Today I was thinking about one of my all-time favorite books: How We Know What Isn't So: The Fallibility of Human Reason in Everyday Life by Thomas Gilovich (Free Press, 1991). He looks at why/how even highly educated, smart people use events to justify their beliefs in the validity of things that are highly questionable -- or demonstrably false.
I highly recommend it: After I showed it to a management professor friend of mine, she was so pleased with the book that her department incorporated it into some of their coursework.
Gilovich provides excellent examples of our bad behavior, including biased uses of inconsistent data (a/k/a seeing only what we want to see) and misperception of random events (such as believing that a basketball player has a "hot hand"). No book of this sort would be complete without a discussion of the research by Tversky and Kahneman, and the author does not disappoint.
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