Richard Nisbett

[kaysixteen]

Anyone familiar with and care to evaluate the work of the U Mich psychologist Richard Nisbett?

[spork]

Wilson, Timothy de Camp, and Richard E. Nisbett (1978) "The Accuracy of Verbal Reports About the Effects of Stimuli on Evaluations and Behavior," Social Psychology 41(2):118-131.

[Hibush]

Wilson, Timothy de Camp, and Richard E. Nisbett (1978) "The Accuracy of Verbal Reports About the Effects of Stimuli on Evaluations and Behavior," Social Psychology 41(2):118-131.

Is your sig a commentary on this paper in particular?

[Puget]

He's a respected social-cognitive psychologist,  but I'm sort of at a loss as to why a non-psychologist would be asking about him?

[downer]

He's a respected social-cognitive psychologist,  but I'm sort of at a loss as to why a non-psychologist would be asking about him?

He has written more popular books, including Culture Of Honor: The Psychology Of Violence In The South and The Geography of Thought: How Asians and Westerners Think Differently...and Why. And his work has been influential outside of psychology. Malcolm Gladwell has a blurb crediting Nisbett as his biggest influence.

[kaysixteen]

I am interested in critical thinking, and logical thinking, and pedagogical approaches to these things.   I have taught these strategies in bibliographic instruction and reading strategies classes and hope to do so again.   So I read things like Nisbett.   I read his Western vs Asian thinking book some weeks back and found it insightful.   I am now slogging my way through his 'Mindset" (subtitle escapes me) which is explicitly billed as a way to increase one's critical thinking and reasoning skills.  It is pretty solid scholarship, though IMO it is not well-written, for nonspecialists (this is a mass-market book, but is written more like a scholarly-audience-themed one).   I confess as a classicist I have never had a stats class (not that classicists should use statistical arguments, which are generally inappropriate in humanities and history), but the stats stuff in the book reveals my ignorance greatly.   I also am only somewhat poorly self-taught at formal logic.   My knowledge of Eastern dialectical reasoning is similarly rather lame.   But I am eager to know more, and thus to be able to teach the young'uns.   Perhaps such training, if it really does become more normative, will be able to engender less national susceptibility to moronism and esp nowadays covidioticy.

[Puget]

I am interested in critical thinking, and logical thinking, and pedagogical approaches to these things.   I have taught these strategies in bibliographic instruction and reading strategies classes and hope to do so again.   So I read things like Nisbett.   I read his Western vs Asian thinking book some weeks back and found it insightful.   I am now slogging my way through his 'Mindset" (subtitle escapes me) which is explicitly billed as a way to increase one's critical thinking and reasoning skills.  It is pretty solid scholarship, though IMO it is not well-written, for nonspecialists (this is a mass-market book, but is written more like a scholarly-audience-themed one).   I confess as a classicist I have never had a stats class (not that classicists should use statistical arguments, which are generally inappropriate in humanities and history), but the stats stuff in the book reveals my ignorance greatly.   I also am only somewhat poorly self-taught at formal logic.   My knowledge of Eastern dialectical reasoning is similarly rather lame.   But I am eager to know more, and thus to be able to teach the young'uns.   Perhaps such training, if it really does become more normative, will be able to engender less national susceptibility to moronism and esp nowadays covidioticy.

Ah, OK that makes sense. I wasn't aware of his popular audience books, as I generally don't read them in my own field. At any rate, I'd say you are in better hands with a serious scholar even when they don't quite have writing for a general audience down vs. someone like Gladwell, who is too slick by half and not an actual expert.

I do think a basic understanding of probability and elementary statistics is vital to understanding our world. You might like Nate Silver's The Signal and Noise for an accessible introduction to real-world probability and statistics. You may also like Kahneman's Thinking, Fast and Slow.

[downer]

It seems that there's hardly a big name psychology prof who hasn't written a trade book aiming to read a wide readership. And I think that's great.

[kaysixteen]

Random thoughts:

1) You are right-- it is a good thing that serious scholars like Nisbett write popular books to share their scholarly insights with the masses.   But I am not exactly the masses, having a humanities PhD, and I find the book, as I noted, a 'slog'.   How can people like Nisbett be trained to write, ahem, better, for nonspecialists?   Would taking on a professional coauthor be a good idea?

2) Kahnemann is an author I have been meaning to read.   Nisbett quotes him often and favorably in the book I am reading, and Kahnemann writes a good review blurb for it as well.  That said, a question for the STEMites here-- how does someone whose weakest academic subject was always math, and who has not taken a math class, or even a class requiring math usage, for, oh, let's say 35 years, approach learning enough stats and probability stuff to read books like Nisbett's more profitably, without suffering brain buzz?

[spork]

Charles Wheelan, Naked Statistics, W.W. Norton, 2013.

Thinking, Fast and Slow is non-mathy. Same for Tversky and Kahneman's journal articles.

[FishProf]

Statistics for Terrified Biologists is mathy-er, but I've used it as a get up to speed for the Master's students coming from non-bio (or insufficiently mathy bio) in my experimental; design class.

[Puget]

Random thoughts:

1) You are right-- it is a good thing that serious scholars like Nisbett write popular books to share their scholarly insights with the masses.   But I am not exactly the masses, having a humanities PhD, and I find the book, as I noted, a 'slog'.   How can people like Nisbett be trained to write, ahem, better, for nonspecialists?   Would taking on a professional coauthor be a good idea?

2) Kahnemann is an author I have been meaning to read.   Nisbett quotes him often and favorably in the book I am reading, and Kahnemann writes a good review blurb for it as well.  That said, a question for the STEMites here-- how does someone whose weakest academic subject was always math, and who has not taken a math class, or even a class requiring math usage, for, oh, let's say 35 years, approach learning enough stats and probability stuff to read books like Nisbett's more profitably, without suffering brain buzz?

1. The skill of translating complex science for the public is a rare one-- I'm sure it can be acquired, but the incentive is not there for most scientists. When academic scientists write these kind of books it is generally toward the end of their careers. Teaming up with a professional writer would probably be helpful in most cases.

2. Kahneman's public writing is very accessible and not at all mathy- You'll do fine with Thinking, Fast and Slow. You really don't need much math to conceptually understand basic probability and statistics -- it requires reasoning quantitatively, but most of the actual math is just arithmetic, and you don't even have to do the computations yourself to understand it conceptually.

[OneMoreYear]

Thanks Kay for starting the thread and for those who have offered book recommendations.
I'm teaching Statistics for Terrified Basketweavers this Spring and now I've got some more books to look though.

[kaysixteen]

Nisbett, in this book I have just now finished, 'Mindware' does delve into the dual issues of 1) how to do stats and use them and 2) how to avoid bad errors and fallacies associated with stats use.   That said, I am much more interested in expanding my knowledge of the latter, since, well, we know that 99 44/100% of stats quoted publicly are either a) false/ made up, and/or b) greatly misused by the author, leading to bad errors in the reader.