I took a general primer on human biases (“Psychology of Critical Thinking”) at a local university in high school, which overall had an enormously beneficial effect on my thinking.
Thinking, Fast and Slow is the most comprehensive popular book I’ve read which covers that territory, and wins points for describing in detail the experiments that Kahneman and Tversky used to reach their various conclusions. My understanding is that most of Kahneman and Tversky’s results have held up, but not everything the book discusses has replicated well- many of the results it describes on priming are questionable.
Might be worth complementing with some of Ben Goldacre’s books (e.g. Bad Science or I Think You’ll Find It’s A Bit More Complicated Than That) for very object-level critiques of research (and especially research reporting in the press and the UK government) or Atul Gawande’s The Checklist Manifesto for descriptions of how to systematically avoid human errors when doing complicated tasks.
I’d second Thinking, Fast and Slow.
I took a general primer on human biases (“Psychology of Critical Thinking”) at a local university in high school, which overall had an enormously beneficial effect on my thinking.
Thinking, Fast and Slow is the most comprehensive popular book I’ve read which covers that territory, and wins points for describing in detail the experiments that Kahneman and Tversky used to reach their various conclusions. My understanding is that most of Kahneman and Tversky’s results have held up, but not everything the book discusses has replicated well- many of the results it describes on priming are questionable.
Might be worth complementing with some of Ben Goldacre’s books (e.g. Bad Science or I Think You’ll Find It’s A Bit More Complicated Than That) for very object-level critiques of research (and especially research reporting in the press and the UK government) or Atul Gawande’s The Checklist Manifesto for descriptions of how to systematically avoid human errors when doing complicated tasks.