Abstract
Reviewed by: Naveen Kashyap, Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology Guwahati, India
Thinking can be construed as a set of mental processes that uses cognitive resources to manipulate mental representations for generating logical and optimal behaviours. Thinking as subject matter of cognition, is covered as a section by most texts on cognitive psychology; The Psychology of Thinking: Reasoning, Decision-Making, and Problem-Solving is aimed at studying the psychology of thinking and evaluating advanced concepts of cognition using a thinking approach. Furthermore, it is meant to serve as a basic text on thinking which will help in understanding related cognitive issues; thus, it is ideal for students with intermediate/advanced knowledge of cognitive psychology and having interest in the study of thinking.
The primary objective of the book lies in understanding the human thought process. In order to achieve this aim the author has divided the entire text into three sections with each section based on a broad theme. The first section outlines the theme ‘The organization of human thought' and within this theme the author has included five chapters. Chapter 1 defines thinking and outlines various challenges to the thinking process like biases and incomplete knowledge. The chapter ends with a section describing the major theoretical approaches to thinking including the Gestalt, Cognitive and Dual Process approaches. The next chapter introduces the fascinating concept of similarity and explains how similarity serves as the core concept for all thinking in terms of perceptual process, memory retrieval and reasoning. The chapter ends with an elaborate description of the multi-dimensional scaling model of similarity and the assumptions the model uses. This is followed by some extensive discussions on how the declarative and procedural memory interacts with the thinking process in the third chapter. Concepts and categories, which are the basis of human thought, are dealt with in Chapter 4. In this chapter discussions are centred on how concepts are formed, leading to the detailed analysis of the classical and probabilistic views of concept representation. The last chapter of this section highlights how people use language for thinking. Starting with an explanation of the meaning of language, the chapter expands on the idea of linguistic inferences, and the use of universal analogies and conceptual metaphor and debate of linguistic relativity and determinism.
The second section focusses on the theme ‘Reasoning and thinking’ and included within this section are chapters on deductive, inductive casual reasoning and context effects on human thought. The human thought process utilizes reasoning to choose the type and form of manipulations of knowledge. The first chapter in this section explains at length inductive reasoning and how inferences are drawn. The nature of induction, categorical induction and theories explaining the categorical induction are the chapter's highlights. Following closely the next chapter begins with distinguishing between deductions and inductions. Further, the logical task structure as well as the concepts of categorical and conditional deductive reasoning is elaborated. The effects of context, motivation and mood on thinking are discussed in the final chapter of this section.
The third section covers the theme of ‘Thinking in action: decision-making, problem-solving, and expertise'. The chapter on decision- making starts by introducing the basic concepts of probability and estimation of base rates. This is followed by describing and contrasting in detail the (normative) rational and (descriptive) behavioural approaches to decision- making. Factors effecting decision-making using both the approaches are discussed. The next chapter starts by defining the meaning of a problem and the various types of problems described in the literature. This explanation is furthered by discussions on approaches to problem-solving (algorithm, heuristic, and means-ends analysis) and the hindrance to solving problems. A brief section on creative thinking concludes the chapter. The last chapter in this section defines in detail the nature of expertise and the characteristics of experts. Various methods that experts use to gain the expert advantage are also outlined.
This is a well-written book and it is easy to comprehend. It discusses in a lucid manner, core concepts of cognitive psychology with a thinking-based approach and can serve as an excellent text for undergraduate students of cognitive psychology. The author does a neat job in explaining the current theories of human thought process and relating them flawlessly with other higher-order human cognition, and the chapters in the text are lucid and very logically connect to concepts preceding and succeeding them. Using a theme based approach the author breaks down the human thought processes and maps them to key concepts of advanced cognitive psychology. Each chapter in the book has a summary which tests the knowledge of the reader and further suggests advanced material in connection with the topic. The book does lack certain features. Important concepts in each chapter should be highlighted alongside the sections. Some sort of practise questions at the end of each section would be a great advantage to the readers. Diagrammatic representation of major concepts within the text would also help readers easily learn and memorize the important concepts. Overall, The Psychology of Thinking: Reasoning, Decision-Making, and Problem-Solving is a complete textbook that can serve as an effective guide for students interested in the understanding of the human thought process.