Social Observations on our Biased Thinking

 The Age of Magical Thinking

Amanda Montell, CC BY-SA 4.0  via Wikimedia Commons

Thank you to NetGalley and Atria Books for providing me with an advanced copy of this book. Amanda Montell is one of the best non-fiction writers out there today. I loved her books Cultish and Wordslut not only for her ability to explore popular phenomena, but also for her ability to take complicated concepts and ideas and make them accessible for public consumption. She does it with such style and humor, often making references to popular culture or her own life and experiences. The Age of Magical Overthinking is also representative of this approach to her writing and analysis. This book examines different kinds of bias and explores how this affects our thinking, while also using specific examples from society, popular culture, and Montell’s own life and experiences. I think that this book got more personal than any of her previous books, and I really appreciated it, especially the chapter on sunk cost bias and Mr. Backpack (A Toxic Relationship is Just a Cult of One). Montell moves seamlessly from popular culture to peer reviewed research studies that explore and explain these biases, how they operate in our mind, and how they were discovered. Furthermore, she offers some examples of people who have worked to overcome their biases or how we can move beyond these biases. I wasn’t sure exactly what this book was at first—if it was a personal narrative, kind of like Joan Didion’s book from which is cites and adapts the title, or if it was more of a pop psychology book like her other writing. In some ways, it’s both, and this is definitely a strength of the book. Her candor and honest revelations are brave, funny, and meaningfully contribute to the book, helping us better understand these biases. I also appreciated how she framed many of the biases in the pandemic, often using recent events to share how the isolation and uncertainty brought about some of the worst in our biases and magical thinking. This is the kind of book that I would use a chapter in my writing course. It’s not only a great way to explain a psychological concept, but Montell explains and analyzes these concepts in such an entertaining and personal way, I know that my students would really engaged with these chapters.