A provocative, timely analysis that asks: What does science tells us about the bias that poisons our politics?We don’t live in a ‘post-truth’ society—but a ‘myside’ society in which no one can agree on accepted truth and facts.In The Bias That Divides Us, psychologist Keith Stanovich argues provocatively that we don’t live in a post-truth society, as has been claimed, but rather a myside society. Our problem is not that we are unab...

How to assess critical aspects of cognitive functioning that are not measured by IQ tests: rational thinking skills.Why are we surprised when smart people act foolishly? Smart people do foolish things all the time. Misjudgments and bad decisions by highly educated bankers and money managers, for example, brought us the financial crisis of 2008. Smart people do foolish things because intelligence is not the same as the capacity for rational thinking. The Rationa...

Critics of intelligence tests—writers such as Robert Sternberg, Howard Gardner, and Daniel Goleman—have argued in recent years that these tests neglect important qualities such as emotion, empathy, and interpersonal skills. However, such critiques imply that though intelligence tests may miss certain key noncognitive areas, they encompass most of what is important in the cognitive domain. In this book, Keith E. Stanovich challenges this widely held assumption.Stanovich shows that IQ tes...

Integrating a decade-long program of empirical research with current cognitive theory, this book demonstrates that psychological research has profound implications for current debates about what it means to be rational. The author brings new evidence to bear on these issues by demonstrating that patterns of individual differences--largely ignored in disputes about human rationality--have strong implications for explanations of the gap between normative and descriptive models of human behav...

How they changed the world, and how they can change it again.This is the best book on philosophy I have ever read, and I have four master's degrees. —Philip van Heusen for Readers' FavoriteFor better or worse, Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle engineered the Western mind.Above all, they formed part of a movement that stood at the crossroads of mythological and scientific-rational thought, at the crossroads of mythos and logos....

ONE OF BARACK OBAMA'S RECOMMENDED BOOKS ON AI * FINANCIAL TIMES BEST BOOKS OF 2023From Dr. Fei-Fei Li, one of TIME's 100 MOST INFLUENTIAL in AI, comes "a powerful plea for keeping humanity at the centre of our latest technological transformation" (Financial Times).Wired called Dr. Fei-Fei Li “one of a tiny group of scientists—a group perhaps small enough to fit around a kitchen table—who are responsible f...

How the meaningless process of natural selection produces purposeful beings who find meaning in the world . . .“A challenging though rewarding exploration of the meaning and purpose of life” that blends evolutionary biology and philosophy (Kirkus Reviews).Evolutionary biologist David Haig explains how a physical world of matter in motion gave rise to a living world of purpose and meaning. Natural selection, a process without purpos...

“A delightful compendium of the kind of facts you immediately want to share with anyone you encounter . . . . Simon Winchester has firmly earned his place in history . . . as a promulgator of knowledge of every variety, perhaps the last of the famous explorers who crisscrossed the now-vanished British Empire and reported what they found to an astonished world.” — New York TimesFrom the creation of the first encyclopedia to Wikipedia, from ancient m...

This funny, "extraordinary and thought-provoking" (The Wall Street Journal) book asks whether we are in fact the superior species. As it turns out, the truth is stranger—and far more interesting—than we have been led to believe.If Nietzsche Were a Narwhal overturns everything we thought we knew about human intelligence, and asks the question: would humans be better off as narwhals? Or some other, less brainy species? There’s a good argument to be ...

Case studies, personal accounts, and analysis show how to recognize and combat pseudoscience in our post-truth, fake news world.“ . . . an invaluable volume that examines the cognitive biases that lead to pseudoscience, the history of pseudoscience, and the reasons for its wide acceptance.” —Science-Based MedicineIn a post-truth, fake news world, we are particularly susceptible to the claims of pseudoscience. When emotions and opin...

A landmark account of the neurobiological basis of language—arguing that species-specific brain differences may be at the root of the human capacity for language.Language makes us human. It is an intrinsic part of us, although we seldom think about it. Language is also an extremely complex entity with subcomponents responsible for its phonological, syntactic, and semantic aspects. In this landmark work, Angela Friederici offers a comprehensive account of these subc...

From the author of Bowling Alone and Our Kids, a “sweeping yet remarkably accessible” (The Wall Street Journal) analysis of social capital, civic engagement, and American democracy that “offers superb, often counterintuitive insights” (The New York Times) to demonstrate how we have gone from an individualistic “I” society to a more communitarian “We” society and then back again, and how we can learn from that experience to become a stronger more ...