Thinking for Decision Makers

Mastermind: How to Think Like Sherlock Holmes by Maria Konnikova is an excellent read in what I call the genre of popular psychology/cognitive knowledge/critical thinking. Konnikova cites and credits many other thinkers and provides bibliography for these interrelated fields.

Here Konnikova, as did Arthur Conan Doyle before her, uses Holmes as the cool, detached, mindful thinker, almost all of the time, and Watson, as the emotional, more impulsive, “observer.”

Konnikova identifies many human shortcomings and errors or non-mindful ways of thinking.  Echoing Sherlock Holmes, she tells us to ask whether something is truly impossible or merely unlikely.

Some of the concepts Mastermind delves into, often in the context of the stories of Sherlock Holmes, are: correspondence bias, availability heuristics, the habitual mindset, attentional blindness, filtering ability, the effect of the sense of smell, omission neglect, creativity and imagination, functional fixedness, the need for closure and our inner storyteller, probabilistic reasoning, memory and witness unreliability, the misinformation effect, and confirmation bias.

There is much to pay attention to in this book.  It would be a crime not to.