Real

True Narratives

• Carla Power, Home, Land, Security: Deradicalization and the Journey Back from Extremism (One World, 2021): “Through interviews with the family members of Westerners who joined ISIS, Power humanizes militant jihadists and offers insights into the forces that push people toward extremism.”

From the dark side:

• Justin E.H. Smith, Irrationality: A History of the Dark Side of Reason (Princeton University Press, 2019): “This is the history of rationality, and therefore also of the irrationality that twins it: exaltation of reason, and a desire to eradicate its opposite; the inevitable endurance of irrationality in human life, even, and perhaps especially — or at least especially troublingly — in the movements that set themselves up to eliminate irrationality; and, finally, the descent into irrational self-immolation of the very currents of thought and of social organization that had set themselves up as bulwarks against irrationality.”
• Mia Bloom and Sophia Moskalenko, Pastels and Pedophiles: Inside the Mind of QAnon (Redwood Press, 2021): “Adherents believe Donald J. Trump is battling the cabal, which, depending on whom you ask, may or may not comprise members of a reptilian alien race disguised as humans.”
• Charles J. Skyes, How the Right Lost Its Mind (St. Martin’s Press, 2017): “A conservative talk-radio host who found himself alienated from his audience and many of his comrades by the rise of Trump, Sykes reexamines his beliefs, and finds himself with more questions than answers.” Apparently, he has figured out (part of) what has been obvious to many people for decades.
• Susan Wels, An Assassin in Utopia: The True Story of a Nineteenth-Century Sex Cult and a President’s Murder (Pegasus Crime, 2023), “links President Garfield’s killer to the atmosphere of free love and religious fervor that gripped Oneida, N.Y., in the late 1800s.”
• Jeff Sharlet, The Undertow: Scenes from a Slow Civil War (W.W. Norton & Co., 2023), “is a riveting, vividly detailed collage of political and moral derangement in America . . .”
• Colin Dickey, Under the Eye of Power: How Fear of Secret Societies Shapes American Democracy (Viking, 2023): “. . . Colin Dickey draws an unbroken line from violence against the Freemasons — whose secret rituals and devotion to social uplift attracted Ben Franklin and many of our young democracy’s early luminaries — to the 2021 Capitol insurrection, demonstrating that our current obsession with conspiracies is not new.”

Still on the dark side, here are some histories of conspiracy theories:

• Richard Hofstadter, The Paranoid Style in American Politics (1964).
• Anna Merlan, Republic of Lies: American Conspiracy Theorists and Their Surprising Rise to Power (Metropolitan Books, 2019): “Throughout the book, she reports from gatherings of people whose beliefs are both extreme and false.”

Technical and Analytical Readings

Texts on rationality:

• Alfred R. Mele & Piers Rawling, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Rationality (Oxford University Press, ).
• Marcus Knauff & Wolfgang Spohn, eds., The Handbook of Rationality (MIT Press, 2021).
• Riccardo Viale, ed.,, The Routledge Handbook of Bounded Rationality (Routledge, 2020).
• Steven Pinker, Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters (Viking, 2021): “Probability and statistics now loom large in both straight and crooked thinking, but logic manuals generally offered only small bites of such fare. The main courses were usually a parade of fallacies, explained in words, plus formal deductive logic (which strips inferences to their skeletons, such as “Some A are B; therefore some B are A”). Pinker has now added comprehensive lessons on statistical significance, how to update your beliefs in the light of fresh data, how to calculate risks and rewards in decision-making and more.”
• Gerd Gigerenzer, Rationality for Mortals: How People Cope with Uncertainty (Oxford University Press, 2008): “The book deals with two complementary modes of thinking of the human mind: heuristic and statistical. Bounded rationality by heuristic thinking is the key to understand how real people make decisions when time and information are limited. Statistical thinking is the key to describe the limits of human inference under uncertainty.”
• Gerd Gigerenzer and Richard Selten, eds., Bounded Rationality: The Adaptive Toolbox (The MIT Press, 2001): “This book promotes bounded rationality as the key to understanding how real people make decisions. Using the concept of an ‘adaptive toolbox,’ a repertoire of fast and frugal rules for decision making under uncertainty, it attempts to impose more order and coherence on the idea of bounded rationality.”
• Gerd Gigerenzer, Adaptive Thinking: Rationality in the Real World (Oxford University Press, 2000): “Gerd Gigerenzer is a man with a mission, and a mission that has some point to it. He wants to show that people are rational decision makers, most of the time.”
• Keith E. Stanovich, What Intelligence Tests Miss: The Psychology of Rational Thought (Yale University Press, 2009): “Stanovich shows that IQ tests (or their proxies, such as the SAT) are radically incomplete as measures of cognitive functioning. They fail to assess traits that most people associate with ‘good thinking,’ skills such as judgment and decision making.”
• Keith E. Stanovich, Rationality and the Reflective Mind (Oxford University Press, 2010): “. . . the author's characterization of his opponents does not seem completely fair or charitable. It is unclear whether Panglossians deny the existence of individual differences or cannot accommodate them. Moreover, there seem to be more arrows in the Panglossians’ quiver than the ones the author mentions. In addition, his main theoretical points are not entirely clear: it is controversial whether data on individual differences provide clues for arbitrating between normative systems, and whether those data are enough to make the case for a tripartite model of the mind. As a result, critics may still doubt that Stanovich has successfully combined his different research projects, and we may conclude that this book has not achieved his grand ambition of resolving the rationality debate.”
• Keith E. Stanovich, Richard F. West and Maggie E. Toplak, The Rationality Quotient: Toward a Test of Rational Thinking (The MIT Press, 2016): “While there is scant evidence that any sort of ‘brain training’ has any real-world impact on intelligence, it may well be possible to train people to be more rational in their decision making.”
• Robert J. Sternberg, Why Smart People Can Be So Stupid (Yale University Press, 2002): “While many millions of dollars are spent each year on intelligence research and testing to determine who has the ability to succeed, next to nothing is spent to determine who will make use of their intelligence and not squander it by behaving stupidly. Why Smart People Can Be So Stupid focuses on the neglected side of this discussion, reviewing the full range of theory and research on stupid behavior and analyzing what it tells us about how people can avoid stupidity and its devastating consequences.”
• Daniel Kahneman, Paul Slovic and Amos Tversky, eds., Judgment Under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases (Cambridge University Press, 1982): “How do people assess the probability of an uncertain event or the value of an uncertain quantity? This article shows that people rely on a limited number of heuristic principles which reduce the complex tasks of assessing probabilities and predicting values to simpler judgmental operations. In general, these heuristics are quite useful, but sometimes they lead to severe and systematic errors. ” (The quotation is from a 1974 article by two of the editors.)
• Julia Galef, The Scout Mindset: Why Some People See Things Clearly and Others Don’t (Portfolio, 2021): she describes the scout mindset as the motivation to see things as they are, not as you wish they were.

From the dark side:

• Dan Ariely, Predictably Irrational, Revised and Expanded Edition: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions (Harper Perennial, 2010).
• Ori Brafman and Rom Brafman, Sway: The Irresistible Pull of Irrational Behavior (Crown Business, 2008).
• Jennifer L. Eberhardt, Biased:  Uncovering the Hidden Prejudice That Shapes What We See, Think, and Do (Viking, 2019): “If our brains didn’t apply categorical knowledge, usually before we’ve had a chance to consciously reflect, we’d experience everything as if for the first time. . . . The problem is that when we live in a society divided by race, gender, class or some other category, our brains learn those social groupings, too, and apply them to order our perceptual field, even when they are more arbitrary than real, even when the “knowledge” attached is a pernicious stereotype and even if we’re committed to equality.”

In many ways, irrationality rules the world. Theism is a prominent part of this phenomenon. Not all religion is theistic. Yet theism’s dominance in the field of religion is so complete that most people do not bother to add the qualifier “theistic”. Here are some books on the irrationality of theistic religion.

• Jerry A. Coyne, Faith Versus Fact: Why Science and Religion are Incompatible (Viking, 2015): “He examines the varieties of accommodationism and explains why each of them fails. Finally, he demonstrates why the conflict between faith and facts matters, highlighting significant impacts of religiously sourced “knowledge”—from religiously motivated child abuse to the running controversy over human-caused climate change.”
• Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion (Houghton Mifflin Company, 2006): “What Dawkins brings to this approach is a couple of fresh arguments — no mean achievement, considering how thoroughly these issues have been debated over the centuries — and a great deal of passion.”

A related subject, also being extensively researched, is that of the rise, persistence and sometimes usefulness of conspiracy theories.

• Jerry E. Uscinski, Conspiracy Theories: A Primer (Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2020).
• Jerry E. Uscinski, ed., Conspiracy Theories and the People Who Believe Them (Oxford University Press, 2018): “a collection that brings together contributors to offer a wide-ranging take on conspiracy theories, examining them as historical phenomena, psychological quirks, expressions of power relations and political instruments.”
• Jerry E. Uscinski and Joseph M. Parent, American Conspiracy Theories (Oxford University Press, 2014): “the authors do not look down upon conspiracy theorists. They believe that, to a certain extent, conspiracy theorizing is a normal phenomenon and can tell us a lot about politics and society. In the end, many great moments in American history had their own conspiracy theories. Before and during the Civil War the abolitionists accused the Slave Power of the South, during the Progressive movement of the early twentieth century Progressives charged the robber barons of conspiring against the common American, and the American revolutionists of the eighteenth century revolted against the conspiracies of the British crown. Of course, slavery, the concentration of trusts and the British imperial dominion were real facts, but it is also true that their opponents frequently used conspiratorial rhetoric in order to mobilize supporters.”

Photographs

Documentary and Educational Films

From the dark side:

• Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief: Prominent among the several themes in this film is the breathtaking irrationality of scientology, both in its founding ideas and in its practices.