Talks & Entertainment

World-renowned social psychologist Richard Nisbett (whom Malcolm Gladwell calls “the most influential thinker in my life”) has spent his career observing and studying people making bad decisions based on the information at hand. Whether consuming news, buying a product, or deciding whom to hire, we often base our choices on the wrong factors without even realizing it. We’re overly influenced by anecdotal evidence, we have difficulty correctly identifying relationships between events, and we generate theories about the world with abandon.

With Mindware: Tools for Smart Thinking, Nisbett offers over 100 concepts, principles, and rules developed by scientists in fields including psychology, economics, statistics, logic, and philosophy. Full of real-world examples, Nisbett explains the wisdom of important concepts of microeconomics and decision theory, the basic principles of the scientific method as they apply to understanding everyday problems, and the basic concepts of if-then logic.

Nisbett has been awarded the Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award of the American Psychology Association and is the author of The Geography of Thought and Intelligence and How to Get It.

In conversation with Malcolm Gladwell, a staff writer at The New Yorker and the best-selling author of The Tipping Point, Blink, Outliers, What the Dog Saw, and David and Goliath. Book signing to follow.