How We Know What Isn't So

Thomas Gilovich examines why people come to believe things that are not true. Drawing on cognitive and social psychology, he walks through the everyday reasoning errors that lead us astray: seeing order in random sequences, reading too much into small samples, remembering confirming evidence while forgetting the rest, and accepting claims that fit what we already expect. He looks at how these errors play out in gambling, in beliefs about alternative medicine, and in the way secondhand stories distort as they spread. Rather than treating false beliefs as failures of intelligence, Gilovich shows them as natural products of how human reasoning works, and he offers ways to guard against them.