Home > How We Know What Isn’t So Summary & Study Guide

How We Know What Isn’t So (Magill Book Reviews)

At a glance:

  • Author: Thomas Gilovich
  • First Published: 1991
  • Type of Work: Psychology
  • Genres: Nonfiction, Psychology

There’s an enormous gulf between the way we reason in everyday life and the formal study of reasoning and argument, as anyone who has taken an introductory logic course can attest. Recently, cognitive scientists from various disciplines have taken an increased interest in this gap. Studies such as Deanna Kuhn’s THE SKILLS OF ARGUMENT, published by Cambridge University Press in 1991, explore the processes by which people construct arguments and form judgments outside the boundaries of the classroom.

Thomas Gilovich, a professor of psychology who has studied commmon cognitive errors, had the good idea to make the fruits of this research accessible to the general reader. The result is HOW WE KNOW WHAT ISN’T SO, a book conceived along the lines of John Allen Paulos’ best-seller INNUMERACY.

Unfortunately, Gilovich’s book largely fails to fulfill its promise. The problems are many, including an unsure sense of audience (Gilovich sometimes adopts a primer style, while at other times he assumes a more sophisticated audience) and a failure to define clearly the scope of his project. Indeed, the bland pontifications in the introduction—“Thinking straight about the world is a precious and difficult process that must be carefully nurtured”—may drive some readers away before they’ve ever really started.

Gilovich begins his first chapter with what he considers to be a prime example of flawed thinking: the widespread belief in the “hot hand” in basketball. To make the hypothesis of the hot hand testable, Gilovich turns it into the proposition that when a player makes a shot, he is more likely to make the next shot. A statistical study of shots taken by a team over a long period indicates that the outcome of a shot has no predictable influence on the outcome of the next shot; therefore, Gilovich concludes, the hot hand is a myth.

In fact, however, Gilovich merely has demonstrated that he doesn’t understand the meaning of the hot hand. Many shots, whether missed or made— shots close to the basket, for example—would not apply to the hot hand, which refers to a heightened sense of rhythm, a sense of being locked in on the basket, analogous to that which a “hot” hitter temporarily enjoys in baseball.

It is ironic that Gilovich’s book is itself so seriously flawed; some readers will see in that failure a lesson about hubris that many social and behavioral scientists would do well to heed.