Thomas Dashiff Gilovich is an American psychologist who is the Irene Blecker Rosenfeld Professor of Psychology at Cornell University. He has conducted research in social psychology, decision making, and behavioral economics, and has written popular books on these subjects. Gilovich has collaborated with Daniel Kahneman, Richard Nisbett, Lee Ross and Amos Tversky. His articles in peer-reviewed journals on subjects such as cognitive biases have been widely cited. In addition, Gilovich has been quoted in the media on subjects ranging from the effect of purchases on happiness to people's most common regrets, to perceptions of people and social groups. Gilovich is a fellow of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry.
Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking (2005) is Malcolm Gladwell's second book. It presents in popular science format research from psychology and behavioral economics on the adaptive unconscious: mental processes that work rapidly and automatically from relatively little information. It considers both the strengths of the adaptive unconscious, for example in expert judgment, and its pitfalls, such as prejudice and stereotypes.
The adaptive unconscious, first coined by social psychologist Daniel Wegner in 2002, is described as a set of mental processes that is able to affect judgement and decision-making, but is out of reach of the conscious mind. It is thought to be adaptive as it helps to keep the organism alive. Architecturally, the adaptive unconscious is said to be unreachable because it is buried in an unknown part of the brain. This type of thinking evolved earlier than the conscious mind, enabling the mind to transform information and think in ways that enhance an organism's survival. It can be described as a quick sizing up of the world which interprets information and decides how to act very quickly and outside the conscious view. The adaptive unconscious is active in everyday activities such as learning new material, detecting patterns, and filtering information. It is also characterized by being unconscious, unintentional, uncontrollable, and efficient without requiring cognitive tools. Lacking the need for cognitive tools does not make the adaptive unconscious any less useful than the conscious mind as the adaptive unconscious allows for processes like memory formation, physical balancing, language, learning, and some emotional and personalities processes that includes judgement, decision making, impression formation, evaluations, and goal pursuing. Despite being useful, the series of processes of the adaptive unconscious will not always result in accurate or correct decisions by the organism. The adaptive unconscious is affected by things like emotional reaction, estimations, and experience and is thus inclined to stereotyping and schema which can lead to inaccuracy in decision making. The adaptive conscious does however help decision making to eliminate cognitive biases such as prejudice because of its lack of cognitive tools.
Regret is the emotion of wishing one had made a different decision in the past, because the consequences of the decision one did make were unfavorable.
Mind Quiz, also known as Mind Quiz: Exercise Your Brain or Mind Quiz: Your Brain Coach, is a mental training game for the Nintendo DS and PlayStation Portable. It is similar to Nintendo's Brain Age: Train Your Brain in Minutes a Day! It involves playing different training exercises to measure and improve particular parts of the player's brain, such as one's brain age and its brain stress degree.
One way of thinking holds that the mental process of decision-making is rational: a formal process based on optimizing utility. Rational thinking and decision-making does not leave much room for strong emotions. In fact, emotions are often considered irrational occurrences that may distort reasoning.
The Emotion Machine: Commonsense Thinking, Artificial Intelligence, and the Future of the Human Mind is a 2006 book by cognitive scientist Marvin Minsky that elaborates and expands on Minsky's ideas as presented in his earlier book Society of Mind (1986).
Jonah Richard Lehrer is an American author and blogger. Lehrer studied neuroscience at Columbia University and was a Rhodes Scholar. Thereafter, he built a media career that integrated science and humanities content to address broad aspects of human behaviour. Between 2007 and 2012 Lehrer published three non-fiction books that became best-sellers, and also wrote regularly for The New Yorker and Wired.com.
Proust Was a Neuroscientist is a non-fiction book written by Jonah Lehrer, first published in 2007. In it, Lehrer argues that many 20th and 21st-century discoveries of neuroscience are actually re-discoveries of insights made earlier by various artists, including Gertrude Stein, Walt Whitman, Paul Cézanne, Igor Stravinsky, and, as alluded to in the title, Marcel Proust.
Tablet is a conservative online magazine focused on Jewish news and culture. The magazine was founded in 2009 and is supported by the Nextbook foundation. Its editor-in-chief is Alana Newhouse.
Michael Christopher Moynihan is an American journalist, former National Correspondent for Vice News and co-host of The Fifth Column podcast. He was previously the cultural news editor for The Daily Beast, the managing editor of Vice magazine, and a senior editor of the libertarian magazine Reason. He currently (2024) produces content for The Free Press.
Thinking, Fast and Slow is a 2011 popular science book by psychologist Daniel Kahneman. The book's main thesis is a differentiation between two modes of thought: "System 1" is fast, instinctive and emotional; "System 2" is slower, more deliberative, and more logical.
Daniel T. Willingham is a psychologist at the University of Virginia, where he is a professor in the Department of Psychology. Willingham's research focuses on the application of findings from cognitive psychology and neuroscience to K–12 education.
Imagine: How Creativity Works is the third non-fiction book by Jonah Lehrer, published in 2012. It explores brain science, and creativity and its social aspects. By July 2012, the book had been recalled by its publisher due to factual inaccuracies.
The Signal is a 2014 American science fiction thriller film directed by William Eubank, written by William and Carlyle Eubank and David Frigerio, and starring Brenton Thwaites and Laurence Fishburne. It premiered at the 2014 Sundance Film Festival, and was theatrically released in the United States on June 13, 2014.
Jonah Berger is a professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, an author, and a viral marketer. He has published over 50 articles in academic journals, and has written for The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and Harvard Business Review. More than a million copies of his books Contagious: Why Things Catch On, Invisible Influence: The Hidden Forces that Shape Behavior, and The Catalyst: How to Change Anyone's Mind are in print in over 35 countries.
Baba Shiv grew up in India and is an American marketing professor and an expert in the area of neuroeconomics. He is the Sanwa Bank, Limited, Professor of Marketing at Stanford Graduate School of Business, Stanford University. His work has been featured in The Tonight Show with Jay Leno, CNN, Fox Business, Financial Times, The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal. Shiv received his PhD from Duke University.
Mastermind: How to Think Like Sherlock Holmes, released January 3, 2013, is a book written by Maria Konnikova exploring ways to improve mindfulness, logical thinking and observation using Arthur Conan Doyle's fictional character Sherlock Holmes as an exemplar. Konnikova intertwines her analysis of Holmes's "habits of mind" with findings from the modern-day fields of neuroscience and psychology and offers advice on how to become a more rational thinker.
Farsighted: How We Make the Decisions That Matter the Most (2018) is a nonfiction book by American journalist Steven Johnson.
Thomas L. Griffiths is an Australian academic who is the Henry R. Luce Professor of Information Technology, Consciousness, and Culture at Princeton University. He studies human decision-making and its connection to problem-solving methods in computation. His book with Brian Christian, Algorithms to Live By: The Computer Science of Human Decisions, was named one of the "Best Books of 2016" by MIT Technology Review.
