Everyday Irrationality
Madness, Motivation, Mothers, and more: A review of Robyn Dawes' "Everyday Irrationality: How Pseudoscientists, Lunatics, and the Rest of Us Systematically Fail to Think Rationally"
By PT Staff published July 1, 2001 - last reviewed on June 9, 2016
Robyn Dawes, Ph.D., professor of psychology at Carnegie Mellon University, is an expert on irrational thinking. Here he argues that such thinking is an everyday occurrence, the result of our failure to make appropriate comparisons. "We do not automatically think in a rational way," he complains and argues convincingly that this has important consequences in politics, medicine, research, family life and many other arenas. Some readers may find his analysis of the irrational difficult, but all will find it rational.