This topic is a fun one to read about because i feel like it makes you a better person. Reading books to increase knowledge and wellbeing is not always easy but its good.

This book will make you question your assumptions and thinking about everything... Surprisingly interesting and entertaining, Ahn uses all types of examples (experiments, studies, real-world situations) to outline common logic fallacies and to help you think more critically about your beliefs, choices, behaviors, what you hear and see - pretty much everything.

Thinking 101: How to Reason Better to Live Better was written by Woo-kyoung Ahn, and the audiobook is narrated by Lessa Lamb. Psychologist Woo-kyoung Ahn devised a course at Yale called “Thinking” to help students examine the biases that cause so many problems in their daily lives. It quickly became one of the university’s most popular courses. Now, for the first time, Ahn presents key insights from her years of teaching and research in a book for everyone. She shows how “thinking problems” stand behind a wide range of challenges, from common, self-inflicted daily aggravations to our most pressing societal issues and inequities. Throughout, Ahn draws on decades of research from other cognitive psychologists, as well as from her own groundbreaking studies. And she presents it all in a compellingly accessible style that uses fun examples from pop culture, anecdotes from her own life, and illuminating stories from history and the headlines.

Thinking 101 is a engaging and well written book that gets readers, or listeners, to think about how they think and why it makes a difference in our lives. Simple thought processes, like giving more weight to a negative than a positive and our reliance on cognitive biases even when we think we are better than that have a huge effect on so many of our choices, big and small. I found the information to be accessible, and the connections to the authors life and various scientific studies brought everything together and made it more concrete and easier to relate to. I think any reader looking to improve how they think about and interact with the world will be able to get a great deal out of the read. I think owning a printed or digital copy of the text would be great, because there are definitely parts of the book that I know I could stand to revisit and be reminded of on occasion.

I always enjoy learning about fallacies, biases and other traps into which our minds fall. This book expanded on concepts that were familiar to me, as well as new ones that I wasn’t aware of. My problem with it is its heavy political content. The author is very smart, she has a PhD and is a Yale professor, she studies cognitive psychology so, if I don’t agree with her, there’s clearly something wrong with my thinking. And I didn’t change my mind, even after following her advice and looking at my opinions from different viewpoints. I wish that her examples had been more generic, like when she discusses capital punishment. I really can’t tell what her position is, because she doesn’t say so, she just discusses experiments conducted on people with different ideas and their results. I also enjoyed the more benign examples, such as moonwalking, or traffic lights. I really liked Lessa Lamb’s narration because she sounds friendly and not judgmental, which belied most of the content here. It just seems like the author is out to prove that whoever doesn’t think exactly like her is, well, wrong. Readers with progressive ideas will feel vindicated. Anyone else will feel stupid. Sorry, this was just not for me.
I chose to listen to this audiobook and all opinions in this review are my own and completely unbiased. Thank you, #NetGalley/#Macmillan Audio!