Partial Truths

How Fractions Distort Our Thinking

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Pub Date 10 May 2022 | Archive Date 17 Aug 2022

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Description

A fast-food chain once tried to compete with McDonald’s quarter-pounder by introducing a third-pound hamburger—only for it to flop when consumers thought a third pound was less than a quarter pound because three is less than four. Separately, a rash of suicides by teenagers who played Dungeons and Dragons caused a panic in parents and the media. They thought D&D was causing teenage suicides—when in fact teenage D&D players committed suicide at a much lower rate than the national average. Errors of this type can be found from antiquity to the present, from the Peloponnesian War to the COVID-19 pandemic. How and why do we keep falling into these traps?

James C. Zimring argues that many of the mistakes that the human mind consistently makes boil down to misperceiving fractions. We see slews of statistics that are essentially fractions, such as percentages, probabilities, frequencies, and rates, and we tend to misinterpret them. Sometimes bad actors manipulate us by cherry-picking data or distorting how information is presented; other times, sloppy communicators inadvertently mislead us. In many cases, we fool ourselves and have only our own minds to blame. Zimring also explores the counterintuitive reason that these flaws might benefit us, demonstrating that individual error can be highly advantageous to problem solving by groups. Blending key scientific research in cognitive psychology with accessible real-life examples, Partial Truths helps readers spot the fallacies lurking in everyday information, from politics to the criminal justice system, from religion to science, from business strategies to New Age culture.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

James C. Zimring is the Thomas W. Tillack Professor of Experimental Pathology at the University of Virginia School of Medicine. He is the author of What Science Is and How It Really Works (2019).

A fast-food chain once tried to compete with McDonald’s quarter-pounder by introducing a third-pound hamburger—only for it to flop when consumers thought a third pound was less than a quarter pound...


Advance Praise

"In this brilliant follow up to What Science Is and How It Really Works, James Zimring engages the reader in a kind of detective story about the classic mistakes of human reasoning, due to our innumeracy. From bad social policy to pandemics to terrorism, he shows how human decision making often gets it so wrong. What I loved most about Partial Truths though is that he didn't just establish that we make errors, but why. This amounts to a handy, insightful, eminently readable guide to the intricate evolution of the human mind itself. If you enjoyed Daniel Kahneman's Thinking Fast and Slow, you'll love this book.

--Lee McIntyre, author of How to Talk to a Science Denier

"In this brilliant follow up to What Science Is and How It Really Works, James Zimring engages the reader in a kind of detective story about the classic mistakes of human reasoning, due to our...


Available Editions

EDITION Hardcover
ISBN 9780231201384
PRICE $28.00 (USD)

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Average rating from 8 members


Featured Reviews

I enjoyed this book. The book is really about biases but uses fractions as a discussion point. There is not a lot of math in the book; what little there is, is explained very well. The book has a conversational tone and the author shares some personal perspectives, which I usually appreciate. The writing is quite compelling, with some humor and clever wording. The endnotes are also worth reading, however, the endnotes that contain clarifications on the text are mixed in with the endnotes that only contain references and citations. I find this annoying in many books. I much prefer that clarifications or explanations appear as footnotes on the same page as the content. I quickly stopped checking the endnotes but scanned through them at the end and many were worthwhile reading. While the pacing of the book was quite good overall, I found that the book slowed down when the discussion turned to cognitive psychology. Nonetheless, the book was so good overall that it still merits 5 stars. Thank you to Netgalley and Columbia University Press for the advance reader copy.

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