Discover the essential thinking tools you’ve been missing with The Great Mental Models series by Shane Parrish, New York Times bestselling author and the mind behind the acclaimed Farnam Street blog and “The Knowledge Project” podcast. This first book in the series is your guide to learning the crucial thinking tools nobody ever taught you. Time and time again, great thinkers such as Charlie Munger and Warren Buffett have credited their success to mental models–representations of how something works that can scale onto other fields. Mastering a small number of mental models enables you to rapidly grasp new information, identify patterns others miss, and avoid the common mistakes that hold people back. The Great Mental Models: Volume 1, General Thinking Concepts shows you how making a few tiny changes in the way you think can deliver big results. Drawing on examples from history, business, art, and science, this book details nine of the most versatile, all-purpose mental models you can use right away to improve your decision making and productivity. This book will teach you how to: Avoid blind spots when looking at problems. Find non-obvious solutions. Anticipate and achieve desired outcomes. Play to your strengths, avoid your weaknesses, … and more. The Great Mental Models series demystifies once elusive concepts and illuminates rich knowledge that traditional education overlooks. This series is the most comprehensive and accessible guide on using mental models to better understand our world, solve problems, and gain an advantage.

This book offers a unified theory of the major propertries of mind, including comprehension, inference, and consciousness. The author argues that we apprehend the world by building inner mental replicas of the relationships among objects and events that concern us. The mind is essentially a model-building device that can itself be modeled on a computer. The book provides a blueprint for building such a model and numberous important illustrations of how to do it.

The Oxford Handbook of Thinking and Reasoning brings together the contributions of many of the leading researchers in thinking and reasoning to create the most comprehensive overview of research on thinking and reasoning that has ever been available. Each chapter includes a bit of historical perspective on the topic, and concludes with some thoughts about where the field seems to be heading.

Over the past decade, the question of whether there is a mental logic has become subject to considerable debate. There have been attacks by critics who believe that all reasoning uses mental models and return attacks on mental-models theory. This controversy has invaded various journals and has created issues between mental logic and the biases-and-heuristics approach to reasoning, and the content-dependent theorists. However, despite its pertinence to current issues in cognition, few cognitive scientists really know what the mental-logic theory is, and misapprehensions are prevalent. This volume is a comprehensive presentation of the theory of mental logic and its implications for cognition and development, including the acquisition of language. The theory offered here has three parts. Part I is the mental logic per se that contains a set of inference schemas. Part II is a reasoning program that applies the schemas in lines of reasoning, including a direct-reasoning routine and more sophisticated indirect-reasoning strategies. Part III of the theory is pragmatic, proposing that the basic meaning of each logic particle is in the inferences that are sanctioned by its inference schemas.

This collection brings together a set of specially commissioned chapters from leading international researchers in the psychology of reasoning. Its purpose is to explore the historical, philosophical and theoretical implications of the development of this field. Taking the unusual approach of engaging not only with empirical data but also with the ideas and concepts underpinning the psychology of reasoning, this volume has important implications both for psychologists and other students of cognition, including philosophers. Sub-fields covered include mental logic, mental models, rational analysis, social judgement theory, game theory and evolutionary theory. There are also specific chapters dedicated to the history of syllogistic reasoning, the psychology of reasoning as it operates in scientific theory and practice, Brunswickian approaches to reasoning and task environments, and the implications of Popper's philosophy for models of behaviour testing. This cross-disciplinary dialogue and the range of material covered makes this an invaluable reference for students and researchers into the psychology and philosophy of reasoning.

"Cognitive psychology," "cognitive neuroscience," and "philosophy of mind" are names for three very different scientific fields, but they label aspects of the same scientific goal: to understand the nature of mental phenomena. Today, the three disciplines strongly overlap under the roof of the cognitive sciences. The book's purpose is to present views from the different disciplines on one of the central theories in cognitive science: the theory of mental models. Cognitive psychologists report their research on the representation and processing of mental models in human memory. Cognitive neuroscientists demonstrate how the brain processes visual and spatial mental models and which neural processes underlie visual and spatial thinking. Philosophers report their ideas about the role of mental models in relation to perception, emotion, representation, and intentionality. The single articles have different and mutually complementing goals: to introduce new empirical methods and approaches, to report new experimental results, and to locate competing approaches for their interpretation in the cross-disciplinary debate. The book is strongly interdisciplinary in character. It is especially addressed to researchers in any field related to mental models theory as both a reference book and an overview of present research on the topic in other disciplines. However, it is also an ideal reader for a specialized graduate course. Examines the theory of mental models from the perspectives of cognitive psychology, cognitive neuroscience and philosophy of the mind Introduces new empirical methods, experimental results, and interdisciplinary yet complementary approaches Serves as a reference book and an overview of current research

This book goes beyond other police leadership books to teach practitioners how to think about policing in a structured way that synthesizes criminological theory, statistics, research design, applied research, and what works and what doesn’t in policing into Mental Models. A Mental Model is a representation of how something works. Using a Mental Model framework to simplify complex concepts, readers will take away an in-depth understanding of how cognitive biases affect our ability to understand and interpret data, what empirical research says about effective police interventions, how statistical data should be structured for management meetings, and how to evaluate interventions for efficiency and effectiveness. While evidence-based practice is critical to advancing the police profession, it is limited in scope, and is only part of what is necessary to support sustainable change in policing. Policing requires a scientifically based framework to understand and interpret data in a way that minimizes cognitive bias to allow for better responses to complex problems. Data and research have advanced so rapidly in the last several decades that it is difficult for even the most ambitious of police leaders to keep pace. The Twenty-one Mental Models were synthesized to create a framework for any police, public, or community leader to better understand how cognitive bias contributes to misunderstanding data and gives the reader the tools to overcome those biases to better serve their communities. The book is intended for a wide range of audiences, including law enforcement and community leaders; scholars and policy experts who specialize in policing; students of criminal justice, organizations, and management; reporters and journalists; individuals who aspire to police careers; and citizen consumers of information about policing. Anyone who is going to make decisions about their communities based on data has a responsibility to be numerate and this book Twenty-one Mental Models That Can Change Policing: A Framework For Using Data and Research For Overcoming Cognitive Bias, will help you become just that.