Professor and psychologist Woo-kyoung Ahn has written an amazing book about how humans think. My review copy had eight chapters that cover the following biases: Fluency, Confirmation Bias, Causal Attribution, Examples, Negativity Bias, Biased Interpretation, Perspective-Taking, and Delayed Gratification. Each chapter gives a definition, some examples, some complications, and strategies for counteracting the effects of the bias. Each chapter flows into the next, and as this isn’t a long book, readers will tear through it. I found each chapter to be fascinating, and I could probably write an essay on each chapter and what I learned from it. Reading about all these biases in a row could be daunting and potentially sad. But instead, I found myself chuckling and nodding along with Ahn’s writing. I easily saw myself in the pages of her book. Instead of seeing how poor my own thinking was, I saw how entirely human I am. Ahn’s book connected me to people in a way that I wasn’t prepared for. I had picked this book up to learn why other people think the way they do, but instead, I found my gaze turned upon myself. And my mental health is all the better for it.

As an example of what readers will experience in the book, let’s look at the first chapter: The Fluency Effect. The Fluency Effect gives us overconfidence. It makes us think we’ve got skill or knowledge that we don’t have. Think of the Dunning-Kruger effect. This happens to all of us. For me, I watched several YouTube clips of bakers making bread. It looked easy enough. So, I tried it. My first bread was basically a cracker. It was thin and crunchy instead of puffy and soft. It was my third bake before I got something that looked right. It was my fifth one that I was actually proud of. On that first attempt, I suffered from the fluency effect. Simply because I watched a video doesn’t mean I had the skills or experience to perform like the video. This is the fluency effect. Woo-kyoung Ahn suggests trying things out to determine your skill level, but she also describes pitfalls associated with making attempts. Ahn discusses the planning fallacy and how it plays into life. She even tells how it builds into conspiracy theories.

Ahn’s chapters give similar detail to the above paragraph. She even breaks down some biases, like Causal Attribution, into cues that influence the conclusions we draw. For example, in Causal Attribution, she says the cues of similarity, sufficiency and necessity, recency, and controllability all effect the causes we attribute to certain actions. But she does more than just classify and define. She gives numerous examples to make her lessons concrete, and the lessons are interesting. One thing you learn writing is that the specific detail is more relatable than the universal. This means that readers are more able to relate to specific details, like saying a blue, porcelain vase instead of simply vase. Or a man with bushy gray mustache, wrinkled forehead, and gray locks of hair in his face paint a better picture than simply old man. Ahn uses this well; her examples are specific and targeted to each lesson she’s giving us. The examples in each chapter are what make this book so useful to me and why I recommend it for anyone. Her years of experience teaching come through the page, and it’s clear that she’s a very good teacher.