In this revealing pop take on the mind and society, Harvard psychologist Pinker (The Better Angels of Our Nature) investigates the nature of straight-thinking and the many ways it goes crooked. He lays out the basics of formal logic, probability, and statistics, and dissects common fallacies that violate them. The "argument from authority," for example, takes pronouncements by "experts" as unquestionable gospel, while "availability bias" makes people falsely believe that nuclear accidents that garner huge news coverage are more dangerous than less-covered coal-fired power plants, and the Texas sharpshooter fallacy--drawing a bulls-eye around a bullet hole after one shoots at a barn--is widespread as a way of passing off random data points as accurate predictions. Pinker skewers all manner of misguided thinking, myths, and "cockamamie conspiracy theories" across the ideological spectrum, from the Stop-the-Steal right to the "left-wing monoculture" that makes universities "laughingstocks for their assaults on common sense." He manages to be scrupulously rigorous yet steadily accessible and entertaining whether probing the rationality of Andrew Yang's presidential platform, Dilbert cartoons, or Yiddish proverbs. The result is both a celebration of humans' ability to make things better with careful thinking and a penetrating rebuke to muddleheadedness. (Sept.)

Much-published psychologist Pinker looks at the not-so-common roots of common-sensical thinking. Rationality, writes the author, "emerges from a community of reasoners who spot each other's fallacies." In other words, it has a social dimension, and it invites good company in order to wrestle with big problems such as climate change. Unfortunately, "among our fiercest problems today is convincing people to accept the solutions when we do find them." That's because so many people are so--well, irrational, or at least encumbered by bad habits of thinking and presuppositions. Discussing beliefs in ghosts and haunted houses, the author wryly points out that 5% more people believe in the latter than in the former, which means "that some people believe in houses haunted by ghosts without believing in ghosts." Rationality is not the same thing as logic, Pinker argues, though there are points in common. Along the way, he examines the differences between propensity and probability, the maddening habit of falling victim to confirmation bias (believing what we want to believe and never mind contrary evidence), the workings of the conjunction rule (by which we conflate suppositions about people and events based on little or no factuality), and our tendency to mistake coincidence for pattern. Pinker serves up plenty of mental exercises that are intended to help us overcome the tricks our minds play on us--e.g., Prisoner's Dilemma game-theoretic scenarios that help expose the reasons so many people are content to be "free riders" in using public goods; or stupid conspiracy theories advanced by people who believe they're being suppressed, which, as Pinker notes, is "not the strategy you see from dissidents in undeniably repressive regimes like North Korea or Saudi Arabia." The author can be heady and geeky, but seldom to the point that his discussions shade off into inaccessibility. A reader-friendly primer in better thinking through the cultivation of that rarest of rarities: a sound argument. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.