critical thinking best books

The 17 Best Books on Critical Thinking (to Read in 2024)

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The aim of improving your skill of critical thinking isn’t just to be able to reason and give logical arguments about a subject skillfully; your goal is to get to the right answer, to make the right decisions and choices for yourself and others.

Critical thinking helps you:

First , improve the quality of your decisions and judgments, and reevaluate your beliefs objectively.

The human mind is rarely objective. However, mastering the skill of critical thinking keeps your mind objective, at least about those things based on facts.

Take for example the beliefs you have about yourself; Some are based on facts, some on subjective (negative) opinions of others.

Second , become an independent thinker (learn to think for yourself); take ownership of your values, beliefs, judgments, and decisions.

Mastering critical thinking is essential , especially in our modern times, because you must:

• Make a tone of decisions every day;
• Think and come to the right conclusion fast;
• Solve (mostly alone) your problems and issues;
• Weigh carefully facts and information you receive from the dozens of sources you have at your disposal;
• Reevaluate your strategies, beliefs, and habits periodically.

Critical thinking is a skill that you must learn; you’re not born with it. To make your journey a little easier, we’ve gathered the best critical thinking books so you can learn from the masters. Get inspired to become a critical thinker in no time!

The best books on critical thinking:

Table of Contents

1. Critical Thinking: A Beginner’s Guide to Critical Thinking, Better Decision Making, and Problem Solving – Jennifer Wilson

2. wait, what: and life’s other essential questions- james e. ryan, 3. think smarter: critical thinking to improve problem-solving and decision-making skills – michael kallet, 4. brain power: learn to improve your thinking skills – karl albrecht, 5. the art of thinking clearly – rolf dobelli, 6. being logical: a guide to good thinking – d.q. mcinerny, 7. predictably irrational, revised and expanded edition: the hidden forces that shape our decisions – dr. dan ariely, 8. a more beautiful question: the power of inquiry to spark breakthrough ideas – warren berger, 9. a rulebook for arguments – anthony weston, 10. thinking, fast and slow – daniel kahneman, 11. the organized mind: thinking straight in the age of information overload – daniel j. levitin, 12. don’t believe everything you think: the 6 basic mistakes we make in thinking – thomas e. kida, 13. the decision book: 50 models for strategic thinking – mikael krogerus, roman tschäppeler, philip earnhart, jenny piening, 14. weaponized lies: how to think critically in the post-truth era – daniel j. levitin, 15. the demon-haunted world: science as a candle in the dark paperback – carl sagan, ann druyan, 16. how to think about weird things: critical thinking for a new age – theodore schick, lewis vaughn, 17. the 5 elements of effective thinking – edward b. burger, michael starbird.

As the title says, this book introduces you to the art of critical thinking. You’ll discover in it:

• What is critical thinking in practice,
• The different thought processes of critical thinking,
• How will your life be better mastering critical thinking,
• The things your brain needs to enjoy exercising critical thinking,
• Techniques you can use for solving problems,
• How to become a better decision maker, Strategies to use in your critical thinking processes,
• Ways to make good decisions when more people (not just you) are involved,
• Tips to frame your questions in order to maximize the efficiency of your critical thinking.

Wisdom comes from observation, learning, practice, and asking the right questions.

Using examples from history, politics, and his own personal life, James e Ryan shows you the importance of knowing how to:

• Ask questions and gain a better understanding,
• Get to be more curious,
• Push yourself to take action,
• Make your relationship stronger,
• And stay focused on the important things in life.

Related:  Critical Thinking Examples

The book starts with the five fundamental questions:

• Couldn’t we at least…?
• How can I help…?
• What truly matters….?

Knowing how to formulate, address, and deliver the right questions doesn’t leave room for misunderstandings, misinterpretations; asking the wrong questions will most probably give you a wrong answer.

This book (Wait, What?: And Life’s Other Essential Questions) will make you feel (more) courageous; after all, asking questions thanks courage. Asking yourself and others the right questions helps you make informed decisions and decisive action.

This book is a guide on how to train your brain to work even more for you. The author (Michael Kallet) is a critical thinking trainer and coach and gives you a practical set of tools and techniques for critical thinking in your day-to-day life and business.

If you want a clear, actionable step by step program to:

• Improve your critical thinking skills,
• A better understanding of complex problems and concepts,
• And how to put them in practice, then this book is for you.

Learn how to discover the real issues that need a solution, so you don’t waste your time in trying to solve imaginary problems. Increase your mental toughness, useful and productive thought.

In this book, Karl Albrecht shows you how to:

• Build your mental strength,
• Think more clearly logically and creative,
• Improve your memory,
• Solve problems,
• Make decisions more effectively.

Karl Albrecht talks in this book about the six functional abilities you need to have and become more adaptable and an innovative thinker.

The book is packed with practical exercises, fascinating illustrations, games, and puzzles to improve your mental capabilities.

The art of thinking Clearly by Rolf Dobelli is a window into human psychology and reasoning; how we:

• Make decisions;
• Evaluate choices and options;
• Develop cognitive biases.

This book helps you notice and recognize erroneous thinking and make better choices and decisions, change unwanted behaviors and habits.

It will change the way you think about yourself and life in general because you have in this book 99 short chapters with examples of the most common errors of judgment and how to rectify them.

If you wish to think more clearly, make better decisions and choices, reevaluate your biases, and feel better about yourself, this book is for you.

When you decide you want to study the field of logic more closely and improve your critical thinking, this book might be exactly what you need. It’s written clearly and concisely laying out for you the basic building blocks of logic and critical thinking.

The ancient civilizations understood better than us how important is to study logic and rhetoric. With the help of this book, you’ll bring back into your life these essential things that our modern society forgot and missed to teach you as a child.

Having increased logical thinking doesn’t mean to ignore your emotions. It means to start from your emotions and together, (emotions and logic) to take better decisions and see more clearly your choices to move forward in life.

“Predictably Irrational, The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions” is a book packed with examples of how:

• Irrational are our choices;
• We make decisions on impulse;
• We fool ourselves with optimism- “that must work for me.”

The author presents you, in this book, a large number of mental traps and flawed tendencies which can make your life harder.

After reading this book, you’ll be better informed about a variety of human flaws and how to avoid being trapped by irrational thinking. You’ll be better prepared to make decisions and choices based more on facts rather than subjective personal opinions.

Knowing how to ask the right questions is determining your success about many things in your life:

• Influencing others,
• Getting out of tricky situations,
• Reevaluating your beliefs,
• Offering yourself and others compassion,
• Overcoming mistakes and fears.

Warren Berger shows you in this book examples of people who are successful (partially) because they are experts in asking questions and don’t have preconceived ideas about what the answers should be.

This book helps you avoid wasting your innovative and brilliant ideas by presenting them in the same way over and over and getting nowhere over and over.

Asking yourself (and others) the right questions gives you the opportunity to display your ideas in a way that those around you feel compelled to listen.

This book is impressive because, Anthony Weston gives you a lot of excellent and practical advice, ordered in a logical and clear manner.

The examples in this book are realistic and useful, ranging from deductive to oral arguments, from argumentative essays to arguments by analogy.

Once you read this book you’ll want to have it on hand to sort out all sorts of situations you’ll encounter in your day-to-day life.

Daniel Kahneman, the author of this book, is a renowned psychologist and winner of the Nobel Prize in economics.

In this book, you will discover where you can and cannot trust your intuition; how to use the two systems that drive the way you think.

The first system is fast, intuitive, and emotional; the second system is slower, based on facts, and more logical.

The author argues that knowing how to use these two systems can make a huge difference in how you:

• Design your strategies,
• Predict consequences,
• Avoid cognitive biases,
• (and even simple things like) choosing the colors for your home office.

If you want to improve your critical thinking, know when you should use logic (instead of using emotions), and become mentally stronger this book is definitely for you.

Critical thinking can’t be created in a cluttered mind. It’s like trying to prepare a gourmet meal for your loved ones in a cramped and dysfunctional kitchen.

As if is not enough all the information you store in your mind from what you personally experience every day, our modern times forcefully adds to that information a lot of junk.

The book “The Organized Mind: Thinking Straight in the Age of Information Overload” by Daniel J. Levitin will help you sort out and organized your thoughts with the help of the four components in the human attentional system:

• Mind wandering mode;
• Central executive mode;
• Attentional filter;
• Attentional switch.

The book is showing you how you can improve your critical thinking and make better decisions concerning many areas of your life.

This book can (really) change your life if you’re dealing with procrastination, multitasking, the inability to switch off and block the outside world.

All in all, you’ll be better prepared to think straight in the age of information overload.

Thomas E. Kida talks in this book very elegantly about the six basic mistakes your thinking can make.

• The first mistake is being mesmerized by stories and ignoring the facts or statistics.
• The second mistake is searching to confirm what we already know or believe.
• The third mistake is to discount the role that chance and coincidence play in our life.
• The fourth mistake is believing that what you see it’s always the reality.
• The fifth mistake is to oversimplify things.
• The sixth mistake is to believe (trust) faulty memories.

This book can be for you an eye-opener into critical thinking, accepting who you are as you are, and improving the way you choose and make decisions.

Did you know you have a strategy for everything you do? From brushing your teeth to making new friends? From choosing a career to dealing with difficult people?

Considering you have a strategy for everything you do, it’s only logical the try to improve every day the way you develop your strategies and don’t leave it to chance, habit, or convenience.

“The Decision Book: 50 Models for Strategic Thinking” can improve your critical thinking and help you make your life easier and more enjoyable.

This book is interactive and provokes you to think about some of the strategies that don’t bring you the results you want.

It contains 58 illustrations offering summaries for known strategies such as the Rubber Band Model, the Personal Performance Model, and the Black Swan Model.

This book is for you if you want to improve the flexibility of your thinking, accept challenges more comfortable, feel more in control of your decisions and choices.

From this book, by Daniel Levitin, you’ll learn how to think critically and avoid being manipulated by things like misleading statistics and graphics, extreme view, or fake news.

The book contains three main sections:

• Evaluating numbers – how to read statistics and data to find out what lurks underneath and make a more objective analysis
• Evaluating words – how to assess the information you receive from experts, understanding the difference between incidence and prevalence, risk perceptions, and probabilistic thinking
• Evaluating the world – how to interpret scientific methods for different types of reasoning (induction, deduction, abduction)

This book will help you improve your critical thinking providing you with a lot of food for thought.

You know how in a criminal trial they call two experts that have divergent opinions on the same facts? Depending on whose side they are? This book teaches you to see the truth.

Although written in the 1990s, this bestseller book is still relevant in today’s society.

With both intelligence and compassion, Carl Sagan lays out the importance of education, logic, and science. This book will show you a ton of practical skills for assessing arguments, recognizing logical fallacies, and applying the scientific method.

Sagan felt that reason and logic could make the world a better place.

This book contains invaluable instructions on logic and reason using critical thinking, without being dull or difficult to understand.

Schick and Vaughn effectively laid out the key elements on how to assess evidence, sort through reasons, and recognize when a claim is likely to be accurate, making this book an absolute must-read for all students.

If you want to be better at decision-making based on sound evidence and argument, then this book is for you.

If you ever found yourself stuck on a problem, or having trouble in forming new ideas, this book will guide you in finding creative solutions to life’s difficult challenges.

This book emphasizes the value of effective thinking, how it can be mastered, and how to integrate it into everyday life.

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Carmen Jacob

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Philosophy Books

The best books on critical thinking, recommended by nigel warburton.

Thinking from A to Z by Nigel Warburton

Do you know your straw man arguments from your weasel words? Nigel Warburton , Five Books philosophy editor and author of Thinking from A to Z,  selects some of the best books on critical thinking—and explains how they will help us make better-informed decisions and construct more valid arguments.

Interview by Cal Flyn , Deputy Editor

Calling Bullshit: The Art of Skepticism in a Data-Driven World by Carl Bergstrom & Jevin West

Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman

Factfulness: Ten Reasons We're Wrong About The World — And Why Things Are Better Than You Think by Hans Rosling

Black Box Thinking: The Surprising Truth About Success by Matthew Syed

The Art of Thinking Clearly by Rolf Dobelli

Critical Thinking: Your Guide to Effective Argument, Successful Analysis and Independent Study by Tom Chatfield

1 Calling Bullshit: The Art of Skepticism in a Data-Driven World by Carl Bergstrom & Jevin West

2 thinking, fast and slow by daniel kahneman, 3 factfulness: ten reasons we're wrong about the world — and why things are better than you think by hans rosling, 4 black box thinking: the surprising truth about success by matthew syed, 5 the art of thinking clearly by rolf dobelli, 6 critical thinking: your guide to effective argument, successful analysis and independent study by tom chatfield.

I t’s been just over two years since you explained to us what critical thinking is all about. Could you update us on any books that have come out since we first spoke?

Calling Bullshit by Carl Bergstrom and Jevin West started life as a course at the University of Washington. It is a book—a handbook really—written with the conviction that bullshit, particularly the kind that is circulated on the Internet, is damaging democracy , and that misinformation and disinformation can have very serious consequences. Bullshitters don’t care about truth. But truth is important, and this book shows why. It is focussed on examples from science and medicine, but ranges more widely too. It’s a lively read. It covers not just verbal bullshit, bullshit with statistics (particularly in relation to big data) and about causation, but also has a chapter on bullshit data visualisations that distract from the content they are about, or present that data in misleading ways. Like all good books on critical thinking this one includes some discussion of the psychology of being taken in by misleading contributions to public debate.

In How To Make the World Add Up , Tim Harford gives us ten rules for thinking better about numbers, together with a Golden Rule (‘Be curious’). Anyone who has listened to his long-running radio series More or Less will know how brilliant Tim is at explaining number-based claims – as I read it, I hallucinated Tim’s reassuring, sceptical, reasonable, amused, and  patient voice. He draws on a rich and fascinating range of examples to teach us (gently) how not to be taken in by statistics and poorly supported claims. There is some overlap with Calling Bullshit , but they complement each other. Together they provide an excellent training in how not to be bamboozled by data-based claims.

[end of update. The original interview appears below]

___________________________

We’re here to talk about critical thinking. Before we discuss your book recommendations, I wonder if you would first explain: What exactly is critical thinking, and when should we be using it?

There’s a whole cluster of things that go under the label ‘critical thinking’. There’s what you might call formal logic , the most extreme case of abstractions. For example take the syllogism: if all men are mortal, and Socrates is a man, you can deduce from that structure of arguments that Socrates is mortal. You could put anything in the slots of ‘men,’ ‘Socrates,’ ‘mortal’, and whatever you put in, the argument structure remains valid. If the premises are true, the conclusion must be true. That kind of logic, which can be represented using letters and signs rather than words, has its place. Formal logic is a quasi-mathematical (some would say mathematical) subject.

But that’s just one element of critical thinking. Critical thinking is broader, though it encompasses that. In recent years, it’s been very common to include discussion of cognitive biases—the psychological mistakes we make in reasoning and the tendencies we have to think in certain patterns which don’t give us reliably good results. That’s another aspect: focussing on the cognitive biases is a part of what’s sometimes called ‘informal logic’, the sorts of reasoning errors that people make, which can be described as fallacious. They’re not, strictly speaking, logical fallacies, always. Some of them are simply psychological tendencies that give us unreliable results.

The gambler’s fallacy is a famous one: somebody throwing a die that isn’t loaded has thrown it three times without getting a six, and then imagines that, by some kind of law of averages, the fourth time they’re more likely to get a six, because they haven’t yet got one yet. That’s just a bad kind of reasoning, because each time that you roll the dice, the odds are the same: there’s a one in six chance of throwing a six. There’s no cumulative effect and a dice doesn’t have a memory. But we have this tendency, or certainly gamblers often do, to think that somehow the world will even things out and give you a win if you’ve had a series of losses. That’s a kind of informal reasoning error that many of us make, and there are lots of examples like that.

I wrote a little book called Thinking from A to Z which was meant to name and explain a whole series of moves and mistakes in thinking. I included logic, some cognitive biases, some rhetorical moves, and also (for instance) the topic of pseudo-profundity, whereby people make seemingly deep statements that are in fact shallow. The classical example is to give a seeming paradox—to say, for example ‘knowledge is just a kind of ignorance,’ or ‘virtue is only achieved through vice.’ Actually, that’s just a rhetorical trick, and once you see it, you can generate any number of such ‘profundities’. I suppose that would fall under rhetoric, the art of persuasion: persuading people that you are a deeper thinker than you are. Good reasoning isn’t necessarily the best way to persuade somebody of something, and there are many devious tricks that people use within discussion to persuade people of a particular position. The critical thinker is someone who recognises the moves, can anatomise the arguments, and call them to attention.

So, in answer to your question: critical thinking is not just pure logic . It’s a cluster of things. But its aim is to be clear about what is being argued, what follows from the given evidence and arguments, and to detect any cognitive biases or rhetorical moves that may lead us astray.

Many of the terms you define and illustrate in Thinking from A to Z— things like ‘straw man’ arguments and ‘weasel words’—have been creeping into general usage. I see them thrown around on Twitter. Do you think that our increased familiarity with debate, thanks to platforms like Twitter, has improved people’s critical thinking or made it worse?

I think that improving your critical thinking can be quite difficult. But one of the ways of doing it is to have memorable labels, which can describe the kind of move that somebody’s making, or the kind of reasoning error, or the kind of persuasive technique they’re using.

For example, you can step back from a particular case and see that somebody’s using a ‘weak analogy’. Once you’re familiar with the notion of a weak analogy, it’s a term that you can use to draw attention to a comparison between two things which aren’t actually alike in the respects that somebody is implying they are. Then the next move of a critical thinker would be to point out the respects in which this analogy doesn’t hold, and so demonstrate how poor it is at supporting the conclusion provided. Or, to use the example of weasel words—once you know that concept, it’s easier to spot them and to speak about them.

Social media, particularly Twitter, is quite combative. People are often looking for critical angles on things that people have said, and you’re limited in words. I suspect that labels are probably in use there as a form of shorthand. As long as they’re used in a precise way, this can be a good thing. But remember that responding to someone’s argument with ‘that’s a fallacy’, without actually spelling out what sort of fallacy it is supposed to be, is a form of dismissive rhetoric itself.

There are also a huge number of resources online now which allow people to discover definitions of critical thinking terms. When I first wrote Thinking from A to Z , there weren’t the same number of resources available. I wrote it in ‘A to Z’ form, partly just as a fun device that allows for lots of cross references, but partly because I wanted to draw attention to the names of things. Naming the moves is important.

“People seem to get a kick out of the idea of sharing irrelevant features—it might be a birthday or it might be a hometown—with somebody famous. But so what?”

The process of writing the book improved my critical thinking quite a lot, because I had to think more precisely about what particular terms meant and find examples of them that were unambiguous. That was the hardest thing, to find clear-cut examples of the various moves, to illustrate them. I coined some of the names myself: there’s one in there which is called the ‘Van Gogh fallacy,’ which is the pattern of thought when people say: ‘Well, Van Gogh had red hair, was a bit crazy, was left-handed, was born on the 30th of March, and, what do you know, I share all those things’—which I do happen to do—‘and therefore I must be a great genius too.’

I love that. Well, another title that deals with psychological biases is the first critical thinking book that you want to discuss, Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking Fast and Slow . Why did you choose this one?

This is an international bestseller by the Nobel Prize-winning behavioural economist—although he’s principally a psychologist—Daniel Kahneman. He developed research with Amos Tversky, who unfortunately died young. I think it would have been a co-written book otherwise. It’s a brilliant book that summarizes their psychological research on cognitive biases (or its patterns of thinking) which all of us are prone to, which aren’t reliable.

There is a huge amount of detail in the book. It summarizes a lifetime of research—two lifetimes, really. But Kahneman is very clear about the way he describes patterns of thought: as using either ‘System One’ or ‘System Two.’ System One is the fast, intuitive, emotional response to situations where we jump to a conclusion very quickly. You know: 2 + 2 is 4. You don’t think about it.

System Two is more analytical, conscious, slower, methodical, deliberative. A more logical process, which is much more energy consuming. We stop and think. How would you answer 27 × 17? You’d have to think really hard, and do a calculation using the System Two kind of thinking. The problem is that we rely on this System One—this almost instinctive response to situations—and often come out with bad answers as a result. That’s a framework within which a lot of his analysis is set.

I chose this book because it’s a good read, and it’s a book you can keep coming back to—but also because it’s written by a very important researcher in the area. So it’s got the authority of the person who did the actual psychological research. But it’s got some great descriptions of the phenomena he researches, I think. Anchoring, for instance. Do you know about anchoring?

I think so. Is that when you provide an initial example that shapes future responses? Perhaps you’d better explain it.

That’s more or less it. If you present somebody with an arbitrary number, psychologically, most people seem prone when you ask them a question to move in the direction of that number. For instance, there’s an experiment with judges. They were being asked off the cuff: What would be a good sentence for a particular crime, say shoplifting? Maybe they’d say it would be a six-month sentence for a persistent shoplifter.

But if you prime a judge by giving an anchoring number—if you ask, ‘Should the sentence for shoplifting be more than nine months?’ They’re more like to say on average that the sentence should be eight months than they would have been otherwise. And if you say, ‘Should it be punished by a sentence of longer than three months?’ they’re more likely to come down in the area of five , than they would otherwise.

So the way you phrase a question, by introducing these numbers, you give an anchoring effect. It sways people’s thinking towards that number. If you ask people if Gandhi was older than 114 years old when he died, people give a higher answer than if you just asked them: ‘How old was Gandhi when he died?’

I’ve heard this discussed in the context of charity donations. Asking if people will donate, say, £20 a month returns a higher average pledge than asking for £1 a month.

People use this anchoring technique often with selling wine on a list too. If there’s a higher-priced wine for £75, then somehow people are more drawn to one that costs £40 than they would otherwise have been. If  that was the most expensive one on the menu, they wouldn’t have been drawn to the £40 bottle, but just having seen the higher price, they seem to be drawn to a higher number. This phenomenon occurs in many areas.

And there are so many things that Kahneman covers. There’s the sunk cost fallacy, this tendency that we have when we give our energy, or money, or time to a project—we’re very reluctant to stop, even when it’s irrational to carry on. You see this a lot in descriptions of withdrawal from war situations. We say: ‘We’ve given all those people’s lives, all that money, surely we’re not going to stop this campaign now.’ But it might be the rational thing to do. All that money being thrown there, doesn’t mean that throwing more in that direction will get a good result. It seems that we have a fear of future regret that outweighs everything else. This dominates our thinking.

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What Kahneman emphasizes is that System One thinking produces overconfidence based on what’s often an erroneous assessment of a situation. All of us are subject to these cognitive biases, and that they’re extremely difficult to remove. Kahneman’s a deeply pessimistic thinker in some respects; he recognizes that even after years of studying these phenomena he can’t eliminate them from his own thinking. I interviewed him for a podcast once , and said to him: ‘Surely, if you teach people critical thinking, they can get better at eliminating some of these biases.’ He was not optimistic about that. I’m much more optimistic than him. I don’t know whether he had empirical evidence to back that up, about whether studying critical thinking can increase your thinking abilities. But I was surprised how pessimistic he was.

Interesting.

Unlike some of the other authors that we’re going to discuss . . .

Staying on Kahneman for a moment, you mentioned that he’d won a Nobel Prize, not for his research in psychology per se but for his influence on the field of economics . His and Tversky’s ground-breaking work on the irrationality of human behaviour and thinking forms the spine of a new field.

Let’s look at Hans Rosling’s book next, this is Factfulness . What does it tell us about critical thinking?

Rosling was a Swedish statistician and physician, who, amongst other things, gave some very popular TED talks . His book Factfulness , which was published posthumously—his son and daughter-in-law completed the book—is very optimistic, so completely different in tone from Kahneman’s. But he focuses in a similar way on the ways that people make mistakes.

We make mistakes, classically, in being overly pessimistic about things that are changing in the world. In one of Rosling’s examples he asks what percentage of the world population is living on less than $2 a day. People almost always overestimate that number, and also the direction in which things are moving, and the speed in which they’re moving. Actually, in 1966, half of the world’s population was in extreme poverty by that measure, but by 2017 it was only 9%, so there’s been a dramatic reduction in global poverty. But most people don’t realise this because they don’t focus on the facts, and are possibly influenced by what they may have known about the situation in the 1960s.

If people are asked what percentage of children are vaccinated against common diseases, they almost always underestimate it. The correct answer is a very high proportion, something like 80%. Ask people what the life expectancy for every child born today is, the global average, and again they get it wrong. It’s over 70 now, another surprisingly high figure. What Rosling’s done as a statistician is he’s looked carefully at the way the world is.

“Pessimists tend not to notice changes for the better”

People assume that the present is like the past, so when they’ve learnt something about the state of world poverty or they’ve learnt about health, they often neglect to take a second reading and see the direction in which things are moving, and the speed with which things are changing. That’s the message of this book.

It’s an interesting book; it’s very challenging. It may be over-optimistic. But it does have this startling effect on the readers of challenging widely held assumptions, much as Steven Pinker ‘s The Better Angels of Our Nature has done. It’s a plea to look at the empirical data, and not just assume that you know how things are now. But pessimists tend not to notice changes for the better. In many ways, though clearly not in relation to global warming and climate catastrophe, the statistics are actually very good for humanity.

That’s reassuring.

So this is critical thinking of a numerical, statistical kind. It’s a bit different from the more verbally-based critical thinking that I’ve been involved with. I’m really interested to have my my assumptions challenged, and Factfulness is a very readable book. It’s lively and thought-provoking.

Coming back to what you said about formal logic earlier, statistics is another dense subject which needs specialist training. But it’s one that has a lot in common with critical thinking and a lot of people find very difficult—by which I mean, it’s often counter-intuitive.

One of the big problems for an ordinary reader looking at this kind of book is that we are not equipped to judge the reliability of his sources, and so the reliability of the conclusions that he draws. I think we have to take it on trust and authority and hope that, given the division of intellectual labour, there are other statisticians looking at his work and seeing whether he was actually justified in drawing the conclusions that he drew. He made these sorts of public pronouncements for a long time and responded to critics.

But you’re right that there is a problem here. I believe that most people can equip themselves with tools for critical thinking that work in everyday life. They can learn something about cognitive biases; they can learn about reasoning and rhetoric, and I believe that we can put ourselves as members of a democracy in a position where we think critically about the evidence and arguments that are being presented to us, politically and in the press. That should be open to all intelligent people, I think. It is not a particularly onerous task to equip yourself with a basic tools of thinking clearly.

Absolutely. Next you wanted to talk about Five Books alumnus Matthew Syed ‘s Black Box Thinking .

Yes, quite a different book. Matthew Syed is famous as a former international table tennis player, but—most people probably don’t know this—he has a first-class degree in Philosophy, Politics and Economics (PPE) from Oxford as well.

This book is really interesting. It’s an invitation to think differently about failure. The title, Black Box Thinking, comes from the black boxes which are standardly included in every passenger aircraft, so that if an accident occurs there’s a recording of the flight data and a recording of the audio communications as the plane goes down. When there’s a crash, rescuers always aim to recover these two black boxes. The data is then analysed, the causes of the crash, dissected and scrutinized, and the information shared across the aeronautic industry and beyond.

Obviously, everybody wants to avoid aviation disasters because they’re so costly in terms of loss of human life. They undermine trust in the whole industry. There’s almost always some kind of technical or human error that can be identified, and everybody can learn from particular crashes. This is a model of an industry where, when there is a failure, it’s treated as a very significant learning experience, with the result that airline travel has become a very safe form of transport.

This contrasts with some other areas of human endeavour, such as, sadly, much of healthcare, where the information about failures often isn’t widely shared. This can be for a number of reasons: there may be a fear of litigation—so if a surgeon does something unorthodox, or makes a mistake, and somebody as a result doesn’t survive an operation, the details of exactly what happened on the operating table will not be widely shared, typically, because there is this great fear of legal comeback.

The hierarchical aspects of the medical profession may have a part to play here, too. People higher up in the profession are able to keep a closed book, and not share their mistakes with others, because it might be damaging to their careers for people to know about their errors. There has been, historically anyway, a tendency for medical negligence and medical error, to be kept very quiet, kept hidden, hard to investigate.

“You can never fully confirm an empirical hypothesis, but you can refute one by finding a single piece of evidence against it”

What Matthew Syed is arguing is that we need to take a different attitude to failure and see it as the aviation industry does. He’s particularly interested in this being done within the healthcare field, but more broadly too. It’s an idea that’s come partly from his reading of the philosopher Karl Popper, who described how science progresses not by proving theories true, but by trying to disprove them. You can never fully confirm an empirical hypothesis, but you can refute one by finding a single piece of evidence against it. So, in a sense, the failure of the hypothesis is the way by which science progresses: conjecture followed by refutation, not hypothesis followed by confirmation.

As Syed argues, we progress in all kinds of areas is by making mistakes. He was a superb table-tennis player, and he knows that every mistake that he made was a learning experience, at least potentially, a chance to improve. I think you’d find the same attitude among musicians, or in areas where practitioners are very attentive to the mistakes that they make, and how those failures can teach them in a way that allows them to make a leap forward. The book has a whole range of examples, many from industry, about how different ways of thinking about failure can improve the process and the output of particular practices.

When we think of bringing up kids to succeed, and put emphasis on avoiding failure, we may not be helping them develop. Syed’s argument is that we should make failure a more positive experience, rather than treat it as something that’s terrifying, and always to be shied away from. If you’re trying to achieve success, and you think, ‘I have to achieve that by accumulating other successes,’ perhaps that’s the wrong mindset to achieve success at the higher levels. Perhaps you need to think, ‘Okay, I’m going to make some mistakes, how can I learn from this, how can I share these mistakes, and how can other people learn from them too?’

That’s interesting. In fact, just yesterday I was discussing a book by Atul Gawande, the surgeon and New Yorker writer, called The Checklist Manifesto . In that, Gawande also argues that we should draw from the success of aviation, in that case, the checklists that they run through before take-off and so on, and apply it to other fields like medicine. A system like this is aiming to get rid of human error, and I suppose that’s what critical thinking tries to do, too: rid us of the gremlins in machine.

Well, it’s also acknowledging that when you make an error, it can have disastrous consequence. But you don’t eliminate errors just by pretending they didn’t occur. With the Chernobyl disaster , for instance, there was an initial unwillingness to accept the evidence in front of people’s eyes that a disaster had occurred, combined with a fear of being seen to have messed up. There’s that tendency to think that everything’s going well, a kind of cognitive bias towards optimism and a fear of being responsible for error, but it’s also this unwillingness to see that in certain areas, admission of failure and sharing of the knowledge that mistakes have occurred is the best way to minimize failure in the future.

Very Beckettian . “Fail again. Fail better.”

Absolutely. Well, shall we move onto to Rolf Dobelli’s 2013 book, The Art of Thinking Clearly ?

Yes. This is quite a light book in comparison with the others. It’s really a summary of 99 moves in thinking, some of them psychological, some of them logical, some of them social. What I like about it is that he uses lots of examples. Each of the 99 entries is pretty short, and it’s the kind of book you can dip into. I would think it would be very indigestible to read it from cover to cover, but it’s a book to keep going back to.

I included it because it suggests you can you improve your critical thinking by having labels for things, recognising the moves, but also by having examples which are memorable, through which you can learn. This is an unpretentious book. Dobelli doesn’t claim to be an original thinker himself; he’s a summariser of other people’s thoughts. What he’s done is brought lots of different things together in one place.

Just to give a flavour of the book: he’s got a chapter on the paradox of choice that’s three pages long called ‘Less is More,’ and it’s the very simple idea that if you present somebody with too many choices, rather than freeing them and improving their life and making them happier, it wastes a lot of their time, even destroys the quality of their life.

“If you present somebody with too many choices, it wastes a lot of their time”

I saw an example of this the other day in the supermarket. I bumped into a friend who was standing in front of about 20 different types of coffee. The type that he usually buys wasn’t available, and he was just frozen in this inability to make a decision between all the other brands that were in front of him. If there’d only been one or two, he’d have just gone for one of those quickly.

Dobelli here is summarising the work of psychologist Barry Schwartz who concluded that generally, a broader selection leads people to make poorer decisions for themselves. We think going into the world that what we need is more choice, because that’ll allow us to do the thing we want to do, acquire just the right consumable, or whatever. But perhaps just raising that possibility, the increased number of choices will lead us to make poorer choices than if we had fewer to choose between.

Now, that’s the descriptive bit, but at the end of this short summary, he asks ‘So what can you do about this practically?’ His answer is that you should think carefully about what you want before you look at what’s on offer. Write down the things you think you want and stick to them. Don’t let yourself be swayed by further choices. And don’t get caught up in a kind of irrational perfectionism. This is not profound advice, but it’s stimulating. And that’s typical of the book.

You can flip through these entries and you can take them or leave them. It’s a kind of self-help manual.

Oh, I love that. A critical thinking self-help book .

It really is in that self-help genre, and it’s nicely done. He gets in and out in a couple of pages for each of these. I wouldn’t expect this to be on a philosophy reading list or anything like that, but it’s been an international bestseller. It’s a clever book, and I think it’s definitely worth dipping into and coming back to. The author is not claiming that it is the greatest or most original book in the world; rather, it’s just a book that’s going to help you think clearly. That’s the point.

Absolutely. Let’s move to the final title, Tom Chatfield’s Critical Thinking: Your Guide to Effective Argument, Successful Analysis and Independent Study . We had Tom on Five Books many moons ago to discuss books about computer games . This is rather different. What makes it so good?

Well, this is a different kind of book. I was trying to think about somebody reading this interview who wants to improve their thinking. Of the books I’ve discussed, the ones that are most obviously aimed at that are Black Box Thinking , the Dobelli book, and Tom Chatfield’s Critical Thinking . The others are more descriptive or academic. But this book is quite a contrast with the Dobelli’s. The Art of Thinking Clearly is a very short and punchy book, while Tom’s is longer, and more of a textbook. It includes exercises, with summaries in the margins, it’s printed in textbook format. But that shouldn’t put a general reader off, because I think it’s the kind of thing you can work through yourself and dip into.

It’s clearly written and accessible, but it is designed to be used on courses as well. Chatfield teaches a point, then asks you to test yourself to see whether you’ve learnt the moves that he’s described. It’s very wide-ranging: it includes material on cognitive biases as well as more logical moves and arguments. His aim is not simply to help you think better, and to structure arguments better, but also to write better. It’s the kind of book that you might expect a good university to present to the whole first year intake, across a whole array of courses. But I’m including it here more as a recommendation for the autodidact. If you want to learn to think better: here is a course in the form of a book. You can work through this on your own.

It’s a contrast with the other books as well, so that’s part of my reason for putting it in there, so there’s a range of books on this list.

Definitely. I think Five Books readers, almost by definition, tend towards autodidacticism, so this is a perfect book recommendation. And, finally, to close: do you think that critical thinking is something that more people should make an effort to learn? I suppose the lack of it might help to explain the rise of post-truth politics.

It’s actually quite difficult to teach critical thinking in isolation. In the Open University’s philosophy department, when I worked there writing and designing course materials, we decided in the end to teach critical thinking as it arose in teaching other content: by stepping back from time to time to look at the critical thinking moves being made by philosophers, and the critical thinking moves a good student might make in response to them. Pedagogically, that often works much better than attempting to teach critical thinking as a separate subject in isolation.

This approach can work in scientific areas too. A friend of mine has run a successful university course for zoologists on critical thinking, looking at correlation and cause, particular types of rhetoric that are used in write ups and experiments, and so on, but all the time driven by real examples from zoology. If you’ve got some subject matter, and you’ve got examples of people reasoning, and you can step back from it, I think this approach can work very well.

But in answer to your question, I think that having some basic critical thinking skills is a prerequisite of being a good citizen in a democracy . If you are too easily swayed by rhetoric, weak at analysing arguments and the ways that people use evidence, and prone to all kinds of biases that you are unaware of, how can you engage politically? So yes, all of us can improve our critical thinking skills, and I do believe that that is an aspect of living the examined life that Socrates was so keen we all should do.

December 4, 2020

Five Books aims to keep its book recommendations and interviews up to date. If you are the interviewee and would like to update your choice of books (or even just what you say about them) please email us at [email protected]

Nigel Warburton

Nigel Warburton is a freelance philosopher, writer and host of the podcast Philosophy Bites . Featuring short interviews with the world's best philosophers on bite-size topics, the podcast has been downloaded more than 40 million times. He is also our philosophy editor here at Five Books , where he has been interviewing other philosophers about the best books on a range of philosophy topics since 2013 (you can read all the interviews he's done here: not all are about philosophy). In addition, he's recommended books for us on the best introductions to philosophy , the best critical thinking books, as well as some of the key texts to read in the Western canon . His annual recommendations of the best philosophy books of the year are among our most popular interviews on Five Books . As an author, he is best known for his introductory philosophy books, listed below:

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Best Books on Critical Thinking

Dive into the realm of logic and reason with this collection – the most recommended books on critical thinking, curated based on frequent recommendations from leading book blogs and publications..

100 Best Critical Thinking Books of All Time

We've researched and ranked the best critical thinking books in the world, based on recommendations from world experts, sales data, and millions of reader ratings. Learn more

Thinking, Fast and Slow

Kahneman | 5.00

Barack Obama A few months ago, Mr. Obama read “Thinking, Fast and Slow,” by Daniel Kahneman, about how people make decisions — quick, instinctive thinking versus slower, contemplative deliberation. For Mr. Obama, a deliberator in an instinctive business, this may be as instructive as any political science text. (Source)

Bill Gates [On Bill Gates's reading list in 2012.] (Source)

Marc Andreessen Captivating dive into human decision making, marred by inclusion of several/many? psychology studies that fail to replicate. Will stand as a cautionary tale? (Source)

See more recommendations for this book...

Factfulness

Ten Reasons We're Wrong About the World – and Why Things Are Better Than You Think

Hans Rosling, Anna Rosling Rönnlund, Ola Rosling | 4.62

Barack Obama As 2018 draws to a close, I’m continuing a favorite tradition of mine and sharing my year-end lists. It gives me a moment to pause and reflect on the year through the books I found most thought-provoking, inspiring, or just plain loved. It also gives me a chance to highlight talented authors – some who are household names and others who you may not have heard of before. Here’s my best of 2018... (Source)

Bill Gates This was a breakthrough to me. The framework Hans enunciates is one that took me decades of working in global development to create for myself, and I could have never expressed it in such a clear way. I’m going to try to use this model moving forward. (Source)

Nigel Warburton It’s an interesting book, it’s very challenging. It may be over-optimistic. But it does have this startling effect on the readers of challenging widely held assumptions. It’s a plea to look at the empirical data, and not just assume that you know how things are now. (Source)

The Demon-haunted World

Science As a Candle in the Dark

Carl Sagan | 4.54

James Randi First of all, Carl was my very good friend, and we had a lot of confidences over the years. He was the epitome of the scientific mind and the scientific thinker. In The Demon-Haunted World, one of his later books, he investigates pseudoscience, frauds and fakes, and the mistakes that scientists made over the years. It’s very comprehensive. He had a whole chapter devoted to “Carlos” – or Jose... (Source)

Philip Plait He holds your hand and shows you the wonders of science and the universe. The Demon-Haunted World is probably his best book. (Source)

Dallas Campbell @TheChilterns Even if you profoundly disagree with Clarke, it’s very detailed. The classic is of course ‘The Demon Haunted World’ by Carl Sagan. When I’m Prime Minister it will be compulsory reading at school! Best book on what science is/isn’t and why we think the way we do. 👍 (Source)

The Psychology of Persuasion

Robert B. Cialdini | 4.53

Charles T. Munger Robert Cialdini has had a greater impact on my thinking on this topic than any other scientist. (Source)

Dan Ariely It covers a range of ways in which we end up doing things, and how we don’t understand why we’re doing them. (Source)

Max Levchin [Max Levchin recommended this book as an answer to "What business books would you advise young entrepreneurs read?"] (Source)

A Brief History of Humankind

Yuval Noah Harari | 4.52

Richard Branson One example of a book that has helped me to #ReadToLead this year is Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari. While the book came out a few years ago now, I got around to it this year, and am very glad I did. I’ve always been fascinated in what makes humans human, and how people are constantly evolving, changing and growing. The genius of Sapiens is that it takes some daunting,... (Source)

Reid Hoffman A grand theory of humanity. (Source)

Barack Obama eval(ez_write_tag([[250,250],'theceolibrary_com-leader-2','ezslot_7',164,'0','1'])); Fact or fiction, the president knows that reading keeps the mind sharp. He also delved into these non-fiction reads. (Source)

Man's Search for Meaning

Viktor E. Frankl, William J. Winslade, et al. | 4.50

Tony Robbins Another book that I’ve read dozens of times. It taught me that if you change the meaning, you change everything. Meaning equals emotion, and emotion equals life. (Source)

Jimmy Fallon I read it while spending ten days in the ICU of Bellevue hospital trying to reattach my finger from a ring avulsion accident in my kitchen. It talks about the meaning of life, and I believe you come out a better person from reading it. (Source)

Dustin Moskovitz [Dustin Moskovitz recommended this book on Twitter.] (Source)

Predictably Irrational

The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions

Dan Ariely | 4.48

Nick Harkaway Predictably Irrational is an examination of the way in which we make decisions irrationally, and how that irrationality can be predicted. (Source)

Jonah Lehrer Dan Ariely is a very creative guy and was able to take this basic idea, that humans are irrational, and mine it in a million different directions. (Source)

The Black Swan

The Impact of the Highly Improbable

Nassim Nicholas Taleb | 4.48

Jeff Bezos [From the book "The Everything Store: and the Age of Amazon"] “The scholar argues that people are wired to see patterns in chaos while remaining blind to unpredictable events, with massive consequences. Experimentation and empiricism trumps the easy and obvious narrative,” Stone writes. (Source)

James Altucher And throw in “The Black Swan” and “Fooled by Randomness”. “Fragile” means if you hit something might break. “Resilient” means if you hit something, it will stay the same. On my podcast Nassim discusses “Antifragility” – building a system, even on that works for you on a personal level, where you if you harm your self in some way it becomes stronger. That podcast changed my life He discusses... (Source)

Freakonomics

A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything

Stephen J. Levitt, Steven D.; Dubner | 4.45

Malcolm Gladwell I don’t need to say much here. This book invented an entire genre. Economics was never supposed to be this entertaining. (Source)

Daymond John I love newer books like [this book]. (Source)

James Altucher [James Altucher recommended this book on the podcast "The Tim Ferriss Show".] (Source)

How to Read a Book

The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading

Mortimer J. Adler, Charles Van Doren | 4.45

Sergey Brin had “How to Read a Book” by Mortimer J. Adler as one of his most recommended books. (Source)

Ben Chestnut I also love How to Read a Book by Mortimer Adler. I’m teaching its tips to my children while they’re young, so they can consume books much faster and have more fun reading. (Source)

Kevin Systrom [The author's] thesis is that the most important part of reading a book is to actually read the table of contents and familiarize yourself with the major structure of the book. (Source)

Don't have time to read the top Critical Thinking books of all time? Read Shortform summaries.

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The Tipping Point

How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference

Malcolm Gladwell | 4.38

Kevin Rose Bunch of really good information in here on how to make ideas go viral. This could be good to apply to any kind of products or ideas you may have. Definitely, check out The Tipping Point, which is one of my favorites. (Source)

Seth Godin Malcolm Gladwell's breakthrough insight was to focus on the micro-relationships between individuals, which helped organizations realize that it's not about the big ads and the huge charity balls... it's about setting the stage for the buzz to start. (Source)

Andy Stern I think that when we talk about making change, it is much more about macro change, like in policy. This book reminds you that at times when you're building big movements, or trying to elect significant decision-makers in politics, sometimes it's the little things that make a difference. Ever since the book was written, we've become very used to the idea of things going viral unexpectedly and then... (Source)

Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness

Richard H. Thaler | 4.37

Dan Ariely Nudge is a very important book. One of the reasons Nudge is so important is because it’s taking these ideas and applying them to the policy domain. Here are the mistakes we make. Here are the ways marketers are trying to influence us. Here’s the way we might be able to fight back. If policymakers understood these principles, what could they do? The other important thing about the book is that it... (Source)

Eric Ries A pioneer in behavioral economics and just recently awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics, his classic book on how to make better decisions. (Source)

Ryan Holiday This might feel like a weird book to include, but I think it presents another side of strategy that is too often forgotten. It’s not always about bold actors and strategic thrusts. Sometimes strategy is about subtle influence. Sometimes it is framing and small tweaks that change behavior. We can have big aims, but get there with little moves. This book has excellent examples of that kind of... (Source)

Asking the Right Questions

A Guide to Critical Thinking

M. Neil Browne, Stuart M. Keeley | 4.36

Enlightenment Now

The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

Steven Pinker | 4.35

Bill Gates Pinker is at his best when he analyzes historic trends and uses data to put the past into context. I was already familiar with a lot of the information he shares—especially about health and energy—but he understands each subject so deeply that he’s able to articulate his case in a way that feels fresh and new. I love how he’s willing to dive deep into primary data sources and pull out unexpected... (Source)

Yuval Noah Harari There is of course much to argue about, but that’s what makes this book so interesting. (Source)

Sam Harris [Sam Harris picked this book as the first book in his Book Club.] (Source)

The New Psychology of Success

Carol S. Dweck | 4.34

Tony Robbins [Tony Robbins recommended this book on the podcast "The Tim Ferriss Show".] (Source)

Bill Gates One of the reasons I loved Mindset is because it’s solutions-oriented. In the book’s final chapter, Dweck describes the workshop she and her colleagues have developed to shift students from a fixed to a growth mindset. These workshops demonstrate that ‘just learning about the growth mindset can cause a big shift in the way people think about themselves and their lives. (Source)

The Story of Success

Malcolm Gladwell | 4.34

Bill Gates [On Bill Gates's reading list in 2011.] (Source)

James Altucher Gladwell is not the first person to come up with the 10,000 hour rule. Nor is he the first person to document what it takes to become the best in the world at something. But his stories are so great as he explains these deep concepts. How did the Beatles become the best? Why are professional hockey players born in January, February and March? And so on. (Source)

Cat Williams-Treloar The books that I've talked the most about with friends and colleagues over the years are the Malcolm Gladwell series of novels. Glorious stories that mix science, behaviours and insight. You can't go wrong with the "The Tipping Point", "Outliers", "Blink" or "David & Goliath". (Source)

Bad Science

Quacks, Hacks, and Big Pharma Flacks

Ben Goldacre | 4.33

Timothy Ferriss I agree wholeheartedly with a lot of the co-opted science, which people can read a book called Bad Science, which is by a doctor named Ben Goldacre. It’s great. (Source)

Tim Harford This book changed the way I thought about my own writing and it changed the way I thought about the world. It really is one of the best books I have ever read. (Source)

Sarah-Jayne Blakemore It’s just a brilliant book, and he’s a fearless defender of science. (Source)

The Power of Thinking Without Thinking

Malcolm Gladwell | 4.33

Mike Shinoda I know most of the guys in the band read [this book]. (Source)

Marillyn Hewson CEO Marilyn Hewson recommends this book because it helped her to trust her instincts in business. (Source)

A Field Guide to Lies

Critical Thinking with Statistics and the Scientific Method

Daniel J. Levitin | 4.28

The Art of Thinking Clearly

Better Thinking, Better Decision

dobelli rolf | 4.28

Robert Cialdini Dobelli examines our most common decision-making failings with engaging eloquence and describes how to counter them with instructive good sense. (Source)

Nigel Warburton This is an unpretentious book. Dobelli doesn’t claim to be an original thinker himself. He’s a summariser of other people’s thoughts. What he’s done is brought lots of different things together in one place. Each of the 99 entries is pretty short, and it’s the kind of book to dip into. (Source)

Antifragile

Things That Gain from Disorder

Nassim Nicholas Taleb | 4.27

James Altucher You ask about success. To be successful you have to avoid being “fragile” – the idea that if something hurts you, you let collapse completely. You also have to avoid simply being resilient. Bouncing back is not enough. Antifragile is when something tries to hurt you and you come back stronger. That is real life business. That is real life success. Nassim focuses on the economy. But when I read... (Source)

Marvin Liao eval(ez_write_tag([[250,250],'theceolibrary_com-leader-2','ezslot_7',164,'0','1'])); My list would be (besides the ones I mentioned in answer to the previous question) both business & Fiction/Sci-Fi and ones I personally found helpful to myself. The business books explain just exactly how business, work & investing are in reality & how to think properly & differentiate yourself. On... (Source)

Vlad Tenev The general concept is applicable to many fields beyond biology, for instance finance, economics and monetary policy. (Source)

The 5 Elements of Effective Thinking

Edward B. Burger | 4.27

Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me)

Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions, and Hurtful Acts

Mark Haddo | 4.25

Peter Attia A book about cognitive dissonance that looks at common weaknesses and biases in human thinking. Peter wants to ensure he goes through life without being too sure of himeself, and this book helps him to recalibrate. (Source)

Ryan Holiday Cognitive Dissonance is one of the most powerful and delusionary forces in the world. (Source)

David Kramaley When asked what books he would recommend to youngsters interested in his professional path, David mentioned Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me). (Source)

Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

Cal Newport | 4.24

Marvin Liao The Joy of Not Working (Zelinkski), Flash Foresight (Burrus), The Art of Worldly Wisdom (Gracian), Sapiens (Yuval), The End of Jobs (Pearson), Deep Work (Newport), Sovereign Individual (Davidson), The Fourth Economy (Davison) & The Monk & the Riddle (Komisar). Every single one of these books completely changed how I looked at everything in the world & literally pushed my life in a new direction.... (Source)

Daniel Pink As automation and outsourcing reshape the workplace, what new skill do we need? The ability to do deep work. Cal Newport's exciting new book is an introduction and guide to the kind of intense concentration in a distraction-free environment that results in fast, powerful learning and performance. Think of it as calisthenics for your mind-and start your exercise program today. (Source)

Seth Godin Cal Newport is a clear voice in a sea of noise, bringing science and passion in equal measure. (Source)

Guns, Germs and Steel

The Fates of Human Societies

Jared Diamond Ph.D. | 4.24

Bill Gates Fascinating.... Lays a foundation for understanding human history. (Source)

Daniel Ek A brilliant Pulitzer Prize-winning book about how the modern world was formed, analyzing how societies developed differently on different continents. (Source)

Yuval Noah Harari A book of big questions, and big answers. The book turned me from a historian of medieval warfare into a student of humankind. (Source)

A Rulebook for Arguments

Anthony Weston | 4.23

The God Delusion

Richard Dawkins | 4.22

Susan Jacoby Richard Dawkins is very funny. One of the reasons for reading The God Delusion is that it will disabuse you of the idea – which is a common stereotype of atheists – that they are utterly humourless. You hear this over and over again. I’m often invited to college campuses to give lectures, and often they’re religious schools – not fundamentalist schools, but colleges of a historically religious... (Source)

Vote Dem For The Planet @KimBledsoe14 @Goodbye_Jesus @Ian313f There were a lot of rebels and drifters in those days against the repressive regime. They had followers. Have you read “The God Delusion”? Great book. (Source)

Antonio Eram This book was recommended by Antonio when asked for titles he would recommend to young people interested in his career path. (Source)

Fooled by Randomness

The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets

Nassim Nicholas Taleb | 4.22

Howard Marks Really about how much randomness there is in our world. (Source)

Anant Jain The five-book series, "Incerto", by Nassim Nicholas Taleb has had a profound impact on how I think about the world. There’s some overlap across the books — but you'll likely find the repetition helpful in retaining the content better. (Source)

Emotional Intelligence

Why It Can Matter More Than IQ

Daniel Goleman | 4.22

Drew Houston It’s nonfiction, but it spelled out something that I just didn’t know you could kind of break down in a logical way. And, suddenly, I had this understanding about the world that I didn’t have before. (Source)

Sharon Salzberg [Sharon Salzberg recommended this book on the podcast "The Tim Ferriss Show".] (Source)

Roxana Bitoleanu [One of the books recommends to young people interested in her career path.] (Source)

Amusing Ourselves to Death

Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

Neil Postman, Andrew Postman | 4.22

Austin Kleon Earlier this year Postman’s son Andrew wrote an op-ed with the title, “My dad predicted Trump in 1985 — it’s not Orwell, he warned, it’s Brave New World.” Postman wrote: “What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one.” (Source)

Steve Lance Neil Postman took the work of Marshall McLuhan – who was putting out early theories on media – and built on them. However, Postman was far more observant and empirical about the trends occurring in the media landscape. The trends which he identifies in Amusing Ourselves to Death, written in the 1980s, have since all come true. For example, he predicted that if you make news entertaining, then... (Source)

Kara Nortman @andrewchen Also a great book on the topic - Amusing Ourselves to Death https://t.co/yWLBxKumLQ (Source)

You Are Not So Smart

Why You Have Too Many Friends on Facebook, Why Your Memory Is Mostly Fiction, and 46 Other Ways You're Deluding Yourself

David McRaney | 4.21

Jessica Flitter Honestly, almost every major topic that we cover in an introductory social psychology chapter is covered in the book. It makes psychology real: this isn’t something that theoretically exists in the classroom. It exists every single day. That’s why I love this book. (Source)

How Not to Be Wrong

The Power of Mathematical Thinking

Jordan Ellenberg | 4.20

Bill Gates The writing is funny, smooth, and accessible -- not what you might expect from a book about math. What Ellenberg has written is ultimately a love letter to math. If the stories he tells add up to a larger lesson, it’s that 'to do mathematics is to be, at once, touched by fire and bound by reason' -- and that there are ways in which we’re all doing math, all the time. (Source)

Auston Bunsen I’ve got a few, one book that really impacted me early on as someone coming from a middle-class family was “Rich dad, Poor dad”. Since then I’ve read many books but one that really stands out is “How not to be wrong” by Jordan Ellenberg which really reignited my appetite & appreciation for math. (Source)

Nick Ganju Written for an audience of people who have historically been intimidated by math [...] and introduces things in a very simple way, and then works up to more complex concepts. (Source)

"Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!"

Adventures of a Curious Character

Richard P. Feynman, Ralph Leighton, Edward Hutchings, Albert R. Hibbs | 4.19

Sergey Brin Brin told the Academy of Achievement: "Aside from making really big contributions in his own field, he was pretty broad-minded. I remember he had an excerpt where he was explaining how he really wanted to be a Leonardo [da Vinci], an artist and a scientist. I found that pretty inspiring. I think that leads to having a fulfilling life." (Source)

Larry Page Google co-founder has listed this book as one of his favorites. (Source)

Peter Attia The book I’ve recommended most. (Source)

Critical Thinking

Tools for Taking Charge of Your Professional and Personal Life

Richard Paul, Linda Elder | 4.19

How to Think About Weird Things

Critical Thinking for a New Age

Theodore Schick, Lewis Vaughn | 4.19

Stephen Law Carefully and critically, aware of the various cognitive biases to which we are, unfortunately, all very prone. This book explains various fallacies to watch out for; the Slippery Slope, the Straw Man fallacy, the Post Hoc fallacy, and so on. It points out all of the problems that we’ve already looked at so far as anecdotal evidence is concerned. It includes many impressive case studies and... (Source)

The Skeptics' Guide to the Universe

How to Know What's Really Real in a World Increasingly Full of Fake

Steven Novella, Bob Novella - contributor, et al | 4.19

Black Box Thinking

Why Some People Never Learn from Their Mistakes - But Some Do

Matthew Syed | 4.18

Richard Branson [...] highlights the need for a growth mindset in life. It advocates for changing attitudes towards failure, and understanding that the only way we learn is by trying things and altering our behaviour based on the results. It’s an attitude we found incredibly valuable during my highlight of the year, completing the Virgin Strive Challenge. (Source)

Daniel Ek Since reading this book, I’ve literally incorporated this approach to problem-solving into every day. (Source)

Nigel Warburton As Syed argues, we progress in all kinds of areas is by making mistakes. He was a superb table-tennis player, and he knows that every mistake that he made was a learning experience, at least potentially, a chance to improve. I think you’d find the same attitude among musicians, or in areas where practitioners are very attentive to the mistake that they make, and how those failures can teach them... (Source)

How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger - Second Edition with a New Chapter by the Author

Darrell Huff and Irving Gei | 4.17

Bill Gates I picked this one up after seeing it on a Wall Street Journal list of good books for investors. It was first published in 1954, but it doesn’t feel dated (aside from a few anachronistic examples—it has been a long time since bread cost 5 cents a loaf in the United States). In fact, I’d say it’s more relevant than ever. One chapter shows you how visuals can be used to exaggerate trends and give... (Source)

Tobi Lütke We all live in Malcolm’s world because the shipping container has been hugely influential in history. (Source)

Jason Zweig This is a terrific introduction to critical thinking about statistics, for people who haven’t taken a class in statistics. (Source)

A Brief History of Tomorrow

Yuval Noah Harari | 4.16

Richard Branson I certainly wouldn’t consider myself a big reader of paleontology or anthropology – not good words for us dyslexics! – but I enjoy learning about how society has unfolded and history has developed in an exciting, easy to read way. The sequel, Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow, is a fascinating look into the future too. While these aren’t traditional business or leadership books, they are all... (Source)

Bill Gates Harari’s new book is as challenging and readable as Sapiens. Rather than looking back, as Sapiens does, it looks to the future. I don’t agree with everything the author has to say, but he has written a thoughtful look at what may be in store for humanity. (Source)

Vinod Khosla Not that I agree with all of it, but it is still mind-bending speculation about our future as a follow-up to a previous favorite, Sapiens. It’s directionally right. (Source)

Why People Believe Weird Things

Michael Shermer, Stephen Jay Gould | 4.16

Richard Wiseman A wider perspective on the paranormal, looking at UFOs and conspiracies – where people link up ideas which aren’t necessarily connected to one another. (Source)

The Selfish Gene

Richard Dawkins | 4.16

Why are there miles and miles of "unused" DNA within each of our bodies? Why should a bee give up its own chance to reproduce to help raise her sisters and brothers? With a prophet's clarity, Dawkins told us the answers from the perspective of molecules competing for limited space and resources to produce more of their own kind. Drawing fascinating examples from every field of biology, he paved the way for a serious re-evaluation of evolution. He also introduced the concept of self-reproducing ideas, or memes , which (seemingly) use humans exclusively for their propagation. If we are puppets, he says, at least we can try to understand our strings. --Rob Lightner

Charles T. Munger recommends this book in the second edition of Poor Charlie’s Almanack. (Source)

Matt Ridley Turned evolutionary biology on its head and was written like a great detective story. (Source)

Phil Libin Had a profound influence on me pretty early on. (Source)

How We Know What Isn't So

The Fallibility of Human Reason in Everyday Life

Thomas Gilovich | 4.16

Jonah Lehrer A really smart book and the reason I put it on there is that it really invented the genre of science non-fiction. (Source)

Nicholas Epley This is a book about intuitive human judgment and how the way we think about the world can be distorted and misdirected by forces within our own mind, like our tendency to think well of ourselves, by cognitive forces, such as the ease with which information comes to mind, and by environmental forces, like asymmetries in feedback. (Source)

Being Logical

A Guide to Good Thinking

D.Q. McInerny | 4.14

David and Goliath

Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants

Malcolm Gladwell | 4.14

Catalina Penciu Business-wise, my goal for this year is to improve my collection and my mindset, but my favorite so far has been David and Goliath by Malcolm Gladwell. (Source)

Robert Katai Buy Malcolm Gladwell’s book “David and Goliath” and read the interesting stories about how the Davids of that moments have defeated the Goliaths. (Source)

The Signal and the Noise

Why So Many Predictions Fail - But Some Don't

Nate Silver | 4.14

Bill Gates Anyone interested in politics may be attracted to Nate Silver’s The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail—but Some Don't. Silver is the New York Times columnist who got a lot of attention last fall for predicting—accurately, as it turned out–the results of the U.S. presidential election. This book actually came out before the election, though, and it’s about predictions in many... (Source)

The End of Faith

Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason

Sam Harris | 4.13

Evan Carmichael His first book, The End of Faith, spent 33 weeks on The New York Times Best Seller list. He's one of the most sought after speakers in the world. He's Sam Harris and here's my take on his Top 10 Rules for Success! #Believe #EvanCarmichael #SamHarris #entrepreneur #valueyourtime https://t.co/ZL0iUlqCOT (Source)

Dr. Andrew Weil One of the books that I have commonly given out to people. (Source)

Lies My Teacher Told Me

Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong

James W. Loewen | 4.13

Talking to Strangers

What We Should Know about the People We Don't Know

Malcolm Gladwell | 4.13

Ryan Holiday I'll put here what I emailed Malcolm when I finished the book: "Just finished your new book in one sitting yesterday. So good. You are at the height of your powers and remain an inspiration to all of us trying to master an un-masterable profession." It's a little less practical or self-improvement oriented than his previous books, but far more thought provoking. (Source)

Nilofer Merchant An interesting analysis/ essay re Gladwell’s latest book —> https://t.co/5Ey1maNRyI (Source)

God Is Not Great

How Religion Poisons Everything

Christopher Hitchens | 4.13

Sam Harris You can get the benefit of both his voice and his writing if you listen to [this audiobook]. (Source)

Poor Charlie's Almanack

The Wit and Wisdom of Charles T. Munger

Peter D. Kaufman, Ed Wexler, Warren E. Buffett, Charles T. Munger | 4.12

Warren Buffett From 1733 to 1758, Ben Franklin dispensed useful and timeless advice through Poor Richard's Almanack. Among the virtues extolled were thrift, duty, hard work, and simplicity. Subsequently, two centuries went by during which Ben's thoughts on these subjects were regarded as the last word. Then Charlie Munger stepped forth. (Source)

Naval Ravikant I always recommend [this book] as my top business book. (Source)

Think like a Freak

The Authors of Freakonomics Offer to Retrain Your Brain

Steven D. Levitt, Stephen J. Dubner | 4.12

Critical Thinking Skills

Effective Analysis, Argument and Reflection

Stella Cottrell | 4.12

The Invisible Gorilla

And Other Ways Our Intuitions Deceive Us

Christopher Chabris, Daniel Simons | 4.11

Dan Ariely These guys did one of the most important pieces of research in social science, to show how little we actually see in the world around us. (Source)

The Undoing Project

A Friendship That Changed Our Minds

Michael Lewis | 4.11

Doug McMillon Here are some of my favorite reads from 2017. Lots of friends and colleagues send me book suggestions and it's impossible to squeeze them all in. I continue to be super curious about how digital and tech are enabling people to transform our lives but I try to read a good mix of books that apply to a variety of areas and stretch my thinking more broadly. (Source)

David Heinemeier Hansson Michael Lewis is just a great storyteller, and tell a story in this he does. It’s about two Israeli psychologists, their collaboration on the irrationality of the human mind, and the milestones they set with concepts like loss-aversion, endowment effect, and other common quirks that the assumption of rationality doesn’t account for. It’s a bit long-winded, but if you like Lewis’ style, you... (Source)

Francisco Perez Mackenna ​This summer, Mackenna is learning more about the birth of behavioral economics, the psychology of white collar crime, and the restoration of American cities as locations of economic growth. (Source)

The Organized Mind

Thinking Straight in the Age of Information Overload

Daniel J. Levitin | 4.11

David Allen Your head is not designed to remember, remind, prioritize, or manage relationships with more than four things. I’ve known this experientially for the last 35 years—that your head is for having ideas, but it’s a terrible place to hang onto them. Levitin validated that in a very rigorously researched book. (Source)

Your Guide to Effective Argument, Successful Analysis and Independent Study

Tom Chatfield | 4.11

Nigel Warburton Clearly written and accessible. Chatfield teaches a point, then asks you to test yourself to see whether you’ve learnt the moves that he’s described. It’s very wide ranging: it includes material on cognitive biases as well as more logical moves and arguments. (Source)

The Coddling of the American Mind

How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure

Greg Lukianoff, Jonathan Haidt | 4.10

Mark Manson The kids aren’t alright. No, really—I know every generation says that, but this time it’s true. Kids who grew up with smartphones (and have begun to enter the university system) are emotionally stunted, overly fragile, and exhibiting mental health issues at alarming rates. I expected this book to be another, “Let’s all shit on social media together,” party, but it’s not. Social media, of course,... (Source)

Max Levchin Highlights the need to continue to have such discussions about sensitive topics instead of ignoring them for the sake of comfort. (Source)

Glenn Beck Just finished The Coddling of the American mind by @glukianoff Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt. Insightful. Straight forward and very helpful. A book that not only correctly identifies what ails us but also gives practical steps to cure. MUST READ (Source)

Nonviolent Communication

A Language of Life

Marshall B. Rosenberg, Deepak Chopra | 4.10

Satya Nadella Upon becoming CEO, Nadella confronted Microsoft’s legendarily combative culture by urging his new reports to read this book, which preaches the power of empathy, self-awareness, and authenticity in collaboration in the workplace, at home, and beyond. Like many of his favorites, it was first recommended to him by his wife, Anu: “I’m heavily influenced by the books she reads more than the books I... (Source)

Dustin Moskovitz Seek first to understand. (Source)

Esther Perel I think that this book is a classic for anyone who is thinking relationships. (Source)

How to Make Better Decisions

Dan Heath, Chip,Heath | 4.09

Cristian-Dragos Baciu So for business related books, the one that I think had the most impact for me was Decisive: How to make better choices in life and work, by Chip & Dan Heath. [...] The reason I enjoyed their work so much is because they offer real-life stories and insights that makes it so much easier for the reader to imprint that information in his mind. (Source)

Sean Mallon It looks at what hinders great decision making, and how to improve any decisions you make. Any entrepreneur knows how crucial their decisions in business are (and how devastating indecision can be). Decisive helps the reader to understand how good decisions are made, what key elements to look for, and how to make your choices better and quicker. (Source)

Julia Galef Explains four of the biggest judgment errors [...] and gives tips for combating them. (Source)

A More Beautiful Question

The Power of Inquiry to Spark Breakthrough Ideas

Warren Berger | 4.08

21 Lessons for the 21st Century

Yuval Noah Harari | 4.08

Bill Gates Harari is such a stimulating writer that even when I disagreed, I wanted to keep reading and thinking. All three of his books wrestle with some version of the same question: What will give our lives meaning in the decades and centuries ahead? So far, human history has been driven by a desire to live longer, healthier, happier lives. If science is eventually able to give that dream to most people,... (Source)

Brajesh Kumar Singh Harari, currently, the world's best historian and future analyst, is a gay! He is a Jew and writes his books in Hebrew! Got universal acclaim for his first book Sapiens, followed by Homo Deus and now the latest, 21 lessons for the 21st century! Salute to this genius, keep it up! https://t.co/s7R6oEbwiN (Source)

Eh Bee Family @harari_yuval This book is amazing. After every chapter...I pause...then freak out...then gather myself and keep reading. (Source)

Superforecasting

The Art and Science of Prediction

Philip E. Tetlock, Dan Gardner | 4.08

Sheil Kapadia Read the book Superforecasting, had a great conversation with @bcmassey and came up with seven ideas for how NFL teams can try to find small edges during the draft process. Would love to hear feedback on this one. https://t.co/PdN1fKCagl (Source)

Julia Galef [Has] some good advice on how to improve your ability to make accurate predictions. (Source)

The Magic of Reality

How We Know What's Really True

Richard Dawkins | 4.08

Bill Gates Dawkins, an evolutionary biologist at Oxford, has a gift for making science enjoyable. This book is as accessible as the TV series Cosmos is for younger audiences—and as relevant for older audiences. It’s an engaging, well-illustrated science textbook offering compelling answers to big questions, like “how did the universe form?” and “what causes earthquakes?” It’s also a plea for readers of all... (Source)

Vote Dem For The Planet @EJDuboisL7444 @realDonaldTrump It’s a great book, like all Dawkins’ books. (Source)

The Shock Doctrine

The Rise of Disaster Capitalism

Naomi Klein | 4.08

George Monbiot The Shock Doctrine explains some of the mechanisms by which patrimonial capital acquires power and enhances its wealth. It’s a brilliant piece of work, and one of those rare books that changes the way you perceive the world. (Source)

Mat Whitecross It starts with the theory that moments of crisis have been utilised by the right wing in the US and other countries to manipulate people into following their agenda. (Source)

Donna Dickenson Naomi Klein’s argument is that capitalism actually requires deliberately engineered shocks to the economic systems. (Source)

Algorithms to Live By

The Computer Science of Human Decisions

Brian Christian and Tom Griffiths | 4.08

Sriram Krishnan @rabois @nealkhosla Yes! Love that book (Source)

Chris Oliver This is a great book talking about how you can use computer science to help you make decisions in life. How do you know when to make a decision on the perfect house? Car? etc? It helps you apply algorithms to making those decisions optimally without getting lost. (Source)

Judgment Under Uncertainty

Heuristics and biases.

Daniel Kahneman | 4.07

Jonah Lehrer This is one of the most influential books in modern economics. (Source)

Adam Robinson This study should be taught at every business school in the country. (Source)

The Blind Watchmaker

Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe Without Design

Richard Dawkins | 4.06

James Randi They talk about the blind watchmaker not being able to make a watch, but if you’re given an almost infinite number of combinations and permutations of materials and situations, the world will come about. Or it may not. In our case, it came about. You’re here, I’m here, and I’m very happy about that. (Source)

Jerry Coyne If I had to pick just one self-contained book that lays out Dawkins’s philosophy and methodology, and shows his literary skills, I would have to pick this one. (Source)

Tom Clarke Dawkins brought Darwin up to date, explaining evolution in a way that incorporates our understanding of genetics and heredity. (Source)

This Will Make You Smarter

New Scientific Concepts to Improve Your Thinking

John Brockman | 4.06

Think Smarter

Critical Thinking to Improve Problem-Solving and Decision-Making Skills

Michael Kallet | 4.06

The Believing Brain

From Ghosts and Gods to Politics and Conspiracies---How We Construct Beliefs and Reinforce Them as Truths

MICHAEL SHERMER | 4.05

The Shallows

What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains

Nicholas Carr | 4.05

Juliette Aristides Nicholas Carr talks at length about what is gained and lost by technological progress. Reading and writing enlarged people’s sympathetic response and enriched their lives even when the book was put aside. One could say the same thing about drawing. (Source)

Andra Zaharia While I was thinking of the best books to add to this short list, I realized that not even half of them are directly related to digital marketing. This is because I believe that the best marketers are people who understand human nature deeply and aim to bring out the best in it. Call me naive, but that’s how I see it. If I were to want to pursue a career in marketing, I’d read [...] The Shallows. (Source)

How Drug Companies Mislead Doctors and Harm Patients

Ben Goldacre | 4.04

Tools for Smart Thinking

Richard Nisbett | 4.04

The Drunkard's Walk

How Randomness Rules Our Lives

Leonard Mlodinow | 4.03

David Spiegelhalter This is a general introduction to the history of probability and the way it comes into everyday life. It intersperses the historical development with modern applications, and looks at finance, sport, gambling, lotteries and coincidences. (Source)

Gabriel Coarna Leonard Mlodinow's "The Drunkarkd's Walk" -more precisely, the section on the "Monty Hall" problem- totally changed how I look-at/think-about probabilities and choices in general; this has impacted almost every real-life choice I've made since I read this book. (Source)

Don't Believe Everything You Think

The 6 Basic Mistakes We Make in Thinking

Thomas E. Kida | 4.03

What the Dog Saw and Other Adventures

Malcolm Gladwell | 4.03

Sam Freedman @mrianleslie (Also I agree What the Dog Saw is his best book). (Source)

Merchants of Doubt

How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming

Erik M Conway | 4.03

Elon Musk I recommend people read a book called Merchants of Doubt. All they need to do is create doubt. (Source)

Trick or Treatment

The Undeniable Facts about Alternative Medicine

Edzard Ernst, Simon Singh | 4.03

Jennifer Gunter @EdzardErnst @SLSingh Fantastic book. Really. Thank you for writing it!! (Source)

Stephen Law I really like this book. It’s a modern classic of the sceptic movement. Simon Singh is an excellent science writer. Edzard Ernst is the world’s first professor of complementary medicine. Well he was, Ernst is retired now. He started out convinced that there was some truth to the claims made by homeopathy and some other alternative practices. He was trained as a homeopath and he was a practising... (Source)

The Structure of Scientific Revolutions

Thomas S. Kuhn and Ian Hacking | 4.02

Mark Zuckerberg It's a history of science book that explores the question of whether science and technology make consistent forward progress or whether progress comes in bursts related to other social forces. I tend to think that science is a consistent force for good in the world. I think we'd all be better off if we invested more in science and acted on the results of research. I'm excited to explore this... (Source)

Tim O'Reilly The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, by Thomas Kuhn. Kuhn introduced the term "paradigm shift" to describe the changeover from Ptolemaic to Copernican astronomy. But the book is far more than a classic in the history of science. It's also a book that emphasizes how what we already believe shapes what we see, what we allow ourselves to think. I've always tried to separate seeing itself from... (Source)

Andra Zaharia I’ve gone through quite a few experiences brought on or shaped by what I’ve learned from books. A particularly unexpected one happened in college when our public relations teacher asked us to read a book called The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas Kuhn. As a humanities student, you can imagine that I wasn’t thrilled I’d have to read a book on science, but what followed blew my mind... (Source)

The Art of Reasoning

An Introduction to Logic and Critical Thinking

David Kelley | 4.02

How to Change Your Mind

What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence

POLLAN MICHAE | 4.02

Daniel Goleman Michael Pollan masterfully guides us through the highs, lows, and highs again of psychedelic drugs. How to Change Your mind chronicles how it’s been a longer and stranger trip than most any of us knew. (Source)

Yuval Noah Harari Changed my mind, or at least some of the ideas held in my mind. (Source)

David Heinemeier Hansson How we get locked into viewing the world, ourselves, and each other in a certain way, and then finding it difficult to relate to alternative perspectives or seeing other angles. Studying philosophy, psychology, and sociology is a way to break those rigid frames we all build over time. But that’s still all happening at a pretty high level of perception. Mind altering drugs, and especially... (Source)

Seeing Like a State

How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed

Professor James C. Scott | 4.02

Marvin Liao I tend to jump from book to book and may switch if I am interested in some new topic. This is a pleasure for me (which I also do benefit work wise from too). It’s quite a random list because I have eclectic interests (or just scatterbrained most likely) on tech business, AI, general global economy, geopolitics, rising Biotech economy & history. I'm basically 15% to 50% into all these books. (Source)

Venkatesh Rao Scott’s book is very important for anybody who wants to have an understanding of how complex modern societies work, why things seem to fail predictably, and what you can do about them, to a limited extent. (Source)

Clare Lockhart Seeing Like A State. He’s quite similar to Dewey in a way. He also sees the state as only a mechanism. But he thinks that the way that the state chooses to count, or the way it chooses to see, will inform how it behaves and what kind of animal it becomes. Scott explains, for example, how in France, in early modern times, the state decided to count two things. It decided to count how much salt... (Source)

Wait, What?

And Life's Other Essential Questions

James E. Ryan and HarperAudi | 4.02

The Greatest Show on Earth

The Evidence for Evolution

Richard Dawkins, Well-illustrated | 4.02

The Psychology of Intuitive Judgment

Thomas Gilovich, Dale Griffin, Daniel Kahneman | 4.02

Matthew Syed This is another really good set of essays in a rapidly growing branch of intellectual enquiry called behavioural economics where they look at the irrationalities in the way that humans behave. I thought this was brilliant. One essay in particular on irrational optimism caught my eye. It’s the idea that individuals who have slightly inflated expectations of their own abilities tend to persevere... (Source)

The Miniature Guide to Critical Thinking

Concepts and Tools

Richard Paul, Linda Elder | 4.02

This miniature guide, which has sold more than half a million copies, is widely used in teach and learning, in personal and professional life. It distills the essence of critical thinking into a 23-page, pocket-sized guide. It introduces the interrelated complex of critical thinking concepts and principles implicit in the works of Richard Paul and Linda Elder. This guide is widely used at the college level. It can be used as a critical thinking supplement to any textbook or course.

Being Wrong

Adventures in the Margin of Error

Kathryn Schulz | 4.02

Peter Attia One of the books that considers to be an important read for people interested in his career path. (Source)

Fabrice Grinda I have lots of books to recommend, but they are not related to my career path. The only one that is remotely related is Peter Thiel’s Zero to One. That said here are books I would recommend. (Source)

The Portable Atheist

Essential Readings for the Nonbeliever

Christopher Hitchens | 4.02

Thinking in Bets

Making Smarter Decisions When You Don't Have All the Facts

Annie Duke | 4.01

Charles Duhigg Through wonderful storytelling and sly wit, Annie Duke has crafted the ultimate guide to thinking about risk. We can all learn how to make better decisions by learning from someone who made choices for a living, with millions on the line. (Source)

Marc Andreessen Compact guide to probabilistic domains like poker, or venture capital. Best articulation of "resulting", drawing bad conclusions from confusing process and outcome. Recommend for people operating in the real world. (Source)

Seth Godin Brilliant. Buy ten copies and give one to everyone you work with. It's that good. (Source)

Thank You for Arguing

What Aristotle, Lincoln, and Homer Simpson Can Teach Us About the Art of Persuasion

Jay Heinrichs | 4.01

Angela Pham The attendees in the altMBA program actually influenced me the most in my book purchases: Robin Flaherty persuaded me to buy Thank You For Arguing. (Source)

Teaching Critical Thinking

Practical Wisdom

bell hooks | 4.01

Letter to a Christian Nation

Sam Harris | 4.01

Finite and Infinite Games a Vision of Life as Play and Possibility

James P. Carse | 4.01

Jane McGonigal It’s basically a book about games, but then it turns out it’s about the meaning of life. (Source)

Tom Critchlow @fkpxls Also it made me think of analogies to finite and infinite games. Have you read that book? If not you might enjoy it! (Source)

Kevin Kelly Gave me a mathematical framework for my own spirituality. (Source)

Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds

Charles MacKay | 4.01

Jonah Lehrer A wonderful eclectic history of mass human irrationality, and a great history of financial bubbles. (Source)

Tom Joseph "Do you know who I am"- Trump cries a/b his status, Iran & Obama are panic b4 his bubble pops Mania's will end in panic as noted in a favorite book: Extraordinary Popular Delusions & the Madness of Crowds by Charles Mackay. Not a plug-written in 1841 Trumpmania is now Trumpanic https://t.co/WnVGJ8Hung (Source)

John Gapper It’s a very patchy book, but it leads off with three classic financial booms and busts – tulip mania in Holland, the Mississippi scheme in 18th century France, and the South Sea Bubble. MacKay was a journalist with a fine tabloid style, and he writes it all up very entertainingly. He gets the eyewitness quotes and he finds the human foibles. (Source)

Skin in the Game

Hidden Asymmetries in Daily Life

Nassim Nicholas Taleb | 4.01

Ben Horowitz A book about the dynamics of how large-scale, highly random systems behave. (Source)

Marc Andreessen Skin in the game as conflict of interest, or as attaching one's livelihood to one's speech? Who to listen to, and why. Ideal counterpart to Philip Tetlock's Expert Political Judgment. (Source)

Daniel Kahneman Changed my view of how the world works. (Source)

Psychics, ESP, Unicorns, and Other Delusions

James Randi, Isaac Asimov | 4.01

Richard Wiseman This book had a huge impact on me when I first came across it, because it was the first time I’d seen a whole volume which wasn’t taking any nonsense. (Source)

Why Evolution Is True

Jerry A. Coyne | 4.01

An Illustrated Book of Bad Arguments

Ali Almossawi, Alejandro Giraldo | 4.00

Beyond Feelings

Vincent Ruggiero | 4.00

The Power of the Socratic Classroom

Students. Questions. Dialogue. Learning.

Charles Ames Fischer | 4.00

Top 14 Books On Critical Thinking

Here, we’ll explore the best books on critical thinking, becoming better at problem-solving and deciding the difference between fact and fiction.

In a world where data is manipulated constantly to support different agendas, where many people get their news from social media , and where thought processes are hindered by an onslaught of strong opinions backed up by supposed facts, it can be tough to develop the skills of a rock-solid critical thinker.

Thankfully, several bestsellers can help give you the skills you need to confront your cognitive biases in a way that helps you discern between fact and pseudoscience. From helping you make better decisions at home and work to helping you understand social issues from around the world, critical thinking skills are essential when it comes to taking in the barrage of media we’re faced with each day and using the information you gather to make informed decisions in the real world.

Here, we’ll look at the top books on how to think critically and explore what the experts have to say about your cognitive critical thinking toolkit.

Top Books on Critical Thinking

1. thinking, fast and slow by daniel kahneman, 2. bad science by ben goldacre, 3. asking the right questions: a guide to critical thinking by m. neil browne and stuart m. keeley, 4. calling bullshit: the art of skepticism in a data-driven world by carl t. bergstrom, 5. the demon-haunted world: science as a candle in the dark by carl sagan, 6. mistakes were made (but not by me): why we justify foolish beliefs, bad decisions, and hurtful acts by carol tavris and elliot aronson, 7. the art of thinking clearly by rolf dobelli, 8. factfulness: ten reasons we’re wrong about the world – and why things are better than you think by hans rosling, 9. a field guide to lies: critical thinking in the information age by daniel j. levitin, 10. predictably irrational: the hidden forces that shape our decisions by dan ariely, 11. a rulebook for arguments by anthony weston, 12. the 5 elements of effective thinking by edward b. burger, 13. the skeptics’ guide to the universe: how to know what’s really real in a world increasingly full of fake by steven novella, 14. being logical: a guide to good thinking by dennis q. mcinerny.

“A reliable way to make people believe in falsehoods is frequent repetition, because familiarity is not easily distinguished from truth. Authoritarian institutions and marketers have always known this fact.”

This data-driven book explores how the human psyche processes information and uses insights to make valuable suggestions on how to change the way you think to become a better critical thinker. Kahneman shares his research and that of others in the field to show where the human brain shines–and where it falters. Readers can use this information to find where they struggle to make connections in their own lives and how to better interpret the information around them to create a semblance of truth.

• Amazon Kindle Edition
• Kahneman, Daniel (Author)
• English (Publication Language)
• 514 Pages - 10/25/2011 (Publication Date) - Farrar, Straus and Giroux (Publisher)

“And if, by the end [of this book], you reckon you might still disagree with me, then I offer you this: you’ll still be wrong, but you’ll be wrong with a lot more panache and flair than you could possibly manage right now.”

In this book, Goldacre works to help readers determine the difference between real and junk science by activating their critical thinking skills. He infuses humor and fun into his writing, helping readers stay engaged while exploring the fallacies of their current decision-making skills. Readers will find that this research-based book helps them question the ideas they previously accepted as fact while being inspired to search for the absolute truth.

• Audible Audiobook
• Ben Goldacre (Author) - Jonathan Cowley (Narrator)
• 01/13/2012 (Publication Date) - Tantor Audio (Publisher)

“While identifying the conclusion and reasons gives you the basic visible structure, you still need to examine the precise meaning of these parts before you can react fairly to the ideas being presented…Identifying the precise meaning of key words or phrases is an essential step in deciding whether to agree with someone’s opinion. If you fail to check for the meaning of crucial terms and phrases, you may react to an opinion the author never intended.”

This book, which is often required reading for graduate-level courses, provides a step-by-step approach on how to attack serious issues with an open, questioning mind. Readers learn how to get to the root of an author’s opinion and dissect statements in a way that helps them get to the root of the issue in question. This how-to guide is rife with examples that take the reader through the different issues they’ll face as they learn to become a top-notch critical thinker.

• Browne, M. Neil (Author)
• 192 Pages - 01/06/2014 (Publication Date) - Pearson (Publisher)

“To tell an honest story, it is not enough for numbers to be correct. They need to be placed in an appropriate context so that a reader or listener can properly interpret them.”

Professor Carl T. Bergstrom wants readers to know that today’s world is filled with misinformation, and media consumers need critical thinking skills to decide what’s real–and what’s not. Today’s lies are different from the past, and it can be tough to tell what’s a fact when statistics and science are manipulated to support a plan. This book provides readers with the tools necessary to decide what to believe.

• Carl T. Bergstrom (Author) - Patrick Zeller (Narrator)
• 08/04/2020 (Publication Date) - Random House Audio (Publisher)

“One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back.”

In this book, renowned scientist Carl Sagan shares how pseudoscience harms society and discusses how science and spirituality can work hand-in-hand to help readers discover the truth they’re looking for. According to Sagan, increasingly technology-reliant lives lead people to believe anything they hear from a seemingly credible source, and readers must develop the critical thinking tools necessary to distinguish fact from fiction. The Pulitzer Prize-winning author eloquently shares how readers can use critical thinking for the betterment of both their own lives and society as a whole.

• Carl Sagan (Author) - Cary Elwes, Seth MacFarlane (Narrators)
• 05/30/2017 (Publication Date) - Brilliance Audio (Publisher)

“Most people, when directly confronted by evidence that they are wrong, do not change their point of view or course of action but justify it even more tenaciously. Even irrefutable evidence is rarely enough to pierce the mental armor of self-justification.”

It can feel nearly impossible to admit when we do something wrong, especially when trying to do something right. Social psychologists Tavris and Aronson explore precisely what makes it so difficult for people to admit when they’ve made a mistake and how we can use this information to be more honest with ourselves and the people in our lives who matter most. This book teaches readers how to focus on the search for truth rather than how to focus on proving themselves right.

• Carol Tavris (Author) - Carol Tavris, Elliot Aronson (Narrators)
• 05/05/2020 (Publication Date) - Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (Publisher)

“Whether we like it or not, we are puppets of our emotions. We make complex decisions by consulting our feelings, not our thoughts. Against our best intentions, we substitute the question, “What do I think about this?” with “How do I feel about this?” So, smile! Your future depends on it.”

Most people have found themselves acting on their emotions without control, continuing with negative behavioral and relational patterns even though they know it’s not the best idea. In this book, Dobelli tells readers how to find the truth within themselves, using critical thinking to change how we make decisions. For readers who have struggled with irrational thinking and actions, this book provides a clear-cut, research-based framework that explains how to look past the pull of emotion to make the best decisions for yourself and the people around you.

• Rolf Dobelli (Author) - Eric Conger (Narrator)
• 05/14/2013 (Publication Date) - HarperAudio (Publisher)

“I want people, when they realize they have been wrong about the world, to feel not embarrassment, but that childlike sense of wonder, inspiration, and curiosity that I remember from the circus, and that I still get every time I discover I have been wrong: “Wow, how is that even possible?” “

Understanding that we don’t have it all figured out can be the first step toward seeing the world in a new light. In this guide to critical thinking, Rosling invites readers to examine what they’ve taken as fact and to reassess whether the way they see the world is true or based on their own biases. Rosling shares the ten instincts that often determine perspective and how readers can work to stop seeing the world in black and white and instead see the gray that truly exists in most areas.

• Rosling, Hans (Author)
• 341 Pages - 04/03/2018 (Publication Date) - Flatiron Books (Publisher)

“Be wary, though, of the way news media use the word “significant,” because to statisticians it doesn’t mean “noteworthy.” In statistics, the word “significant” means that the results passed mathematical tests such as t-tests, chi-square tests, regression, and principal components analysis (there are hundreds). Statistical significance tests quantify how easily pure chance can explain the results. With a very large number of observations, even small differences that are trivial in magnitude can be beyond what our models of change and randomness can explain. These tests don’t know what’s noteworthy and what’s not—that’s a human judgment.”

Every day, we’re bombarded with media and information that makes it hard to tell what’s real and what information has been twisted to support a political cause or other plans that need our support to thrive. Levitin shares how statistics and other math/science findings are manipulated to support faulty arguments in this book. Levitin teaches readers to take the information they discover in books, news, podcasts, and other media sources and think critically about the facts presented.

• Audio CD – Audiobook
• Levitin, Daniel J. (Author)
• 09/06/2016 (Publication Date) - Penguin Audio (Publisher)

“We usually think of ourselves as sitting in the driver’s seat, with ultimate control over the decisions we made and the direction our life takes; but, alas, this perception has more to do with our desires-with how we want to view ourselves-than with reality.”

This book delves into an exciting facet of human nature: humans can understand what’s rational behavior and what isn’t, but often struggle to make rational choices. Throughout this bestseller, Ariely explains how humans act in times of financial crises and how dire situations cause humans to disregard social norms and instead act in what they believe to be their immediate best interests. The author helps readers understand how understanding irrational and rational behavior can help us better understand our lives and global issues.

• Ariely, Dan (Author)
• 379 Pages - 06/06/2009 (Publication Date) - HarperCollins e-books (Publisher)

“Typically we learn to “argue” by assertion. That is, we tend to start with our conclusions—our desires or opinions—without a whole lot to back them up. And it works, sometimes, at least when we’re very young. What could be better? Real argument, by contrast, takes time and practice. Marshaling our reasons, proportioning our conclusions to the actual evidence, considering objections, and all the rest—these are acquired skills. We have to grow up a little.”

Staying rational and based on facts can be challenging when arguing a point with others, especially if you’re passionate about your point. In this book, Weston works to help readers understand how to present arguments in a way that fuels rational debate and dialogue, using logic and facts to make points rather than relying on opinion-based passion. Weston offers practical tips on arguing effectively and delves into the research that shows how to argue in a way that helps people see your point of view–instead of your stubbornness to hear the other side.

• Weston, Anthony (Author)
• 109 Pages - 02/01/2018 (Publication Date) - Hackett Publishing Company, Inc. (Publisher)

“In everything you do, refine your skills and knowledge about fundamental concepts and simple cases. Once is never enough. As you revisit fundamentals, you will find new insights. It may appear that returning to basics is a step backward and requires additional time and effort; however, by building on firm foundations you will soon see your true abilities soar higher and faster.”

People who are influential thinkers aren’t necessarily better at thinking than other people. Instead, they use their brains to dissect ideas effectively. In this book, Burger teaches readers how to use critical thinking skills to solve problems and develop a positive mindset, harnessing their power to see long-standing issues in a new light. Burger offers research-based information and real-life anecdotes to help readers understand how they can utilize the concepts in the book to bring new ways of seeing the world to their personal and professional lives.

• Edward B. Burger (Author) - Brian Troxell (Narrator)
• 09/19/2012 (Publication Date) - Audible Studios (Publisher)

“An ignorant mind is precisely not a spotless, empty vessel, but one that’s filled with the clutter of irrelevant or misleading life experiences, theories, facts, intuitions, strategies, algorithms, heuristics, metaphors, and hunches that regrettably have the look and feel of useful and accurate knowledge.”

Suppose you’re ready to develop the tools necessary to separate fact from fiction. In that case, Novella offers the tools necessary to analyze your current way of thinking and create new strategies that allow you to see the world for what it is–not what others want you to believe it is. Novella talks about how there are no true holders of truth and that it’s up to each individual to do the research necessary to decide what’s real and what’s pseudoscience. Whether you want to debunk conspiracy theories or simply want to ingest media more critically, Novella’s practical skills will help you develop the critical thinking tools necessary to seek the truth.

• Steven Novella (Author) - Steven Novella (Narrator)
• 10/02/2018 (Publication Date) - Hachette Audio (Publisher)

“Bad ideas do not just happen. We are responsible for them. They result from carelessness on our part, when we cease to pay sufficient attention to the relational quality of ideas, or, worse, are a product of the willful rejection of objective facts.”

When we feel emotional or distressed about an issue, it can be hard to separate logical thinking from illogical thinking. This can also be hard when others are making an impassionated argument. In this book, McInerny works to help readers develop critical thinking tactics that allow them to use discernment when considering both their own ideas and the ideas of others. The book is written in an elegant yet accessible manner that allows readers to process deep ideas without an overload of scientific or philosophical jargon.

• D.Q. McInerny (Author) - Al Kessel (Narrator)
• 04/16/2019 (Publication Date) - Tantor Audio (Publisher)

Interested in reading more? Check out our round-up of the  11 best dystopian novels !

Amanda has an M.S.Ed degree from the University of Pennsylvania in School and Mental Health Counseling and is a National Academy of Sports Medicine Certified Personal Trainer. She has experience writing magazine articles, newspaper articles, SEO-friendly web copy, and blog posts.

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What are the Top 20 Best Critical Thinking Books?

There are many great books on critical thinking, including but not limited to Thinknetic’s “The Habit of Critical Thinking,” Rebecca Stobaugh’s “50 Strategies to Boost Cognitive Engagement,” and Jonathan Haber’s “Critical Thinking: Part of the MIT Press Essential Knowledge.” 

With all the books on critical thinking available, how do you best determine which you should read? The rest of this article will break down the top 20 books on critical thinking followed by the Amazon link and a short description of each.

What is Critical Thinking?

Critical thinking is the ability to objectively analyze and evaluate an issue in order to form judgment, which is vital in today’s world. While critical thinking begins in early childhood and is taught at the primary and secondary education levels, it is always best to keep your critical thinking skills sharp.

Why is Critical Thinking Important?

Communication is key to healthy relationships and communities. Critical thinking enables individuals to express their thoughts, ideas, and beliefs in constructive ways. In relationships, critical thinking is vital to avoid frustration and miscommunication.

Critical thinking fosters creativity and out of the box thinking, which can be applied to any area of life. People are usually introduced to critical thinking in early childhood when, as infants and toddlers, we explore our world and its limits. Our first problem solving skills come in our earliest years.

However, critical thinking doesn’t always come so naturally. Fortunately, there are countless resources to improving our critical thinking skills – including the following books mentioned in this article.

The Top 20 Books on Critical Thinking

The following books can all be found on Amazon.com, and a link is provided for each.

1.) Critical Thinking ; Logic Mastery (Series by Thinknetic)

The first entry on our list is actually a series of 5 books by Thinknetic.net . Each of the five books contain essential critical thinking skills and teach the reader how to change their way of thinking and apply critical thinking to every aspect of their lives. The five books in the series are as follows:

• Critical Thinking in a Nutshell
• The Critical Thinking Effect
• Conquer Logical Fallacies
• The Habit of Critical Thinking
• The Socratic Way of Questioning

Most of these books are available on Kindle Unlimited. You can purchase them individually or as a set.

Amazon Link: https://amzn.to/360UA40

2.) Critical Thinking and the Analytical Mind by Marcus P. Dawson

Amazon Link: https://amzn.to/3LUuqyS

This book teaches the reader the art of making decisions and solving problems while thinking clearly and avoiding cognitive biases and fallacies in systems.

3.) Critical Thinking: The 12 Rules for Intelligent Thinking by Jason Dyer

Amazon Link: https://amzn.to/3jDVk2h

The description of this book includes skills to improve your problem solving and decision-making skills. It also contains valuable information on how to overcome shyness and social anxiety – conditions that hinder many people in both personal and professional capacities – and increase self-confidence.

4.) 50 Strategies to Boost Cognitive Engagement by Rebecca Stobaugh

Amazon Link: https://amzn.to/3OaDYbl

This valuable book for teachers of any grade level – from elementary to college – helps build a culture of thinking that transforms any classroom into an environment of active learning and student engagement.

5.) Critical Thinking: The MIT Press Essential Knowledge Series by Jonathan Haber

Amazon Link: https://amzn.to/3ji6329

In this essential book, Jonathan Haber explains critical thinking, how the term first emerged in society, its definition, and how to teach and assess critical thinking skills.

6.) The Critical Thinking Toolkit by Galen A. Foresman, Peter S. Fosl, and Jamie C. Watson

Amazon Link: https://amzn.to/3vcISMi

This comprehensive book takes a wide view with critical thinking perspectives in psychology, sociology, philosophy, and political science. It applies critical thinking to subjects such as race and gender, symbols in rhetoric, and cognitive biases.

7.) Critical Thinking: A Beginner’s Guide to Developing Reasoning Skills by Morris Cullen

Amazon Link: https://amzn.to/3DX6t7w

A great resource for those still unfamiliar with the concept of critical thinking, this book will help the reader conquer feeble thought patterns and utilize reason.

8.) Critical Thinking Beginner’s Guide: Learn How Reasoning by Logic Improves Effective Problem Solving by Carl Patterson

Amazon Link: https://amzn.to/3rAJevd 

This book contains the tools to think smarter and level up intuition to reach your potential and grow your mindfulness.

9.) Thinking Guide for Busy People by Harvey Smart

Amazon Link: https://amzn.to/3JsjzdU 

This book helps the reader avoid the most common but subtle decision-making mistakes and make better decisions.

10.) Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman

This New York Times Bestseller won the Nobel Prize in Economics.

Amazon Link: https://amzn.to/3Ob1RQ3

11.) Overthinking is NOT the Solution by Robert J. Charles

This book lists 25 ways to reduce stress, eliminate negative thinking, develop mental clarity and master your emotions.

Amazon Link: https://amzn.to/3LOsKHm

12.) Communication Skills Training by Ian Tuhovsky

This practical guide outlines how to improve social intelligence, presentation, persuasion, and public speaking. An Amazon bestseller.

Amazon Link: https://amzn.to/3LQu64d

13.) Self-Discipline: How to Build Mental Toughness and Focus to Achieve your Goals by John Winters

Amazon Link: https://amzn.to/3NSLIhX

A great book for those who don’t feel in control of their lives and want to change their path.

14.) Critical Thinking Mastery by Carl Patterson

Amazon Link: https://amzn.to/3xnnBlo

A beginner’s guide to increase intuition, improve communication, and solve problems.

15.) Master Your Emotions by Thibaut Meurisse

This book is described as a practical guide to overcoming negativity and better managing your emotions.

Amazon Link: https://amzn.to/3DX424Q

16.) Rethinking How We Think by Charles M. Johnston, MD

Amazon Link: https://amzn.to/3LQvfZz

This book details the integrative meta-perspective and the cognitive growing up on which our future depends.

17.) Critical Thinking by Brooke Noel Moore and Richard Parker

Amazon Link: https://amzn.to/36ZTy8Y

This textbook helps build the ability to discern between subjective opinions and judgments and objective facts in the era of “fake news.”

18.) Critical Thinking in Psychology, edited by Robert J. Sternberg

Amazon Link : https://amzn.to/3upkK9R

This textbook is a guide for psychology students to think critically about key topics such as experimental research, statistical analysis, and ethical judgments.

19.) Thinking in Systems and Mental Models by Marcus P. Dawson

Amazon Link: https://amzn.to/3Kv2JMQ

A guide for decision making and problem solving, this book introduces chaos theory and the science of thinking for social change.

20.) Critical Thinking by Tom Chatfield

Amazon Link: https://amzn.to/3v4GIOr

This valuable resource serves as a guide for effective argument, successful analysis, and independent study.

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14 Of The Best Critical Thinking Books That Come Packed With Examples

Anthony Metivier | December 12, 2022 | Thinking

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However, few of them come packed with examples.

Even fewer come with exercises. 

Examples and exercises are important because critical thinking is not just something you learn. 

It’s something you develop through practical application. 

Here’s another problem that might be frustrating you if you’re looking for the best critical thinking books:

A lot of them are either irrelevant, “dumbed-down” for the mass market, or already abandoned by their authors.

For example, the famous Thinking, Fast and Slow on just about every list has big problems. 

Its author, Daniel Khaneman has agreed that several entire chapters need to be removed in a future edition. 

The reproducibility problem. Many of the studies he refers to weren’t scientifically valid. 

But critical thinking is based on reproducible models.

So on this page, let’s dig into a comprehensive list of critical thinking books that won’t go out of date.

The 14 Best Critical Thinking Books Packed With Examples For Improving Your Mind

As you go through these examples, consider your specific goals.

As you’ll see, each of these examples are related, but each has different strengths. 

You’ll want to beef up on each of these areas, but as you gather your collection, I suggest you start with where you currently feel you need the most help. 

One: Scientific Critical Thinking

In Critical Thinking for Better Learning: New Insights from Cognitive Science , Carole Hamilton helps you understand how the brain creates categories in the mind. 

Knowledge of how your mind works helps you tap into how your memory deals with examples and analogies that can improve your thinking skills.

Some of the best parts of this book teach you:

• How to study topics thoroughly so that you can think critically about them.
• How to develop creative analogies so you can see the “shape” and dynamics of larger topics. 
• Threshold concepts, which are “the central, defining truths in a given discipline, the ideas that open a gateway to deeper understanding.”
• Why some ideas are obvious to certain people but take others a long time to learn.

As an example of how this book helped me, when I was working on my Art of Memory project, it reminded me to read both the historical summary and also the specific books about memory during that period. This is what Hamilton means by knowing the “shape” of a topic.

Other great aspects of this book include its points on:

• How beliefs can distort facts
• Who really benefits and who suffered from environmental damage in the world
• The concept of opportunity cost
• How to assess critical thinking

It gives examples of each and concludes strong with its best tip: 

Study real problems and how they were solved, and then recall these frequently to test your memory for accuracy about the details. 

Two: A Jargon Free Toolkit

Critical thinking often involves a lot of complex terminology. You have to learn about antecedents in logic and the concept of paraconsistencies .

But if you’re just beginning and don’t have a Memory Palace , such terms can be hard to learn and remember. 

Enter The Critical Thinking Toolkit .

This book provides a wonderful introduction with examples from:

• Political science

Three: How To Think About Arguments

We all get into arguments.

That’s not a problem, but the ways we use language while arguing often causes more problems than necessary. 

Enter The Uses of Argument by Stephen E. Toulmin.

But in this excellent book, Toulmin shows you:

• What it means to make a valid argument
• How to lay out valid arguments
• The difference between working logic and idealised logic
• How that validity must be intra-field, not inter-field (so that you approach critical thinking comparatively)

It boils down to this:

Arguments have patterns and we can learn to perceive those patterns. 

One pro tip in this book is to find ways to see logic and critical thinking as historical. 

When you know how logic has changed over time, you’re able to note the patterns that shape how we communicate and use them better. 

That’s just one benefit. Here are 11 more benefits of critical thinking you can expect after reading the books on this page.

Four: Validity In Your Thinking

I’ll never forget hearing The Amazing Kreskin discuss hypnosis. He said:

“Hypnosis is nothing more than the acceptance of a suggestion.”

If you don’t have much time to learn how this is happening to you, I suggest Critical Thinking : A Concise Guide by Tracy Bowell and Gary Kemp.

This book’s strength is how it helps you determine whether an argument is valid. 

To do so, the authors teach you the connection between critical thinking and symbolic logic, informal logic and formal logic.

You also learn how to determine which parts of an argument are relevant. You get real world examples with detailed commentary on each.

A v Hoare is one of my favorite examples. In it, you learn about how the amount of detail shapes our perceptions. You also learn how to determine what information is valuable to properly assess the context and shape of an argument.

Five: How To Stop Thinking Against Yourself

I used to think very darkly. 

Little did I know that I was using my thoughts against myself, practically making it impossible to see opportunities.

Then I discovered The Luck Factor by Richard Wiseman.

This book not only goes through numerous examples of how people use cynical thinking against themselves. It also gives powerful exercises that help your critical thinking skills see opportunities your own thinking patterns might be hiding from you.

Six: Understanding Your Personality

That’s why I recommend Stuart Hanscomb’s Critical Thinking: The Basics .

Looking at your personal dispositions can help you avoid many of the problems created by emotions and cognitive biases . 

You may even want to go further by looking into the OCEAN model to help better understand how your personality might help or hinder your thinking abilities.

Either way, Hanscomb’s book is great. Pay extra attention to the final chapter. It’s pack with additional examples of fallacies you’ll want to avoid. 

Seven: Simple, But Not “Dumbed Down”

Crit ical Thinking Skills For Dummies , like many books in the “dummies” series is actually quite valuable.

Its biggest strengths are: 

• Strong examples of false dichotomies
• How to avoid logical pitfalls
• Examples of key arguments

Pay special attention to the final chapter and its list of “arguments that changed the world.” These are interesting and useful case studies. 

Eight: Thinking On Autopilot

One of the most challenging critical thinking examples to work through involves the topic of free will.

My favorite book on the topic is also one of the most hotly contested. 

But it’s the examples in Free Will by Sam Harris that really bring it all together.

And although Daniel Dennet strongly disagrees with its thesis, going through the for and against will give your thinking abilities a stretch.

Without a doubt, contending with the issue of free will is one of the best ways you can practice critical thinking. It will also give you a better understanding of human consciousness too. 

Nine: The Humpty Dumpty Of Thought

As the cohost of Philosophy Bites , a fantastic philosophy podcast, Warburton has packed this book with excellent critical thinking tools to up your game.

Some of my favorites include:

Weasel Words

“Advertisers who declare the food they are selling to be a ‘healthier alternative’ need to specify precisely what the food is healthier than and why. If they cannot do this, then the weasel words ‘healthier alternative’ are meaningless – mere rhetoric”

Humptydumptying

Giving private meanings to words in common use

‘When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty answers, in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.’

Ten: The Power of Analysis

This book proves a number of self assessment activities, including several sub-skills, such as identifying similarities and differences.

It also includes material on:

• Note taking in a critical manner
• Critical writing
• Reflective thinking tips as a mental discipline
• Multiple models of reflective thinking
• Bonus practice activities

If you do any kind of reading and writing, this book is a must. 

Eleven: Improve Your Research Skills

If you do anything involved in research, you know just how difficult interpreting data accurately can be. 

In this book, you’ll learn all about:

• How to seek trustworthy knowledge
• How to understand the role of hypothetical questions
• How samples are chosen and validated
• Aspects that threaten the validity of a research project
• The role of ethics in research
• Examples of multiple studies in different fields of interest

There are a large number of practice articles too. These will help you better engage with scientific reporting you encounter in the media. 

Twelve: Avoiding Errors

If you’re like me, you probably prefer to avoid mistakes whenever possible. 

This book exposes the many poor thinking habits we have. Here are just a few the book covers and then repairs:

• Being in a hurry
• Missing a deadline
• Faulty cost analyses
• Failing to ask for help

I’ve personally found this book helpful, especially when dealing with customers and personal coaching clients. It’s great to be able to ascertain what errors people are making and help guide them to more logical conclusions.

Anyone can do this for themselves too. Read this book. 

Thirteen: Know Your Science

The lack of scientific literacy in society is a huge problem. 

That’s why I recommend Science, Pseudo-science, Non-sense, and Critical Thinking: Why the Differences Matter .

In this book by Marianna Barr and Gershon Ben-Shakhar, you get detailed chapters that use critical thinking to debunk:

• Cold reading

Another thing that makes this critical thinking book unique is that it includes:

• Correspondence with Houdini
• Good movie and literature examples
• Excellent lists of books to follow-up on with for further information about each pseudoscientific topic

I also like how the book discusses the reasons why people need to believe – or at least think they do.

Fourteen: An Ancient Critical Thinking Book

Basically, this term translates to a statement like: “the culmination of the Vedas is ‘not two’”.

In other words, the philosophy works to demonstrate a “oneness” in human consciousness. 

One of the most interesting books uses critical thinking to demonstrate this principle. It is called Panchadasi .

My favorite commentary on this text, which includes a translation, is Inquiry Into Existence , by James Swartz.

This philosophy will probably stretch your mind.

The trick is not to mistake its conclusions for solipsism, which is arguably nonsense . It’s really just a way of thinking through the situation we all find ourselves in as the bearers of consciousness. 

Crafting A Library Of Critical Thinking Books

I hope you enjoyed checking out this list of books on critical thinking. Please let me know which ones you check out and how you helpful you found them. 

There are many more out there, and keep in mind that you can find texts that will help you improve many types of thinking . 

The important thing is to have a library that you continually build and read thoroughly. 

And to get it all in, I recommend that you check out how to read faster next.

Need help with remembering what you read from these books? Check out my free memory improvement course:

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Last modified: December 12, 2022

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The 5 Best Books on Critical Thinking for Einstein-Esque Performance

Critical thinking is a skill that we all need but often isn’t taught explicitly.

With critical thinking , we can identify scams and fake news, analyze situations, and evaluate factual evidence.

These are skills we need every day to be better, more successful people.

If you feel you need to improve your critical thinking skills, here are some of the best books on the topic.

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Listen to the books below

Best Books on Critical Thinking

1. thinking, fast and slow by daniel kahneman.

Daniel Kahneman’s book divides thinking into two systems. Within each system, Kahneman describes rational and non-rational motivations for thinking that way.

In short, System 1 is automatic thinking, whereas System 2 is conscious, calculating decision-making. Kahneman doesn’t prefer one to the other but labels them so we can identify them in our own thought processes.

The book’s second part then discusses biases that affect our ability to think statistically. He uses something called heuristics, which is the theory of quick-thinking.

Kahneman uses all of this to explain why we make bad decisions and suggests ways we can make better ones. It’s a summary of decades of Kahneman’s own research, and is clear, logical, and well researched.

However, it’s quite dense in places. Importantly, its language is aimed at people who probably have clear critical thinking skills but its points are aimed at people wanting to learn critical thinking. There might be easier books on the subject, but this is a good read nonetheless.

• Backed up with decades of research.
• Interesting system of thought proposed.
• Logical statements about bad decisions.
• Quite dense reading.

2. Asking the Right Questions: A Guide to Critical Thinking by Neil Browne and Stuart Keeley

This book is written as a textbook for courses that teach critical and analytical thinking. As a result, it’s very clear and concise. It’s a great starting point for anyone unfamiliar with the subject.

It essentially teaches you how to think logically and then how to apply this to your personal decision-making. It favours the ideas of autonomy, openness, and curiosity, all of which require critical thinking.

Asking the Right Questions has been through multiple revisions (it’s currently on the 11th edition!). Updates have mostly adjusted examples to be more applicable to changing audiences, but older additions provide the same important core information.

The fact that it’s designed for an academic setting might be its best feature or its worst. Some sections go into very specific detail about how to do something, so members of the general public might find it a bit too in-depth.

But, if you’re entirely new to critical thinking, this is a good place to start.

• Clear writing designed for college courses.
• Teaches the reader how to think logically.
• Revisions keep examples and language fresh.
• Some sections might feel too in-depth for the general reader.

3. The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark by Carl Sagan

Carl Sagan is a name you probably recognise, and for good reason. His work bringing science into the public sphere should never be overlooked. This book is no different.

Its purpose is to explain the scientific method to everyday people so they can use it to think critically. Sagan also describes this as “sceptic thinking”, something he was well known for.

The book explains how scientific thinking is critical thinking and offers something called the “baloney detection kit”. In short, this is the ability to recognise false arguments. He follows this up with the 20 logical fallacies, which you might already know.

The Demon-Haunted World is still seen as an important book in the sceptic movement and is very clearly written by Carl Sagan. Its information is interesting and important for anyone wanting to think critically using actual scientific methods.

Perhaps the only real critique is that it’s very rooted in the world of astrophysics, Sagan’s field. Its examples of myth-busting relate to UFOs, which is fine, but it could do with other examples from the rest of the scientific world.

• Contains Sagan’s typical humour.
• Teaches critical thinking in relation to scientific practice.
• An interesting and clear read.
• Quite a narrow view of the “scientific method”.

4. The Art of Thinking Clearly: Better Thinking, Better Decisions by Rolf Dobelli

The Art of Thinking Clearly describes 99 examples of common thinking errors. It was originally published in newspaper columns, meaning the chapters are short and quite concise.

It clearly labels each error of judgement and suggests ways to avoid them in the future. Rather than teaching you critical thinking processes, the book just shows you thinking errors. This is helpful for people who might want a different outlook on the subject.

Considering chapters are around 2.5 pages long, it’s easy to pick up whenever for short reading bursts. This makes it a standout in a category like this, as many books are a bit clunky and dense.

That said, some of the chapters don’t really need explaining at all. Combined with some obvious examples, it might detract from its otherwise useful information. This would make a good supplement to another critical thinking book.

• Short, concise chapters.
• Different approach to critical thinking.
• Discusses errors in judgement rather than thinking processes.
• Some parts are almost too obvious.

5. Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces that Shape Our Decisions by Dan Ariely

This book works on the understanding that humans are irrational but in a predictable way. It uses this fact to teach you how to recognise and change irrational thinking habits.

It consists of 15 chapters broken down into modes of thinking and examples of when rationality breaks down. The book uses both rational choice theory and behavioural economics to do this.

Ariely is a Professor of Behavioural Economics at MIT, so he’s a pretty trustworthy source on the subject. Importantly, though, he knows how to write for the general reader. It’s a complex subject delivered clearly.

However, it’s written like Ariely is holding back some information because of the target audience. You get the sense that he knows he’s writing for the public and so doesn’t explain things to the full extent of his knowledge. Even so, the points he raises are interesting and useful for rational thinking.

• Interesting look at irrational thinking.
• Relies on behavioural theory.
• Written by an authority in the field.
• Sometimes feels a bit too edited.

Improving our critical thinking skills is vital to understanding how decisions can work for or against us. It’s something we use every day in work or home life, so is a vital skill to have.

Using a variety of books on critical thinking will provide different skills and understanding of what is an incredibly broad subject. So, don’t limit yourself to just one or two.

Browse more best books and recommended reads .

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Critical thinking definition

Critical thinking, as described by Oxford Languages, is the objective analysis and evaluation of an issue in order to form a judgement.

Active and skillful approach, evaluation, assessment, synthesis, and/or evaluation of information obtained from, or made by, observation, knowledge, reflection, acumen or conversation, as a guide to belief and action, requires the critical thinking process, which is why it's often used in education and academics.

Some even may view it as a backbone of modern thought.

However, it's a skill, and skills must be trained and encouraged to be used at its full potential.

People turn up to various approaches in improving their critical thinking, like:

• Developing technical and problem-solving skills
• Engaging in more active listening
• Actively questioning their assumptions and beliefs
• Seeking out more diversity of thought
• Opening up their curiosity in an intellectual way etc.

Is critical thinking useful in writing?

Critical thinking can help in planning your paper and making it more concise, but it's not obvious at first. We carefully pinpointed some the questions you should ask yourself when boosting critical thinking in writing:

• What information should be included?
• Which information resources should the author look to?
• What degree of technical knowledge should the report assume its audience has?
• What is the most effective way to show information?
• How should the report be organized?
• How should it be designed?
• What tone and level of language difficulty should the document have?

Usage of critical thinking comes down not only to the outline of your paper, it also begs the question: How can we use critical thinking solving problems in our writing's topic?

Let's say, you have a Powerpoint on how critical thinking can reduce poverty in the United States. You'll primarily have to define critical thinking for the viewers, as well as use a lot of critical thinking questions and synonyms to get them to be familiar with your methods and start the thinking process behind it.

Are there any services that can help me use more critical thinking?

We understand that it's difficult to learn how to use critical thinking more effectively in just one article, but our service is here to help.

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Best Books Hub

Reviews of The Best Books on Every Subject

20 Best Books on Critical Thinking (2022 Review)

September 16, 2020 by James Wilson

DISCLOSURE: This post may contain affiliate links, meaning when you click the links and make a purchase, I receive a commission. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

Critical thinking is a skill/mindset that enables a person to think logically. Critical thinking is a vital necessity for everyone these days who want to perform exceptionally. No matter what field of life you are in, let it be a student, a teacher, an athlete or a corporate employee. There are high chances that you will need to enable critical thinking to find a noteworthy solution to your problems and be able to move forward effectively.

To enable critical thinking, there are certain things involved. These include evaluating evidence, weighing the chances, analysing assumptions and more. Once you start your journey towards critical thinking, you start to take the next steps automatically. It is a journey that takes you from assumptions to the realities that are possible.

What are the Best Critical Thinking Books to read?

With effective critical thinking skills, it is impossible for you to be fooled by anyone. You can read one’s intentions right away. You can even see what other people cannot, based on evidence and argument.

If you are looking to grow respective critical thinking skills, and want to learn it quick. We have compiled a list of books that you can read the review for. This will enable you to choose the right book on critical thinking for your learning journey.

Best Books on Critical Thinking: Our Top 20 Picks

Here are some of the best critical thinking books that you can consider to expand your knowledge on the subject:

1. Critical Thinking Skills for Dummies

Of Course, we all are already aware of the “For Dummies” series. For those who are not, this series presents an absolute and definitive guide for the beginners. With the help of this series, everyone can effectively learn the skills from the beginner level to advance. If you have little to zero knowledge about critical thinking and want to learn, this is the book for you.

The book has been written by Martin Cohen. It serves the purpose by enabling its readers to get access to the most comprehensible and easy-to-read narrative on critical thinking. The book provides you with access to several tools that you can activate to develop reflective thinking. There is also deep insight from the beginners’ level on how you can brainstorm to generate insights.

• Authors : Martin Cohen (Author)
• Publisher : For Dummies; 1st Edition (May 4, 2015)
• Pages : 376 pages

2. Think Smarter: Critical thinking to improve problem-solving and decision-making skills

Critical thinking is a necessary skill for all that are studying, teaching, or working in any part of life. It enables you to look at the flaws in a system, a story, a program, a project or virtually anything so you can effectively improve it.

This book is all about using critical thinking to improve problem-solving and decision-making skills. Written by Michael Kallet, the book presents valuable arguments that you can use to weigh your options, find the flaws and improve your critical thinking skills. This book goes beyond the concepts and is about the examples of real-world scenarios that will not only serve as a clear piece of understanding for you but also help you with the exercise and practice of such skills. The book has over 25 tools for critical thinking with real-world examples.

• Authors : Michael Kallet (Author)
• Publisher : Wiley; 1st Edition (April 7, 2014)
• Pages : 240 pages

3. Critical Thinking (10th Edition)

There are levels of Critical thinking classified with the understanding and utilization level of the students. The course enables students to think logically and critically not only in the class but in the real-world to make effective decisions.

It will not be wrong to call this book the most taught textbook on critical thinking subjects. The book is written by Brooke Noel Moore and Richard Parker. It presents the students with a buffet of examples and exercises that they can perform within or outside the class to enable their critical thinking skills and do well in their life. The book presents a highly understandable version of critical thinking in Moore’s famous, engaging narrative.

• Authors : Brooke Noel Moore (Author), Richard Parker (Author)
• Publisher : McGraw-Hill; 10th Edition (January 1, 2012)
• Pages : 576 pages

4. Critical Thinking: Tools for taking charge of your learning and your life (3rd Edition)

Critical thinking has become highly popular in the last couple of decades. It enables you with an approach of integration and making decisions based on viable arguments and evidence instead of hallow words. The sixth sense is a thing, but weighing your arguments and the right evidence laying in front of you is what critical thinking enables you to do.

Written by two experts of the field Richard Paul, and Linda Elder, this book presents its readers with a huge list of interactive tools that they can learn to utilize in their learning journey towards critical thinking. This book is focused on a comprehensive and practical approach to critical thinking that is to be used in everyday life. With this book, you can get your hands on some new diagrams that will enhance your decision-making skills.

• Authors : Richard Paul (Author), Linda Elder (Author)
• Publisher : Pearson; 3rd Edition (November 20, 2019)
• Pages : 528 pages

5. The power of Critical Thinking: Effective Reasoning about Ordinary and Extraordinary claims

Critical thinking is a power that takes you from assuming to believing. It enables you to understand the truth laying behind the valid evidences that someone is trying to hide it from you. It is a skill to believe in the true version of events instead of hallow words.

Written by Lewis Vaughn, this book is the right read for you if you are looking to enable and use critical thinking in your daily routine. The book enables you access to a wide range of tools you need to apply for critical thinking in daily life. It provides a perspective understandable and applicable by students, teachers, corporate workers, and normal people alike. Including scientific reasoning, evidence, authority, and visual reasoning this book can enable you to get the skills of critical thinking in a commendable manner.

• Authors : Lewis Vaughn (Author)
• Publisher : Oxford University Press; 6th Edition (September 20, 2018)
• Pages : 600 pages

6. Critical Thinking, Reading and Writing: A Brief Guide to Argument (9th Edition)

If you are a reader, student or an individual with a job requirement of reading and getting the right information. This book is the right guide for you. This book is a comprehensive, compact guide for all those who want to learn the right skillset to weigh arguments based on validity and authority.

The book presents you with a number of real-life examples that will enable you to understand the fundamentals of skimming through the information and improve your analysis to reach the right conclusion. Written by Sylvan Barnet, Hugo Bedau, and John O’Hara this book has all the information and guidance to enable critical thinking and create valid arguments based on facts and figures.

• Authors : Sylvan Barnet (Author), Hugo Bedau (Author), John O’Hara (Author)
• Publisher : Bedford/St. Martin’s; Ninth Edition (October 4, 2016)

7. Critical Thinking (11th Edition)

Critical thinking is being taught as a course in most schools. It enables the students to make the right decisions in life effectively and to weigh the chances for their success. Critical thinking is a necessary tool for all who want to survive in this highly competitive world and outperform their selves every day.

It will not be wrong to call this book a Textbook. Written by Brooke Noel Moore, and Richard Parker this book contains a unique and interactive approach towards learning the skills required to enable critical thinking. There are real-world applications that enable the students and instructors alike to understand the concepts better. The book is a great help for not only scoring grades in the course but also being able to use the concepts and learnings effectively in daily routine.

• Publisher : McGraw-Hill Education; 11th Edition (January 15, 2014)
• Pages : 512 pages

8. Models for Critical Thinking: A fundamental guide to effective decision making, deep analysis, Intelligent reasoning, and independent thinking

Critical thinking has benefits far more reasonable and useful beyond the academic career. While there are no doubts about the importance of critical thinking for educational purposes. There are also a number of other applications that you can use critical thinking to analyse and understand the process of certain things going around.

Written by Albert Rutherford, this book is a marvel of critical thinking. With this book, you can get your hands on some advance concepts and techniques used to enable critical thinking. And the best part is, there are also numerous applications including that will enable you to enhance your critical thinking skills. The book contains elaborative insight on how you can apply logic to analyse and everyday events around you and use that to save yourself from getting tricked or manipulated.

• Authors : Albert Rutherford (Author)
• Publisher : Independently published (October 17, 2018)
• Pages : 278 pages

9. LOGITICA: Improve your critical thinking and problem-solving skills: the brain behind the brain

Problem-solving skills rely greatly on critical thinking. To understand an error in your work and to effectively eliminate that requires a deeper sense of understanding towards the comprehension of the reasons that may have caused the error and how you can improve.

This book is based on logistical facts and figures rather than assumptions, that could have been true. Logics presents you with a more accurate opportunity and approach towards improving our problem-solving skills. Written by Neelabh Kumar, this book is a right guide for all those who want to understand an in-depth perspective of what may have caused an error and how you can eliminate the possibility of recurrence through enhances critical thinking skills.

• Authors : Neelabh Kumar (Author)
• Publisher : Independently published (January 8, 2019)
• Pages : 329 pages

10. A workbook for arguments, Second Edition: A complete course in critical thinking

This second edition of a highly popular guide on critical thinking contains all major improvements that back the fundamentals of the first edition. However, advancement and revelations are continued and this book is the right example of moving forward in your journey of learning critical thinking efficiently.

The book is written by David R. Morrow and Anthony Weston. In this book, they present an understandable and easy to imply narrative towards critical thinking. The book contains elaborative information on all the exercises of critical thinking. Also, it has improved and enhanced version of scientific reasoning that was discussed in earlier edition. This is a perfect workbook for all the students and those who are looking to improve their critical thinking skills.

• Authors : David R. Morrow (Author), Anthony Weston (Author)
• Publisher : Hackett Publishing Company, Inc.; Second Edition (November 1, 2015)

11. From Critical Thinking to Argument: A Portable Guide (5th Edition)

Critical Thinking is a valuable skill for all, especially the writers. While other people have to self-analyse and use the information for their own improvements and apply them their selves. Writers are required to craft the arguments based on the information and their critical thinking skills.

This book is written by Sylvan Barnet, Hugo Bedau, and John O’Hara. It is a handbook that is compact and has a precise narrative to not only enhance critical thinking skills but also to improve the knowledge. The book contains practical exercises on how one can effectively craft the arguments based on facts, figures, and assumptions that might come true.

• Publisher : Bedford/St. Martin’s; Fifth Edition (December 22, 2016)
• Pages : 432 pages

12. Critical Thinking: The effective Beginner’s guide to master logical facilities using a scientific approach and improve your rational thinking skills with problem-solving tools to make better decisions

Thinking deep and analytically requires you to work on your thinking process and analyse the information effectively. These are some skills that require you to work on yourself and the way you look at things. It includes changing your narrative towards the things that might be causing hindrance in your thinking process and clouding your judgment.

The book is written & published by Travis Holiday, and Kevin Hollins. This is the right guide for all the beginners to start thinking rationally and based on the facts that are affecting things around you. There are indicators that allow you to see the reality hidden behind things and words with absolute meaning. However, there are deeper practices along the way and you must understand those to start thinking effectively the right possible way. This book is the right guide that will take you from beginner to master-level critical thinking approach through its easy to understand and imply a narrative.

• Authors : Travis Holiday (Author), Kevin Hollins (Author)
• Publisher : Independently published (September 18, 2019)
• Pages : 210 pages

13. Critical Thinking (12th Edition)

Researches are being conducted daily on critical thinking. With each passing day, there are new and more effective concepts that are being discovered and proven right. These concepts are not a denial to older ones but strengthen their validity. If you are looking to get your hands on some of the latest concepts of Critical thinking, this is the right book for you.

Written by Brooke Noel Moore and Richard Parker, this book presents you with the most up-to-date concepts of critical thinking. It has an improved narrative and hundreds of latest examples based on real-world scenarios that will enable you to think critically and improve your decision-making skills in every part of your life.

• Publisher : McGraw-Hill Higher Education; 12th Edition (October 25, 2016)

14. The basics of Critical Thinking

Young minds are more interesting and they are more curious. Curiosity is considered the first step toward critical thinking. It is believed that habits made in early age stays with you for life. Critical thinking is more of a habit, a lifestyle than a skill set that you can earn over time. Hence, this book presents a version of basic tools that can enable younger minds to get hold of the basics of critical thinking.

The book follows simple English with a narrative that is easier to understand for children. To increase interest, this book contains a colourful and image-based description of things. The book is written by Michael Baker. While it is intended for younger people, that does not mean adults cannot read it. For all those who want to learn the fundamentals of critical thinking and to enable their selves to analyse things effectively, this book is a worthy read.

• Authors : Michael Baker (Author), Children’s Books – Educational (Introduction)
• Publisher : The Critical Thinking Co. (January 1, 2015)
• Pages : 152 pages

15. Tools of Critical Thinking: Meta thoughts of psychology, second edition.

While there are other books that focus on basics and how you can start analysing things and events to think critically. This book is focused more on in-depth analysis and understanding of psychology involved behind decision making and critical thinking approach.

Written by David A. Levy, this book presents a highly understandable narrative and approach towards thinking critically and to understand how human psychology works towards it. If you are having problems in thinking critically due to the emotions attached and are unable to get ahead of these. This book is the perfect guide for you.

• Authors : David A. Levy (Author)
• Publisher : Waveland Pr Inc; 2nd Edition (September 1, 2009)
• Pages : 298 pages

16. Your Deceptive Mind: A Scientific guide to critical thinking skills

Our minds can often deceive us to think differently, while the truth is looking right in your eyes. Being said that, human judgment and decision making can often be clouded by certain feelings that are attached to it. There is no denial to it that sometimes we are unable to look at the reality because of our emotions and feelings.

This book is the right guide for all those who think that they are lacking in any field of life due to their emotions and being unable to think critically on the subject. The book presents you with a blunt and harsh narrative to stop relying on emotions and scientifically understand the factors that are stopping you from thinking critically and efficiently. It is written by Steven Novella and published by The Great Courses. The book also includes a critical toolbox that you can use to access the quality of information and skillset required to think critically.

• Authors : Professor Steven Novella (Author), Yale School of Medicine (Foreword)
• Publisher : The Great Courses (January 1, 2012)

17. Master Critical Thinking: Think Intelligently, Improve Problem-Solving Skills, make better Decisions, and Upgrade your life.

To master critical thinking, one must have several goals. The goals can be thinking intelligently and enable enhanced thinking, improving your problem-solving skills or simply making better decisions in everyday life.

Whatever your goals may be, critical thinking is the right approach towards upgrading your life with the help of improving each decision and backing it based on solid arguments instead of vague assumptions and emotions attached to it that can be deceiving at times. If you often struggle with the urge to make the right decision and want to get over with the gut feelings you have. This book will guide you to start thinking critically instead of simply relying on emotions and assumptions.

• Authors : Henrik Rodgers (Author)
• Publisher : Independently published (July 9, 2019)
• Pages : 116 pages

18. Critical Thinking: The Beginners User manual to Improve your communication and self-confidence skills Every day. The Tools and the concepts for problem-solving and decision making.

To learn from your own failures is the right way to understand and not make those mistakes again. It is the best practice to improve your own-self. However, to improve and to correct your own mistakes, the right approach is to realise them. While there are people, who can turn a blind eye towards their own mistakes. This book is the right guide that teaches you how not to. The book contains great insight into self-realization and how you can use it to improve your own thinking skills.

The book is written by Jacko Babin and Ray Manson. It contains elaborative insight on how you can effectively stop second-guessing yourself and have a confident approach towards improving the mistakes. Once you have realized your own mistakes, the rest of the journey becomes easier for you. The book also contains numerous real-life examples that will help you understand these concepts in a much better way.

• Authors : Jocko Babin (Author), Ray Manson (Author)
• Publisher : Independently published (March 9, 2019)
• Pages : 147 pages

19. A concise guide to critical thinking (1st Edition)

Lewis Vaughn is considered an expert on the subject of critical thinking. He has written several books covering the topic. His books contain an in-depth analysis of how you can enable critical thinking in your daily routine and what might be stopping you from doing so.

This book, however, can be deemed as a complete summary of concepts being advocated by him. Along with the guidance on covering the obstacles that are stopping you and enabling your mind to think critically. This book contains a highly understandable and easy to follow the narrative that will be great for all the beginners to understand and imply critical thinking from scratch to master level.

• Publisher : Oxford University Press; Annotated – Illustrated Edition (October 1, 2017)
• Pages : 352 pages

20. The miniature guide to critical thinking concepts and tools (Thinker’s guide library)

If you are looking to master critical thinking and do not have time to read extensive concepts and get yourself indulged with the psychic or scientific approach. This is the book for you. This book presents a concise and to-the-point approach to critical thinking concepts and tools.

Written by Richard Paul and Linda Elder, the book does not only contain all the information required to understand the concepts on critical thinking but also how you can imply those in your daily life to enhance your decision making and critical thinking skills effectively. The book presents a short and easy to follow approach towards the subject.

• Publisher : The Foundation for Critical Thinking; Eighth Edition (September 20, 2019)
• Pages : 48 pages

Choosing the Best Critical Thinking Books

Critical thinking is not just a skill-set. It is a way of life that enables you to make the right decisions in every part of life. It also enables you to understand the things, events and the factors involved behind them efficiently. With the help of critical thinking, you can analyse the events and decisions unbiased by any sort of feelings or attachments.

We have gone through these books and compiled a list of critical reviews on these books. If you are looking to start thinking critically and are unsure of where to start. This guide will definitely help you to choose the right book to aid your learning journey.

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Unveiling the Best Critical Thinking Books in this 2024 Update

Are you looking to sharpen your critical thinking skills? Look no further! We’ve curated a list of the 20 best books about critical thinking that will challenge your mind and expand your perspective. Whether you’re a student, professional, or just someone who loves a good book on critical thinking, these critical thinking books will provide you with the tools and insights to think more critically and make better decisions. Let’s dive in and explore these thought-provoking reads!

• 1 20 Best Books About Critical Thinking
• 2 Thinking, Fast and Slow
• 3 The Art of Thinking Clearly
• 4 Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness
• 5 Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions
• 6 The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark
• 7 The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable
• 8 Super Thinking: The Big Book of Mental Models
• 9 The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion
• 10 The Organized Mind: Thinking Straight in the Age of Information Overload
• 11 The Innovator’s Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail
• 12 The Lean Startup: How Today’s Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses
• 13 The Upside of Irrationality: The Unexpected Benefits of Defying Logic at Work and at Home
• 14 The Art of Thinking
• 15 The Believing Brain: From Ghosts and Gods to Politics and Conspiracies—How We Construct Beliefs and Reinforce Them as Truths
• 16 The Science of Fear: How the Culture of Fear Manipulates Your Brain
• 17 The Design of Everyday Things
• 18 The Art of Deception: Controlling the Human Element of Security
• 19 Critical Thinking: A Concise Guide
• 20 Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion
• 21 The Attacker’s Advantage: Turning Uncertainty into Breakthrough Opportunities
• 22 Conclusion

20 Best Books About Critical Thinking

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Thinking, Fast and Slow

By daniel kahneman.

Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman is a groundbreaking book on critical thinking that delves into the two systems that drive the way we think: the fast, intuitive and emotional system, and the slow, deliberate and logical system. Kahneman, a Nobel Prize-winning psychologist, explores the cognitive biases and heuristics that affect our decision making, shedding light on the flaws and limitations of human reasoning. Through engaging examples and thought-provoking experiments, the book challenges readers to reevaluate their assumptions about their own thinking processes and the world around them. With its insightful exploration of the complexities of the human mind, this book about critical thinking offers valuable insights into how we can make more informed and rational decisions in our daily lives.

The Art of Thinking Clearly

By rolf dobelli.

The Art of Thinking Clearly by Rolf Dobelli is a captivating book on critical thinking that delves into the common mental pitfalls we all fall victim to. Dobelli presents 99 cognitive biases, logical fallacies, and social distortions that cloud our judgment and hinder our decision-making. Through engaging anecdotes and real-life examples, the author offers practical advice on how to recognize and overcome these obstacles, empowering readers to make clearer, more rational choices in both their personal and professional lives. This insightful book about critical thinking provides valuable insights into the workings of the human mind and offers tools for sharpening our decision-making skills. Whether you’re a business professional, student, or simply someone who wants to improve their thinking, The Art of Thinking Clearly is an essential addition to your reading list.

Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness

By richard h. thaler and cass r. sunstein.

Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness is a groundbreaking book on critical thinking by Richard H. Thaler and Cass R. Sunstein. The authors explore how small changes, or “nudges,” in the way choices are presented can significantly impact decision-making. Drawing on insights from behavioral economics, psychology, and neuroscience, the book offers practical strategies for improving individual and societal decision-making. It challenges readers to rethink the traditional assumptions about human rationality and demonstrates how subtle changes in the environment can steer people towards better choices. Nudge provides a compelling argument for the power of choice architecture in shaping behavior and offers valuable insights for anyone interested in understanding and improving decision-making processes. This book about critical thinking is essential reading for anyone seeking to make better choices and understand the forces that influence our decisions.

Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions

By dan ariely.

Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely is a captivating book on critical thinking that explores the hidden forces that influence our decision-making processes. Through a series of thought-provoking experiments and real-life examples, Ariely challenges the traditional economic theory that humans are rational beings when it comes to making choices. He delves into the irrational behaviors that shape our decisions, such as the power of free offers, the influence of social norms, and the impact of emotions on our choices. This critical thinking book sheds light on the quirks of human behavior and provides valuable insights into how we can make better decisions in our personal and professional lives. Ariely’s engaging writing style and fascinating findings make Predictably Irrational a must-read for anyone interested in understanding the complexities of decision-making.

The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark

By carl sagan.

The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark is a thought-provoking book on critical thinking by Carl Sagan. In this captivating work, Sagan explores the importance of skepticism, reason, and scientific thinking in a world filled with superstition, pseudoscience, and misinformation. With eloquence and insight, Sagan urges readers to embrace the tools of critical thinking and to question claims that lack empirical evidence. He emphasizes the value of scientific inquiry and the need to distinguish between genuine knowledge and unfounded beliefs. The book serves as a powerful reminder of the dangers of ignorance and the vital role of rational thinking in navigating the complexities of our world. Sagan’s compelling prose and compelling arguments make this book about critical thinking a must-read for anyone seeking to cultivate a deeper understanding of the world around them.

The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable

By nassim nicholas taleb.

The Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb is a thought-provoking book on critical thinking that explores the impact of rare and unpredictable events on our lives. Taleb introduces the concept of “black swan” events, which are highly improbable occurrences with massive consequences. Through engaging anecdotes and insightful analysis, he challenges the way we perceive and understand the world, shedding light on the limitations of our knowledge and the importance of embracing uncertainty. This critical thinking book encourages readers to question their assumptions, consider the role of randomness in shaping our lives, and develop a more nuanced understanding of the complex systems that govern our world. With its emphasis on skepticism and intellectual humility, The Black Swan offers a fresh perspective on decision-making and risk assessment, making it an essential read for anyone interested in understanding the unpredictable nature of our reality.

Super Thinking: The Big Book of Mental Models

By gabriel weinberg and lauren mccann.

Super Thinking: The Big Book of Mental Models by Gabriel Weinberg and Lauren McCann is a comprehensive guide to improving your decision-making skills. This book on critical thinking introduces readers to various mental models, which are thinking tools that help us make sense of the world and make better choices. The authors present a wide range of mental models, from probability and statistics to physics and biology, offering practical examples and exercises to help readers apply these models in their daily lives. Whether you’re a student, professional, or simply someone looking to enhance your critical thinking abilities, this critical thinking book provides valuable insights and strategies for making smarter decisions. Super Thinking is a must-read for anyone seeking to sharpen their cognitive skills and become a more effective thinker.

The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion

By jonathan haidt.

The Righteous Mind is a thought-provoking exploration of why people are so deeply divided by politics and religion. Jonathan Haidt delves into the psychology of morality, arguing that our moral judgments are driven more by intuition than by critical thinking. Haidt presents a compelling case for the importance of understanding the moral foundations that shape our beliefs and how they influence our political and religious affiliations. This book about critical thinking challenges readers to consider the role of emotions and social influences in shaping our moral reasoning, offering valuable insights for anyone seeking to understand the complex dynamics of human morality and the nature of political and religious divisions. The Righteous Mind is a must-read for anyone interested in psychology, ethics, or the complexities of human nature.

The Organized Mind: Thinking Straight in the Age of Information Overload

By daniel j. levitin.

The Organized Mind: Thinking Straight in the Age of Information Overload by Daniel J. Levitin is a fascinating exploration of how our brains process and organize the constant influx of information in today’s digital age. Levitin, a neuroscientist and cognitive psychologist, offers practical strategies for managing information overload and making better decisions. This critical thinking book delves into the science of attention, memory, and decision-making, providing valuable insights into how we can optimize our cognitive abilities. By understanding the way our brains work, readers can learn to navigate the complexities of modern life with more clarity and efficiency. Levitin’s engaging writing style and real-world examples make this book a must-read for anyone seeking to improve their organizational skills and cognitive performance in the face of overwhelming amounts of information.

The Innovator’s Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail

By clayton m. christensen.

The Innovator’s Dilemma by Clayton M. Christensen is a groundbreaking book on critical thinking that explores why successful companies often fail when faced with disruptive innovation. Christensen argues that companies can become too focused on satisfying their existing customers and improving their current products, which can blind them to the potential of new, disruptive technologies. The book provides numerous case studies and examples to illustrate how even the most well-managed and innovative companies can be blindsided by new technologies. Christensen offers valuable insights into how companies can navigate the challenges of disruptive innovation and adapt their business strategies to stay ahead in a rapidly changing marketplace. The Innovator’s Dilemma is a must-read for anyone interested in understanding the complexities of innovation and the importance of critical thinking in business.

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The Lean Startup: How Today’s Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses

By eric ries.

The Lean Startup by Eric Ries is a groundbreaking book on critical thinking for entrepreneurs. Ries introduces the concept of continuous innovation, urging businesses to adopt a flexible, adaptive approach to product development. He emphasizes the importance of testing assumptions, gathering feedback, and making data-driven decisions to create successful, scalable businesses. Ries’s approach challenges traditional business models and encourages entrepreneurs to embrace uncertainty, take calculated risks, and pivot when necessary. The book provides practical strategies for startup founders and established companies alike, offering valuable insights into building a sustainable business in today’s fast-paced, ever-changing market. With its focus on experimentation and learning, The Lean Startup is an essential read for anyone seeking to develop a critical thinking mindset and drive innovation in their entrepreneurial endeavors.

The Upside of Irrationality: The Unexpected Benefits of Defying Logic at Work and at Home

The Upside of Irrationality by Dan Ariely is a thought-provoking book about critical thinking that challenges the notion that logic is always the best approach. Ariely explores the unexpected benefits of defying logic at work and at home, shedding light on the ways in which irrationality can actually lead to positive outcomes. Through engaging anecdotes and thought experiments, Ariely demonstrates how our irrational behaviors can be harnessed for greater creativity, motivation, and decision-making. This critical thinking book offers a fresh perspective on human behavior and provides valuable insights for anyone looking to understand the complexities of the mind. Whether you’re interested in psychology, economics, or simply want to improve your critical thinking skills, The Upside of Irrationality is a compelling read that will challenge your assumptions and expand your understanding of human behavior.

The Art of Thinking

By ernest dimnet.

The Art of Thinking by Ernest Dimnet is a timeless book on critical thinking that delves into the intricacies of the human mind and the art of reasoning. Dimnet explores the importance of cultivating a thoughtful and analytical approach to life, in both personal and intellectual pursuits. Through engaging prose and thought-provoking insights, the author encourages readers to sharpen their intellect and embrace the power of critical thinking in every aspect of their lives. This critical thinking book offers practical wisdom and guidance for developing a deeper understanding of the world around us, making it an essential read for anyone seeking to enhance their cognitive abilities and broaden their perspectives.

The Believing Brain: From Ghosts and Gods to Politics and Conspiracies—How We Construct Beliefs and Reinforce Them as Truths

By michael shermer.

The Believing Brain by Michael Shermer is a fascinating book on critical thinking that delves into the psychology behind belief formation. Shermer explores how our brains are wired to seek patterns and make sense of the world, often leading us to construct and reinforce beliefs that may not align with reality. From the belief in ghosts and gods to political ideologies and conspiracy theories, Shermer unpacks the cognitive processes that underpin our convictions and offers insights into how we can cultivate a more rational and evidence-based approach to understanding the world. Through engaging storytelling and compelling research, The Believing Brain challenges readers to examine their own beliefs and encourages a more skeptical and open-minded approach to navigating the complexities of our modern world. This critical thinking book is a must-read for anyone interested in understanding the human mind and the nature of belief.

The Science of Fear: How the Culture of Fear Manipulates Your Brain

By daniel gardner.

The Science of Fear: How the Culture of Fear Manipulates Your Brain by Daniel Gardner is a fascinating exploration of how fear influences our thoughts and behaviors. This critical thinking book delves into the psychology of fear, examining how media, politics, and society exploit our natural instincts to instill fear in us. Gardner provides insight into how our brains process fear and how we can learn to recognize and combat irrational fears. He offers practical strategies for approaching fear with a rational mindset, empowering readers to make informed decisions and resist manipulation. This book about critical thinking is a thought-provoking and eye-opening read, shedding light on the ways fear can impact our perceptions and actions. It’s a must-read for anyone interested in understanding the complexities of human psychology and the power of critical thinking.

The Design of Everyday Things

By don norman.

The Design of Everyday Things by Don Norman is a seminal book on critical thinking in the context of design. Norman explores the ways in which everyday objects are designed and how those designs impact our interactions with them. He delves into the psychology of design, discussing the principles of usability and the importance of user-centered design. Through engaging examples and case studies, Norman challenges readers to think critically about the objects they encounter daily, prompting them to consider how design choices influence their experiences. This thought-provoking book about critical thinking encourages readers to question the design of the world around them and to recognize the power of thoughtful, user-centric design in shaping their everyday lives.

The Art of Deception: Controlling the Human Element of Security

By kevin d. mitnick.

The Art of Deception: Controlling the Human Element of Security by Kevin D. Mitnick is a captivating book about the art of manipulating human behavior to gain access to sensitive information. Mitnick, a former hacker turned security consultant, explores the psychological tactics and social engineering techniques used to exploit the human element of security. This eye-opening book on critical thinking sheds light on the vulnerabilities of human nature and provides valuable insights into how to protect against social engineering attacks. Mitnick’s engaging storytelling and real-world examples make this critical thinking book a must-read for anyone interested in cybersecurity, psychology, or human behavior.

Critical Thinking: A Concise Guide

By tracy bowell and gary kemp.

Critical Thinking: A Concise Guide by Tracy Bowell and Gary Kemp is a comprehensive and accessible book about critical thinking. It provides a clear and practical introduction to the essential skills of critical reasoning and argumentation. The authors present a wide range of topics, from identifying and analyzing arguments to evaluating evidence and making sound judgments. This book on critical thinking is perfect for students and anyone looking to improve their analytical and reasoning abilities. With its engaging and easy-to-follow style, it’s a valuable resource for anyone seeking to develop their critical thinking skills and become a more effective and discerning thinker.

Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion

By robert b. cialdini.

Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion by Robert B. Cialdini is a captivating exploration of the psychology behind the art of persuasion. This insightful book delves into the various tactics and techniques used by individuals to influence the behavior and decisions of others. Cialdini draws on his extensive research and real-life examples to shed light on the power of persuasion and how it can be harnessed for both positive and negative outcomes. Whether you’re a marketer, salesperson, or simply interested in the dynamics of human interaction, this book offers valuable insights into the principles of influence and the psychology behind them. It’s a must-read for anyone looking to enhance their understanding of the subtle and often unconscious forces that shape our decisions. This is a book about critical thinking that will leave you with a deeper understanding of the art of persuasion.

The Attacker’s Advantage: Turning Uncertainty into Breakthrough Opportunities

By ram charan.

The Attacker’s Advantage by Ram Charan is a compelling book about critical thinking that explores how businesses can thrive in an uncertain and rapidly changing environment. Charan argues that in today’s volatile market, traditional strategies are no longer sufficient, and companies must learn to embrace uncertainty and turn it into breakthrough opportunities. The book provides insights into how successful companies navigate ambiguity, make bold decisions, and continuously innovate to stay ahead of the competition. Charan presents a framework for leaders to develop a mindset that enables them to see change as an advantage rather than a threat. Packed with real-life examples and actionable strategies, The Attacker’s Advantage is an essential read for anyone looking to sharpen their critical thinking skills and gain a competitive edge in the business world.

These 20 best books about Critical Thinking offer valuable insights and practical strategies for honing this essential skill. From examining logical fallacies to improving decision-making, these books provide a comprehensive guide to developing a well-rounded critical mindset. Whether you’re a student, educator, or lifelong learner, the wisdom contained within these pages will undoubtedly enrich your intellectual journey. Dive into these thought-provoking reads and elevate your ability to think critically in all aspects of life.

Which Critical Thinking book is best?

The best book on Critical Thinking can vary with personal preference, but three widely recommended titles are:

• Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman ,
• The Art of Thinking Clearly by Rolf Dobelli ,
• Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness by Richard H. Thaler and Cass R. Sunstein .

Each offers valuable insights and could be a great starting point.

What are the best books to learn about Critical Thinking?

For those looking to learn about Critical Thinking, there is a wealth of literature that can provide a comprehensive understanding of the subject. Some of the most highly recommended books include:

• Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness by Richard H. Thaler and Cass R. Sunstein ,
• Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions by Dan Ariely ,
• The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark by Carl Sagan ,
• The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable by Nassim Nicholas Taleb ,
• Super Thinking: The Big Book of Mental Models by Gabriel Weinberg and Lauren McCann ,
• The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion by Jonathan Haidt ,
• The Organized Mind: Thinking Straight in the Age of Information Overload by Daniel J. Levitin ,
• The Innovator’s Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail by Clayton M. Christensen

These books offer a range of perspectives on Critical Thinking, covering various aspects and approaches to the subject.

What are the best books on Critical Thinking?

The best books on Critical Thinking include:

• The Lean Startup: How Today’s Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses by Eric Ries ,
• The Upside of Irrationality: The Unexpected Benefits of Defying Logic at Work and at Home by Dan Ariely ,
• The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable by Nassim Nicholas Taleb .

Each offers unique insights into the subject. While these books on the topic of Critical Thinking are highly regarded, it’s important to note that any list of ‘best’ books is subjective and reflects a range of opinions.

What are the best Critical Thinking books of all time?

Choosing the best Critical Thinking books of all time can vary depending on who you ask, but seven titles that are often celebrated include

• The Innovator’s Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail by Clayton M. Christensen ,
• and The Lean Startup: How Today’s Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses by Eric Ries .

Each of these books has made a significant impact in the field of Critical Thinking and continues to be influential today.

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7 Best Critical Thinking Books of All Time

Our goal : Find the best Critical Thinking books according to the internet (not just one random person's opinion).

• Type "best critical thinking books" into our search engine and study the top 4+ pages.
• Add only the books mentioned 2+ times.
• Rank the results neatly for you here! 😊 (It was a lot of work. But hey! That's why we're here, right?)

(Updated 2024)

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Last Updated: Monday 1 Jan, 2024

• Best Critical Thinking Books

Thinking, Fast and Slow

Daniel Kahneman

Predictably Irrational

The hidden forces that shape our decisions.

The Demon-Haunted World

Science as a candle in the dark.

The Art of Thinking Clearly

Rolf Dobelli

Factfulness

Ten reasons we're wrong about the world - and why things are better than you think.

Hans Rosling

How to Think About Weird Things

Critical thinking for a new age.

Theodore Schick

Asking the Right Questions

A guide to critical thinking.

M. Neil Browne

• The 5 Best Books On Critical Thinking | Game-Changer www.game-changer.net
• The 17 Best Books on Critical Thinking (to Read in 2023) upjourney.com
• The 5 Best Books on Critical Thinking for Einstein-Esque Performance bloomsoup.com
• Best Critical Thinking Books theartofliving.com

How was this Critical Thinking books list created?

We searched for 'best Critical Thinking books', found the top 5 articles, took every book mentioned in 2+ articles, and averaged their rankings.

How many Critical Thinking books are in this list?

There are 7 books in this list.

Why did you create this Critical Thinking books list?

We wanted to gather the most accurate list of Critical Thinking books on the internet.

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