, “Of miracles,” part 1, 90.
13. Hume 1748/1999, section X, “Of miracles,” part 1, 91.
14. French 2012.
15. Carroll 2016. See also Stenger 1990.
16. Open Science Collaboration 2015; Pashler & Wagenmakers 2012.
17. Ineffectiveness of persuasion industries: Mercier 2020.
18. Ziman 1978, p. 40.
19. Tetlock & Gardner 2015.
20. Tetlock 2003; Tetlock, Kristel, et al. 2000.
21. Decline of bigotry: Pinker 2018, pp. 215–19; Charlesworth & Banaji 2019.
22. Politics of base rates in social science: Tetlock 1994.
23. Gigerenzer 1991, 2018a; Gigerenzer, Swijtink, et al. 1989; see also Cosmides & Tooby 1996.
24. Burns 2010; Maines 2007.
25. Bar-Hillel 1980; Tversky & Kahneman 1982; Gigerenzer 1991.
26. Gigerenzer 1991, 1996; Kahneman & Tversky 1996.
27. Cosmides & Tooby 1996; Gigerenzer 1991; Hoffrage, Lindsey, et al. 2000; Tversky & Kahneman 1983. Kahneman and Tversky point out that frequency formats reduce, but don’t always eliminate, base-rate neglect, as we saw in chapter 1 with Kahneman’s adversarial collaboration with Gigerenzer’s collaborator Ralph Hertwig on whether frequency formats eliminate the conjunction fallacy: Kahneman & Tversky 1996; Mellers, Hertwig, & Kahneman 2001.
28. Gigerenzer 2015; Kahan 2013.
1. The model of the human as a rational actor is explained in any introductory economics or political science textbook. The theory that relates rational choice to expected utility was developed by von Neumann & Morgenstern 1953/2007 and refined by Savage 1954. I will use “rational choice” and “expected utility” interchangeably for the theory that equates them. See Luce & Raiffa 1957 and Hastie & Dawes 2010 for accessible explanations.
2. Cohn, Maréchal, et al. 2019.
3. Glaeser 2004.
4. Contesting the axioms of rational choice: Arkes, Gigerenzer, & Hertwig 2016; Slovic & Tversky 1974.
5. Hastie & Dawes 2010; Savage 1954.
6. More commonly, it is called Completeness or Comparability.
7. Also known as Distribution of Probabilities across Alternatives, Algebra of Combining, and Reduction of Compound Lotteries.
8. Variants of the Independence axiom include Chernoff’s condition, Sen’s property, Arrow’s Independence of Irrelevant Alternatives (IIA), and Luce’s choice axiom.
9. Liberman 2004.
10. More commonly, Continuity or Solvability.
11. Stevenson & Wolfers 2008.
12. Richardson 1960, p. 11; Slovic 2007; Wan & Shammas 2020.
13. Pinker 2011, pp. 219–20.
14. Tetlock 2003; Tetlock, Kristel, et al. 2000.
15. “Gee, a million dollars . . . maybe.” “Would you sleep with me for a hundred dollars?” “What kind of woman do you think I am?” “We’ve already established that; we’re just haggling over price.”
16. Simon 1956.
17. Tversky 1972.
18. Savage 1954, cited in Tversky 1972, pp. 283–84.
19. Tversky 1969.
20. Arkes, Gigerenzer, & Hertwig 2016.
21. Tversky 1972, p. 298; Hastie & Dawes 2010, p. 251.
22. Called preference reversals: Lichtenstein & Slovic 1971.
23. Rounding results in a difference of a cent or two, but the differences cancel out over the bets used in the study and don’t affect the results.
24. No intransitive money pumps: Arkes, Gigerenzer, & Hertwig 2016, p. 23. Preference-reversing money pumps: Hastie & Dawes 2010, p. 76. Wise up: Arkes, Gigerenzer, & Hertwig 2016, pp. 23–24.
25. Allais 1953.
26. Kahneman & Tversky 1979, p. 267.
27. Kahneman & Tversky 1979.
28. Breyer 1993, p. 12.
29. Kahneman & Tversky 1979.
30. McNeil, Pauker, et al. 1982.
31. Tversky & Kahneman 1981.
32. Hastie & Dawes 2010, pp. 282–88.
33. Kahneman & Tversky 1979.
34. The decision weight graph differs from fig. 4 in Kahneman & Tversky 1979 and is instead based on fig. 12.2 in Hastie & Dawes 2010, which I believe is a better visualization of the theory.
35. Based on Kahneman & Tversky 1979.
36. This pervasive asymmetry is called the Negativity bias; Tierney & Baumeister 2019.
37. Maurice Allais, Herbert Simon, Daniel Kahneman, Richard Thaler, George Akerlof.
38. Gigerenzer 2008b, p. 20.
39. Abito & Salant 2018; Braverman 2018.
40. Sydnor 2010.
41. Gigerenzer & Kolpatzik 2017; see also Gigerenzer 2014, for a similar argument on breast cancer screening.
1. Twain 1897/1989.
2. Signal Detection Theory and expected utility theory: Lynn, Wormwood, et al. 2015.
3. Statistical distributions are explained in any introduction to statistics or psychology. Signal Detection Theory: Green & Swets 1966; Lynn, Wormwood, et al. 2015; Swets, Dawes, & Monahan 2000; Wolfe, Kluender, et al. 2020, chap. 1. For the histories of Signal Detection Theory and statistical decision theory and their connection, see Gigerenzer, Krauss, & Vitouch 2004; Gigerenzer, Swijtink, et al. 1989.
4. Pinker 2011, pp. 210–20.
5. This is called the Central Limit Theorem.
6. “Likelihood” here is being used in the narrow sense common in discussions of Bayes’s rule.
7. Lynn, Wormwood, et al. 2015.
8. Lynn, Wormwood, et al. 2015.
9. Lynn, Wormwood, et al. 2015.
10. Confusingly, “sensitivity” is used in medical contexts to refer to the hit rate, namely the likelihood of a positive finding given that a condition is present. It is contrasted with “specificity,” the correct rejection rate, the likelihood of a negative finding given that the condition is absent.
11. Loftus, Doyle, et al. 2019.
12. National Research Council 2009; President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology 2016.
13. Contesting enhanced interrogation: Bankoff 2014.
14. Ali 2011.
15. Contesting sexual misconduct: Soave 2014; Young 2014a. Two surveys of false rape accusations have found rates between 5 and 10 percent: De Zutter, Horselenberg, & van Koppen 2017; Rumney 2006. See also Bazelon & Larimore 2009; Young 2014b.
16. Arkes & Mellers 2002.
17. Arkes and Mellers cite a 1981 study which reported a range of 0.6–0.9, and a set of flawed studies with dʹs closer to 2.7. My estimate comes from a meta-analysis in National Research Council 2003, p. 122, which reports a median of 0.86 for a related measure of sensitivity, area under the ROC curve. That figure may be converted, under the assumption of equal-variance normal distributions, to a dʹ of 1.53 by multiplying the corresponding z-score by √2.
18. False accusations, convictions, and executions: National Research Council 2009; President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology 2016. For rape in particular: Bazelon & Larimore 2009; De Zutter, Horselenberg, & van Koppen 2017; Rumney 2006; Young 2014b. For terrorism: Mueller 2006.
19. Statistical decision theory, in particular, null hypothesis significance testing, is explained in every statistics and psychology textbook. For its history and its relation to Signal Detection Theory, see Gigerenzer, Krauss, & Vitouch 2004; Gigerenzer, Swijtink, et al. 1989.
20. Gigerenzer, Krauss, & Vitouch 2004.
21. As with note 6 above, “likelihood” is used in the narrow sense common in discussions of Bayes’s rule, namely the probability of the data given a hypothesis.
22. Gigerenzer 2018b; Open Science Collaboration 2015; Ioannidis 2005; Pashler & Wagenmakers 2012.
24. Nature editors 2020b. “Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is” is from Wallace Stevens’s “The Snow Man.”
25. Henderson 2020; Hume 1748/1999.
1. Hume 1739/2000, book III, part II, section V, “Of the obligation of promises.”
2. von Neumann & Morgenstern 1953/2007. Semitechnical introductions: Binmore 1991; Luce & Raiffa 1957. Mostly nontechnical: Binmore 2007; Rosenthal 2011. Completely nontechnical: Poundstone 1992.
3. Each game presented in this chapter is discussed in most of the sources in note 2 above.
4. Clegg 2012; Dennett 2013, chap. 8.
5. Thomas, De Freitas, et al. 2016.
6. Chwe 2001; De Freitas, Thomas, et al. 2019; Schelling 1960; Thomas, DeScioli, et al. 2014.
7. Pinker 2007, chap. 8; Schelling 1960.
8. Lewis 1969. Skepticism that conventions require common knowledge: Binmore 2008.
9. The example has been adjusted for inflation.
10. Schelling 1960, pp. 67, 71.
11. J. Goldstein 2010.
12. Frank 1988; Schelling 1960; see also Pinker 1997/2009, chap. 6.
13. Dollar auction: Poundstone 1992; Shubik 1971.
14. Dawkins 1976/2016; Maynard Smith 1982.
15. Pinker 2011, pp. 217–20.
16. Shermer 2008.
17. Dawkins 1976/2016; Maynard Smith 1982.
18. Trivers 1971.
19. Pinker 1997/2009, chap. 7; Pinker 2002/2016, chap. 14; Pinker 2011, chap. 8; Trivers 1971.
20. Ridley 1997.
21. Ellickson 1991; Ridley 1997.
22. Hobbes 1651/1957, chap. 14, p. 190.
1. Sowell 1995.
2. Cohen 1997.
3. BBC News 2004.
4. Stevenson & Wolfers 2008, adapted with permission of the authors.
5. Hamilton 2018.
6. Chapman & Chapman 1967, 1969.
7. Thompson & Adams 1996.
8. Spurious correlations, https://www.tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations.
9. Galton 1886.
10. Tversky & Kahneman 1974.
11. Tversky & Kahneman 1974.
12. Tversky & Kahneman 1971, 1974.
13. The author, Jonah Lehrer (2010), quoted scientists who explained regression to the mean and questionable research practices to him, but he still maintained that something was happening but they didn’t know what it was.
14. Pinker 2007, pp. 208–33.
15. Hume 1739/2000.
16. Holland 1986; King, Keohane, & Verba 1994, chap. 3.
17. Kaba 2020. For accessible reviews of studies that do show a causal effect of policing on crime (using methods explained in this chapter), see Yglesias 2020a, 2020b.
18. Pearl 2000.
19. Weissman 2020.
20. VanderWeele 2014.
21. Lyric from the 1941 recording. So the Bible says: Matthew 25:29, “For unto every one that hath shall be given, and he shall have abundance: but from him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath.”
22. Social Progress Imperative 2020; Welzel 2013.
23. Deary 2001; Temple 2015; Ritchie 2015.
24. Pearl & Mackenzie 2018.
25. The cognitive psychologist Reid Hastie.
26. Baron 2012; Bornstein 2012; Hallsworth & Kirkman 2020.
27. Levitt & Dubner 2009; https://freakonomics.com/.
28. DellaVigna & Kaplan 2007.
29. Martin & Yurukoglu 2017.
30. See Pinker 2011, pp. 278–84.
31. The example here is adapted from Russett & Oneal 2001, and discussed in Pinker 2011, pp. 278–84.
32. Stuart 2010.
33. Kendler, Kessler, et al. 2010.
34. Vaci, Edelsbrunner, et al. 2019.
35. Dawes, Faust, & Meehl 1989; Meehl 1954/2013. See also Tetlock 2009 regarding political and economic predictions.
36. Polderman, Benyamin, et al. 2015; see Pinker 2002/2016, pp. 395–98, 450–51.
37. Salganik, Lundberg, et al. 2020.
1. Shermer 2020a.
2. O’Keefe 2020.
3. Wolfe & Dale 2020.
4. Kessler, Rizzo, & Kelly 2020; Nature editors 2020a; Tollefson 2020.
5. Rauch 2021.
6. Gilbert 2019; Pennycook & Rand 2020a.
7. The first five figures are from a Gallup survey, Moore 2005; the second five from Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life 2009.
8. According to repeated surveys between 1990 and 2005 or 2009, there were slight upward trends for belief in spiritual healing, haunted houses, ghosts, communicating with the dead, and witches, and slight downward trends for belief in possession by the devil, ESP, telepathy, and reincarnation. Consultations with a psychic or fortune-teller, belief in aliens visiting Earth, and channeling were steady (Moore 2005; Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life 2009). According to reports from the National Science Foundation, from 1979 to 2018 the percentage believing that astrology is “very” or “sort of” scientific declined very slightly, from the low 40s to the high 30s, and in 2018 included 58 percent of 18- to 24-year-olds and 49 percent of 25- to 34-year-olds (National Science Board 2014, 2020). All paranormal beliefs are more popular in younger than in older respondents (Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life 2009). For astrology, the age gradient is stable over the decades, suggesting that the credulity is an effect of youth itself, which many people grow out of, not of being a Gen Z, Millennial, or any other cohort.
9. Shermer 1997, 2011, 2020b.
10. Mercier 2020; Shermer 2020c; Sunstein & Vermeule 2008; Uscinski & Parent 2014; van Prooijen & van Vugt 2018.
11. Horowitz 2001; Sunstein & Vermeule 2008.
12. Statista Research Department 2019; Uscinski & Parent 2014.
13. Brunvand 2014; the tabloid headlines are from my personal collection.
14. Nyhan 2018.
15. R. Goldstein 2010.
16. https://quoteinvestigator.com/2017/11/30/salary/.
17. Kunda 1990.
18. Thanks to the linguist Ann Farmer for her credo “It isn’t about being right. It’s about getting it right.”
19. Though see note 26 to chapter 1 above.
20. Dawson, Gilovich, & Regan 2002.
21. Kahan, Peters, et al. 2017; Lord, Ross, & Lepper 1979; Taber & Lodge 2006; Dawson, Gilovich, & Regan 2002.
22. Pronin, Lin, & Ross 2002.
23. Mercier & Sperber 2011, 2017; Tetlock 2002. But see also Norman 2016.
24. Mercier & Sperber 2011, p. 63; Mercier, Trouche, et al. 2015.
25. Kahan, Peters, et al. 2017.
26. Ditto, Liu, et al. 2019. For replies, see Baron & Jost 2019; Ditto, Clark, et al. 2019.
27. Stanovich 2020, 2021.
28. Gampa, Wojcik, et al. 2019.
29. Kahan, Hoffman, et al. 2012.
30. Kahan, Peters, et al. 2012.
31. Stanovich 2020, 2021.
32. Hierarchical vs. egalitarian and libertarian vs. communitarian: Kahan 2013 and other references in note 39 below. Throne-and-altar vs. Enlightenment, tribal vs. cosmopolitan: Pinker 2018, chaps. 21, 23. Tragic vs. utopian: Pinker 2002/2016, chap. 16; Sowell 1987. Honor vs. dignity: Pinker 2011, chap. 3; Campbell & Manning 2018; Pinker 2012. Binding vs. individualizing: Haidt 2012.
33. Finkel, Bail, et al. 2020.
34. Finkel, Bail, et al. 2020; Wilkinson 2019.
35. Baron & Jost 2019.
36. The epigraph to Sowell 1995.
37. Ditto, Clark, et al. 2019. Doozies from each side: Pinker 2018, pp. 363–66.
38. Mercier 2020, pp. 191–97.
39. Kahan 2013; Kahan, Peters, et al. 2017; Kahan, Wittlin, et al. 2011.
40. Mercier 2020, chap. 10. Mercier quoted the Google review in a guest lecture in my class on rationality, Mar. 5, 2020.
41. Mercier 2020; Sperber 1997.
42. Abelson 1986.
43. Henrich, Heine, & Norenzayan 2010.
44. Coyne 2015; Dawkins 2006; Dennett 2006; Harris 2005. See R. Goldstein 2010 for a fictionalized debate.
45. Jenkins 2020.
46. BBC News 2020.
47. Baumard & Boyer 2013; Hood 2009; Pinker 1997/2009, chaps. 5, 8; Shermer 1997, 2011.
48. Bloom 2004.
49. Gelman 2005; Hood 2009.
50. Kelemen & Rosset 2009.
51. Rauch 2021; Shtulman 2017; Sloman & Fernbach 2017.
52. See the magazines Skeptical Inquirer (http://www.csicop.org/si) and Skeptic (http://www.skeptic.com/), and the Center for Inquiry (https://centerforinquiry.org/) for regular updates on pseudoscience in mainstream media.
53. Acerbi 2019.
54. Thompson 2020.
55. Mercier 2020; Shermer 2020c; van Prooijen & van Vugt 2018.
56. Pinker 2011, chap. 2; Chagnon 1997.
57. van Prooijen & van Vugt 2018.
58. Mercier 2020, chap. 10.
59. Dawkins 1976/2016.
60. Friesen, Campbell, & Kay 2015.
61. Moore 2005; Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life 2009.
62. Kahan 2015; Kahan, Wittlin, et al. 2011.
63. Nyhan & Reifler 2019; Pennycook & Rand 2020a; Wood & Porter 2019.
64. Baron 2019; Pennycook, Cheyne, et al. 2020; Sá, West, & Stanovich 1999; Tetlock & Gardner 2015.
65. Like most pithy quotes, apocryphally; credit probably should go to fellow economist Paul Samuelson: https://quoteinvestigator.com/2011/07/22/keynes-change-mind/.
66. Pennycook, Cheyne, et al. 2020. The first three items were added to the Active Open-Mindedness test by Sá, West, & Stanovich 1999.
67. Pennycook, Cheyne, et al. 2020. For similar findings, see Erceg, Galić, & Bubić 2019; Stanovich 2012. Pennycook, Cheyne, et al. 2020, Stanovich, West, & Toplak 2016, and Stanovich & Toplak 2019 point out that some of these correlations may be inflated by the term “belief” in the openness questionnaire, which respondents may have interpreted as “religious belief.” When the word “opinion” is used, the correlations are lower, but still significant.
68. Global trends in political and social beliefs: Welzel 2013; Pinker 2018, chap. 15.
69. Pennycook, Cheyne, et al. 2012; Stanovich 2012; Stanovich, West, & Toplak 2016. Cognitive Reflection Test: Frederick 2005. See also Maymin & Langer 2021, in which it is connected to mindfulness.
70. Pennycook, Cheyne, et al. 2012; Pennycook & Rand 2020b.
71. Cognitive immune system: Norman 2021.
72. Caplan 2017; Chivers 2019; Raemon 2017.
73. “Party of stupid” has been attributed to the former Republican governor of Louisiana Bobby Jindal, though he himself said “stupid party.” Critiques from within the conservative movement, pre-Trump: M. K. Lewis 2016; Mann & Ornstein 2012/2016; Sykes 2017. Post-Trump: Saldin & Teles 2020; see also The Lincoln Project, https://lincolnproject.us/.
74. Quoted in Rauch 2018.
75. Mercier 2020.
76. Lane 2021.
77. Rauch 2018, 2021; Sloman & Fernbach 2017.
78. Trust in science steady: American Academy of Arts and Sciences 2018. Trust in academia sinking: Jones 2018.
79. Flaherty 2020. For other examples, see Kors & Silverglate 1998; Lukianoff 2012; Lukianoff & Haidt 2018; and the Heterodox Academy (https://heterodoxacademy.org/), the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (https://www.thefire.org/), and Quillette magazine (https://quillette.com/).
80. Haidt 2016.
81. American Academy of Arts and Sciences 2018.
82. Nyhan 2013; Nyhan & Reifler 2012.
83. Willingham 2007.
84. Bond 2009; Hoffrage, Lindsey, et al. 2000; Lilienfeld, Ammirati, & Landfield 2009; Mellers, Ungar, et al. 2014; Morewedge, Yoon, et al. 2015; Willingham 2007.
85. Kahan, Wittlin, et al. 2011; Stanovich 2021.
86. Ellickson 1991; Ridley 1997.
87. Rauch 2021; Sloman & Fernbach 2017.
88. Eisenstein 2012.
89. Kräenbring, Monzon Penza, et al. 2014.
90. See “Wikipedia: List of policies and guidelines,” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:List_of_policies_and_guidelines, and “Wikipedia: Five pillars,” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Five_pillars.
91. Social media reform: Fox 2020; Lyttleton 2020. Some early analyses: Pennycook, Cannon, & Rand 2018; Pennycook & Rand 2020a.
92. Joyner 2011; Tetlock 2015.
93. Pinker 2018, pp. 380–81.
94. Elster 1998; Fishkin 2011.
95. Mercier & Sperber 2011.
1. Singer 1981/2011, p. 88.
2. For a trenchant analysis of “conflict versus mistake” as drivers of human progress, see Alexander 2018.
3. These examples are discussed in chapters 4–9; see also Stanovich 2018; Stanovich, West, & Toplak 2016.
4. Stanovich 2018.
5. http://whatstheharm.net/index.html. Many of his examples are backed by scientific reports, listed in http://whatstheharm.net/scientificstudies.html. Farley stopped maintaining the site around 2009, but sporadically reports examples in his Twitter feed @WhatsTheHarm, https://twitter.com/whatstheharm.
6. Bruine de Bruin, Parker, & Fischhoff 2007.
7. Ritchie 2015.
8. Bruine de Bruin, Parker, & Fischhoff 2007. See also Parker, Bruine de Bruin, et al. 2018 for an eleven-year follow-up, and Toplak, West, & Stanovich 2017 for similar results. In 2020, the economist Mattie Toma and I replicated the result in a survey of 157 Harvard students taking my Rationality course (Toma 2020).
9. Pinker 2011; Pinker 2018. Related conclusions: Kenny 2011; Norberg 2016; Ridley 2010; and the websites Our World in Data (https://ourworldindata.org/) and Human Progress (https://www.humanprogress.org/).
10. Roser, Ortiz-Ospina, & Ritchie 2013, accessed Dec. 8, 2020; Pinker 2018, chaps. 5, 6.
11. Pinker 2018, chap. 7.
12. Roser 2016, accessed Dec. 8, 2020; Pinker 2018, chap. 8.
13. Pinker 2011, chaps. 5, 6; Pinker 2018, chap. 11. Related conclusions: J. Goldstein 2011; Mueller 2021; Payne 2004.
14. Road map to solving the climate crisis: Goldstein-Rose 2020.
15. Pinker 2011, chaps. 4, 7; Pinker 2018, chap. 15. Related conclusions: Appiah 2010; Grayling 2007; Hunt 2007; Payne 2004; Shermer 2015; Singer 1981/2011.
16. Alexander 2018.
17. Pinker 2011, chap. 4; see also Appiah 2010; Grayling 2007; Hunt 2007; Payne 2004.
18. Welzel 2013, p. 122; see Pinker 2018, p. 228 and note 45, and pp. 233–35 and note 8.
19. Concerning Heretics, Whether They Are to Be Persecuted, quoted in Grayling 2007, pp. 53–54.
20. Mueller 2021.
21. Erasmus 1517/2017.
22. Beccaria 1764/2010; my blend of two translations.
23. Pinker 2018, pp. 211–13.
24. Bentham & Crompton 1785/1978.
25. Bentham 1789, chap. 19.
26. Singer 1981/2011.
27. Davis 1984.
28. Locke 1689/2015, 2nd treatise, chap. VI, sect. 61.
29. Locke 1689/2015, 2nd treatise, chap. IV, sect 22.
30. Astell 1730/2010.
31. Wollstonecraft 1792/1995.
32. Douglass 1852/1999.