best critical thinking books pdf

The 17 Best Books on Critical Thinking (to Read in 2024)

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The aim of improving your skill of critical thinking isn’t just to be able to reason and give logical arguments about a subject skillfully; your goal is to get to the right answer, to make the right decisions and choices for yourself and others.

Critical thinking helps you:

First , improve the quality of your decisions and judgments, and reevaluate your beliefs objectively.

The human mind is rarely objective. However, mastering the skill of critical thinking keeps your mind objective, at least about those things based on facts.

Take for example the beliefs you have about yourself; Some are based on facts, some on subjective (negative) opinions of others.

Second , become an independent thinker (learn to think for yourself); take ownership of your values, beliefs, judgments, and decisions.

Mastering critical thinking is essential , especially in our modern times, because you must:

• Make a tone of decisions every day;
• Think and come to the right conclusion fast;
• Solve (mostly alone) your problems and issues;
• Weigh carefully facts and information you receive from the dozens of sources you have at your disposal;
• Reevaluate your strategies, beliefs, and habits periodically.

Critical thinking is a skill that you must learn; you’re not born with it. To make your journey a little easier, we’ve gathered the best critical thinking books so you can learn from the masters. Get inspired to become a critical thinker in no time!

The best books on critical thinking:

Table of Contents

1. Critical Thinking: A Beginner’s Guide to Critical Thinking, Better Decision Making, and Problem Solving – Jennifer Wilson

2. wait, what: and life’s other essential questions- james e. ryan, 3. think smarter: critical thinking to improve problem-solving and decision-making skills – michael kallet, 4. brain power: learn to improve your thinking skills – karl albrecht, 5. the art of thinking clearly – rolf dobelli, 6. being logical: a guide to good thinking – d.q. mcinerny, 7. predictably irrational, revised and expanded edition: the hidden forces that shape our decisions – dr. dan ariely, 8. a more beautiful question: the power of inquiry to spark breakthrough ideas – warren berger, 9. a rulebook for arguments – anthony weston, 10. thinking, fast and slow – daniel kahneman, 11. the organized mind: thinking straight in the age of information overload – daniel j. levitin, 12. don’t believe everything you think: the 6 basic mistakes we make in thinking – thomas e. kida, 13. the decision book: 50 models for strategic thinking – mikael krogerus, roman tschäppeler, philip earnhart, jenny piening, 14. weaponized lies: how to think critically in the post-truth era – daniel j. levitin, 15. the demon-haunted world: science as a candle in the dark paperback – carl sagan, ann druyan, 16. how to think about weird things: critical thinking for a new age – theodore schick, lewis vaughn, 17. the 5 elements of effective thinking – edward b. burger, michael starbird.

As the title says, this book introduces you to the art of critical thinking. You’ll discover in it:

• What is critical thinking in practice,
• The different thought processes of critical thinking,
• How will your life be better mastering critical thinking,
• The things your brain needs to enjoy exercising critical thinking,
• Techniques you can use for solving problems,
• How to become a better decision maker, Strategies to use in your critical thinking processes,
• Ways to make good decisions when more people (not just you) are involved,
• Tips to frame your questions in order to maximize the efficiency of your critical thinking.

Wisdom comes from observation, learning, practice, and asking the right questions.

Using examples from history, politics, and his own personal life, James e Ryan shows you the importance of knowing how to:

• Ask questions and gain a better understanding,
• Get to be more curious,
• Push yourself to take action,
• Make your relationship stronger,
• And stay focused on the important things in life.

Related:  Critical Thinking Examples

The book starts with the five fundamental questions:

• Couldn’t we at least…?
• How can I help…?
• What truly matters….?

Knowing how to formulate, address, and deliver the right questions doesn’t leave room for misunderstandings, misinterpretations; asking the wrong questions will most probably give you a wrong answer.

This book (Wait, What?: And Life’s Other Essential Questions) will make you feel (more) courageous; after all, asking questions thanks courage. Asking yourself and others the right questions helps you make informed decisions and decisive action.

This book is a guide on how to train your brain to work even more for you. The author (Michael Kallet) is a critical thinking trainer and coach and gives you a practical set of tools and techniques for critical thinking in your day-to-day life and business.

If you want a clear, actionable step by step program to:

• Improve your critical thinking skills,
• A better understanding of complex problems and concepts,
• And how to put them in practice, then this book is for you.

Learn how to discover the real issues that need a solution, so you don’t waste your time in trying to solve imaginary problems. Increase your mental toughness, useful and productive thought.

In this book, Karl Albrecht shows you how to:

• Build your mental strength,
• Think more clearly logically and creative,
• Improve your memory,
• Solve problems,
• Make decisions more effectively.

Karl Albrecht talks in this book about the six functional abilities you need to have and become more adaptable and an innovative thinker.

The book is packed with practical exercises, fascinating illustrations, games, and puzzles to improve your mental capabilities.

The art of thinking Clearly by Rolf Dobelli is a window into human psychology and reasoning; how we:

• Make decisions;
• Evaluate choices and options;
• Develop cognitive biases.

This book helps you notice and recognize erroneous thinking and make better choices and decisions, change unwanted behaviors and habits.

It will change the way you think about yourself and life in general because you have in this book 99 short chapters with examples of the most common errors of judgment and how to rectify them.

If you wish to think more clearly, make better decisions and choices, reevaluate your biases, and feel better about yourself, this book is for you.

When you decide you want to study the field of logic more closely and improve your critical thinking, this book might be exactly what you need. It’s written clearly and concisely laying out for you the basic building blocks of logic and critical thinking.

The ancient civilizations understood better than us how important is to study logic and rhetoric. With the help of this book, you’ll bring back into your life these essential things that our modern society forgot and missed to teach you as a child.

Having increased logical thinking doesn’t mean to ignore your emotions. It means to start from your emotions and together, (emotions and logic) to take better decisions and see more clearly your choices to move forward in life.

“Predictably Irrational, The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions” is a book packed with examples of how:

• Irrational are our choices;
• We make decisions on impulse;
• We fool ourselves with optimism- “that must work for me.”

The author presents you, in this book, a large number of mental traps and flawed tendencies which can make your life harder.

After reading this book, you’ll be better informed about a variety of human flaws and how to avoid being trapped by irrational thinking. You’ll be better prepared to make decisions and choices based more on facts rather than subjective personal opinions.

Knowing how to ask the right questions is determining your success about many things in your life:

• Influencing others,
• Getting out of tricky situations,
• Reevaluating your beliefs,
• Offering yourself and others compassion,
• Overcoming mistakes and fears.

Warren Berger shows you in this book examples of people who are successful (partially) because they are experts in asking questions and don’t have preconceived ideas about what the answers should be.

This book helps you avoid wasting your innovative and brilliant ideas by presenting them in the same way over and over and getting nowhere over and over.

Asking yourself (and others) the right questions gives you the opportunity to display your ideas in a way that those around you feel compelled to listen.

This book is impressive because, Anthony Weston gives you a lot of excellent and practical advice, ordered in a logical and clear manner.

The examples in this book are realistic and useful, ranging from deductive to oral arguments, from argumentative essays to arguments by analogy.

Once you read this book you’ll want to have it on hand to sort out all sorts of situations you’ll encounter in your day-to-day life.

Daniel Kahneman, the author of this book, is a renowned psychologist and winner of the Nobel Prize in economics.

In this book, you will discover where you can and cannot trust your intuition; how to use the two systems that drive the way you think.

The first system is fast, intuitive, and emotional; the second system is slower, based on facts, and more logical.

The author argues that knowing how to use these two systems can make a huge difference in how you:

• Design your strategies,
• Predict consequences,
• Avoid cognitive biases,
• (and even simple things like) choosing the colors for your home office.

If you want to improve your critical thinking, know when you should use logic (instead of using emotions), and become mentally stronger this book is definitely for you.

Critical thinking can’t be created in a cluttered mind. It’s like trying to prepare a gourmet meal for your loved ones in a cramped and dysfunctional kitchen.

As if is not enough all the information you store in your mind from what you personally experience every day, our modern times forcefully adds to that information a lot of junk.

The book “The Organized Mind: Thinking Straight in the Age of Information Overload” by Daniel J. Levitin will help you sort out and organized your thoughts with the help of the four components in the human attentional system:

• Mind wandering mode;
• Central executive mode;
• Attentional filter;
• Attentional switch.

The book is showing you how you can improve your critical thinking and make better decisions concerning many areas of your life.

This book can (really) change your life if you’re dealing with procrastination, multitasking, the inability to switch off and block the outside world.

All in all, you’ll be better prepared to think straight in the age of information overload.

Thomas E. Kida talks in this book very elegantly about the six basic mistakes your thinking can make.

• The first mistake is being mesmerized by stories and ignoring the facts or statistics.
• The second mistake is searching to confirm what we already know or believe.
• The third mistake is to discount the role that chance and coincidence play in our life.
• The fourth mistake is believing that what you see it’s always the reality.
• The fifth mistake is to oversimplify things.
• The sixth mistake is to believe (trust) faulty memories.

This book can be for you an eye-opener into critical thinking, accepting who you are as you are, and improving the way you choose and make decisions.

Did you know you have a strategy for everything you do? From brushing your teeth to making new friends? From choosing a career to dealing with difficult people?

Considering you have a strategy for everything you do, it’s only logical the try to improve every day the way you develop your strategies and don’t leave it to chance, habit, or convenience.

“The Decision Book: 50 Models for Strategic Thinking” can improve your critical thinking and help you make your life easier and more enjoyable.

This book is interactive and provokes you to think about some of the strategies that don’t bring you the results you want.

It contains 58 illustrations offering summaries for known strategies such as the Rubber Band Model, the Personal Performance Model, and the Black Swan Model.

This book is for you if you want to improve the flexibility of your thinking, accept challenges more comfortable, feel more in control of your decisions and choices.

From this book, by Daniel Levitin, you’ll learn how to think critically and avoid being manipulated by things like misleading statistics and graphics, extreme view, or fake news.

The book contains three main sections:

• Evaluating numbers – how to read statistics and data to find out what lurks underneath and make a more objective analysis
• Evaluating words – how to assess the information you receive from experts, understanding the difference between incidence and prevalence, risk perceptions, and probabilistic thinking
• Evaluating the world – how to interpret scientific methods for different types of reasoning (induction, deduction, abduction)

This book will help you improve your critical thinking providing you with a lot of food for thought.

You know how in a criminal trial they call two experts that have divergent opinions on the same facts? Depending on whose side they are? This book teaches you to see the truth.

Although written in the 1990s, this bestseller book is still relevant in today’s society.

With both intelligence and compassion, Carl Sagan lays out the importance of education, logic, and science. This book will show you a ton of practical skills for assessing arguments, recognizing logical fallacies, and applying the scientific method.

Sagan felt that reason and logic could make the world a better place.

This book contains invaluable instructions on logic and reason using critical thinking, without being dull or difficult to understand.

Schick and Vaughn effectively laid out the key elements on how to assess evidence, sort through reasons, and recognize when a claim is likely to be accurate, making this book an absolute must-read for all students.

If you want to be better at decision-making based on sound evidence and argument, then this book is for you.

If you ever found yourself stuck on a problem, or having trouble in forming new ideas, this book will guide you in finding creative solutions to life’s difficult challenges.

This book emphasizes the value of effective thinking, how it can be mastered, and how to integrate it into everyday life.

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Carmen Jacob

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Philosophy Books

The best books on critical thinking, recommended by nigel warburton.

Thinking from A to Z by Nigel Warburton

Do you know your straw man arguments from your weasel words? Nigel Warburton , Five Books philosophy editor and author of Thinking from A to Z,  selects some of the best books on critical thinking—and explains how they will help us make better-informed decisions and construct more valid arguments.

Interview by Cal Flyn , Deputy Editor

Calling Bullshit: The Art of Skepticism in a Data-Driven World by Carl Bergstrom & Jevin West

Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman

Factfulness: Ten Reasons We're Wrong About The World — And Why Things Are Better Than You Think by Hans Rosling

Black Box Thinking: The Surprising Truth About Success by Matthew Syed

The Art of Thinking Clearly by Rolf Dobelli

Critical Thinking: Your Guide to Effective Argument, Successful Analysis and Independent Study by Tom Chatfield

1 Calling Bullshit: The Art of Skepticism in a Data-Driven World by Carl Bergstrom & Jevin West

2 thinking, fast and slow by daniel kahneman, 3 factfulness: ten reasons we're wrong about the world — and why things are better than you think by hans rosling, 4 black box thinking: the surprising truth about success by matthew syed, 5 the art of thinking clearly by rolf dobelli, 6 critical thinking: your guide to effective argument, successful analysis and independent study by tom chatfield.

I t’s been just over two years since you explained to us what critical thinking is all about. Could you update us on any books that have come out since we first spoke?

Calling Bullshit by Carl Bergstrom and Jevin West started life as a course at the University of Washington. It is a book—a handbook really—written with the conviction that bullshit, particularly the kind that is circulated on the Internet, is damaging democracy , and that misinformation and disinformation can have very serious consequences. Bullshitters don’t care about truth. But truth is important, and this book shows why. It is focussed on examples from science and medicine, but ranges more widely too. It’s a lively read. It covers not just verbal bullshit, bullshit with statistics (particularly in relation to big data) and about causation, but also has a chapter on bullshit data visualisations that distract from the content they are about, or present that data in misleading ways. Like all good books on critical thinking this one includes some discussion of the psychology of being taken in by misleading contributions to public debate.

In How To Make the World Add Up , Tim Harford gives us ten rules for thinking better about numbers, together with a Golden Rule (‘Be curious’). Anyone who has listened to his long-running radio series More or Less will know how brilliant Tim is at explaining number-based claims – as I read it, I hallucinated Tim’s reassuring, sceptical, reasonable, amused, and  patient voice. He draws on a rich and fascinating range of examples to teach us (gently) how not to be taken in by statistics and poorly supported claims. There is some overlap with Calling Bullshit , but they complement each other. Together they provide an excellent training in how not to be bamboozled by data-based claims.

[end of update. The original interview appears below]

___________________________

We’re here to talk about critical thinking. Before we discuss your book recommendations, I wonder if you would first explain: What exactly is critical thinking, and when should we be using it?

There’s a whole cluster of things that go under the label ‘critical thinking’. There’s what you might call formal logic , the most extreme case of abstractions. For example take the syllogism: if all men are mortal, and Socrates is a man, you can deduce from that structure of arguments that Socrates is mortal. You could put anything in the slots of ‘men,’ ‘Socrates,’ ‘mortal’, and whatever you put in, the argument structure remains valid. If the premises are true, the conclusion must be true. That kind of logic, which can be represented using letters and signs rather than words, has its place. Formal logic is a quasi-mathematical (some would say mathematical) subject.

But that’s just one element of critical thinking. Critical thinking is broader, though it encompasses that. In recent years, it’s been very common to include discussion of cognitive biases—the psychological mistakes we make in reasoning and the tendencies we have to think in certain patterns which don’t give us reliably good results. That’s another aspect: focussing on the cognitive biases is a part of what’s sometimes called ‘informal logic’, the sorts of reasoning errors that people make, which can be described as fallacious. They’re not, strictly speaking, logical fallacies, always. Some of them are simply psychological tendencies that give us unreliable results.

The gambler’s fallacy is a famous one: somebody throwing a die that isn’t loaded has thrown it three times without getting a six, and then imagines that, by some kind of law of averages, the fourth time they’re more likely to get a six, because they haven’t yet got one yet. That’s just a bad kind of reasoning, because each time that you roll the dice, the odds are the same: there’s a one in six chance of throwing a six. There’s no cumulative effect and a dice doesn’t have a memory. But we have this tendency, or certainly gamblers often do, to think that somehow the world will even things out and give you a win if you’ve had a series of losses. That’s a kind of informal reasoning error that many of us make, and there are lots of examples like that.

I wrote a little book called Thinking from A to Z which was meant to name and explain a whole series of moves and mistakes in thinking. I included logic, some cognitive biases, some rhetorical moves, and also (for instance) the topic of pseudo-profundity, whereby people make seemingly deep statements that are in fact shallow. The classical example is to give a seeming paradox—to say, for example ‘knowledge is just a kind of ignorance,’ or ‘virtue is only achieved through vice.’ Actually, that’s just a rhetorical trick, and once you see it, you can generate any number of such ‘profundities’. I suppose that would fall under rhetoric, the art of persuasion: persuading people that you are a deeper thinker than you are. Good reasoning isn’t necessarily the best way to persuade somebody of something, and there are many devious tricks that people use within discussion to persuade people of a particular position. The critical thinker is someone who recognises the moves, can anatomise the arguments, and call them to attention.

So, in answer to your question: critical thinking is not just pure logic . It’s a cluster of things. But its aim is to be clear about what is being argued, what follows from the given evidence and arguments, and to detect any cognitive biases or rhetorical moves that may lead us astray.

Many of the terms you define and illustrate in Thinking from A to Z— things like ‘straw man’ arguments and ‘weasel words’—have been creeping into general usage. I see them thrown around on Twitter. Do you think that our increased familiarity with debate, thanks to platforms like Twitter, has improved people’s critical thinking or made it worse?

I think that improving your critical thinking can be quite difficult. But one of the ways of doing it is to have memorable labels, which can describe the kind of move that somebody’s making, or the kind of reasoning error, or the kind of persuasive technique they’re using.

For example, you can step back from a particular case and see that somebody’s using a ‘weak analogy’. Once you’re familiar with the notion of a weak analogy, it’s a term that you can use to draw attention to a comparison between two things which aren’t actually alike in the respects that somebody is implying they are. Then the next move of a critical thinker would be to point out the respects in which this analogy doesn’t hold, and so demonstrate how poor it is at supporting the conclusion provided. Or, to use the example of weasel words—once you know that concept, it’s easier to spot them and to speak about them.

Social media, particularly Twitter, is quite combative. People are often looking for critical angles on things that people have said, and you’re limited in words. I suspect that labels are probably in use there as a form of shorthand. As long as they’re used in a precise way, this can be a good thing. But remember that responding to someone’s argument with ‘that’s a fallacy’, without actually spelling out what sort of fallacy it is supposed to be, is a form of dismissive rhetoric itself.

There are also a huge number of resources online now which allow people to discover definitions of critical thinking terms. When I first wrote Thinking from A to Z , there weren’t the same number of resources available. I wrote it in ‘A to Z’ form, partly just as a fun device that allows for lots of cross references, but partly because I wanted to draw attention to the names of things. Naming the moves is important.

“People seem to get a kick out of the idea of sharing irrelevant features—it might be a birthday or it might be a hometown—with somebody famous. But so what?”

The process of writing the book improved my critical thinking quite a lot, because I had to think more precisely about what particular terms meant and find examples of them that were unambiguous. That was the hardest thing, to find clear-cut examples of the various moves, to illustrate them. I coined some of the names myself: there’s one in there which is called the ‘Van Gogh fallacy,’ which is the pattern of thought when people say: ‘Well, Van Gogh had red hair, was a bit crazy, was left-handed, was born on the 30th of March, and, what do you know, I share all those things’—which I do happen to do—‘and therefore I must be a great genius too.’

I love that. Well, another title that deals with psychological biases is the first critical thinking book that you want to discuss, Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking Fast and Slow . Why did you choose this one?

This is an international bestseller by the Nobel Prize-winning behavioural economist—although he’s principally a psychologist—Daniel Kahneman. He developed research with Amos Tversky, who unfortunately died young. I think it would have been a co-written book otherwise. It’s a brilliant book that summarizes their psychological research on cognitive biases (or its patterns of thinking) which all of us are prone to, which aren’t reliable.

There is a huge amount of detail in the book. It summarizes a lifetime of research—two lifetimes, really. But Kahneman is very clear about the way he describes patterns of thought: as using either ‘System One’ or ‘System Two.’ System One is the fast, intuitive, emotional response to situations where we jump to a conclusion very quickly. You know: 2 + 2 is 4. You don’t think about it.

System Two is more analytical, conscious, slower, methodical, deliberative. A more logical process, which is much more energy consuming. We stop and think. How would you answer 27 × 17? You’d have to think really hard, and do a calculation using the System Two kind of thinking. The problem is that we rely on this System One—this almost instinctive response to situations—and often come out with bad answers as a result. That’s a framework within which a lot of his analysis is set.

I chose this book because it’s a good read, and it’s a book you can keep coming back to—but also because it’s written by a very important researcher in the area. So it’s got the authority of the person who did the actual psychological research. But it’s got some great descriptions of the phenomena he researches, I think. Anchoring, for instance. Do you know about anchoring?

I think so. Is that when you provide an initial example that shapes future responses? Perhaps you’d better explain it.

That’s more or less it. If you present somebody with an arbitrary number, psychologically, most people seem prone when you ask them a question to move in the direction of that number. For instance, there’s an experiment with judges. They were being asked off the cuff: What would be a good sentence for a particular crime, say shoplifting? Maybe they’d say it would be a six-month sentence for a persistent shoplifter.

But if you prime a judge by giving an anchoring number—if you ask, ‘Should the sentence for shoplifting be more than nine months?’ They’re more like to say on average that the sentence should be eight months than they would have been otherwise. And if you say, ‘Should it be punished by a sentence of longer than three months?’ they’re more likely to come down in the area of five , than they would otherwise.

So the way you phrase a question, by introducing these numbers, you give an anchoring effect. It sways people’s thinking towards that number. If you ask people if Gandhi was older than 114 years old when he died, people give a higher answer than if you just asked them: ‘How old was Gandhi when he died?’

I’ve heard this discussed in the context of charity donations. Asking if people will donate, say, £20 a month returns a higher average pledge than asking for £1 a month.

People use this anchoring technique often with selling wine on a list too. If there’s a higher-priced wine for £75, then somehow people are more drawn to one that costs £40 than they would otherwise have been. If  that was the most expensive one on the menu, they wouldn’t have been drawn to the £40 bottle, but just having seen the higher price, they seem to be drawn to a higher number. This phenomenon occurs in many areas.

And there are so many things that Kahneman covers. There’s the sunk cost fallacy, this tendency that we have when we give our energy, or money, or time to a project—we’re very reluctant to stop, even when it’s irrational to carry on. You see this a lot in descriptions of withdrawal from war situations. We say: ‘We’ve given all those people’s lives, all that money, surely we’re not going to stop this campaign now.’ But it might be the rational thing to do. All that money being thrown there, doesn’t mean that throwing more in that direction will get a good result. It seems that we have a fear of future regret that outweighs everything else. This dominates our thinking.

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What Kahneman emphasizes is that System One thinking produces overconfidence based on what’s often an erroneous assessment of a situation. All of us are subject to these cognitive biases, and that they’re extremely difficult to remove. Kahneman’s a deeply pessimistic thinker in some respects; he recognizes that even after years of studying these phenomena he can’t eliminate them from his own thinking. I interviewed him for a podcast once , and said to him: ‘Surely, if you teach people critical thinking, they can get better at eliminating some of these biases.’ He was not optimistic about that. I’m much more optimistic than him. I don’t know whether he had empirical evidence to back that up, about whether studying critical thinking can increase your thinking abilities. But I was surprised how pessimistic he was.

Interesting.

Unlike some of the other authors that we’re going to discuss . . .

Staying on Kahneman for a moment, you mentioned that he’d won a Nobel Prize, not for his research in psychology per se but for his influence on the field of economics . His and Tversky’s ground-breaking work on the irrationality of human behaviour and thinking forms the spine of a new field.

Let’s look at Hans Rosling’s book next, this is Factfulness . What does it tell us about critical thinking?

Rosling was a Swedish statistician and physician, who, amongst other things, gave some very popular TED talks . His book Factfulness , which was published posthumously—his son and daughter-in-law completed the book—is very optimistic, so completely different in tone from Kahneman’s. But he focuses in a similar way on the ways that people make mistakes.

We make mistakes, classically, in being overly pessimistic about things that are changing in the world. In one of Rosling’s examples he asks what percentage of the world population is living on less than $2 a day. People almost always overestimate that number, and also the direction in which things are moving, and the speed in which they’re moving. Actually, in 1966, half of the world’s population was in extreme poverty by that measure, but by 2017 it was only 9%, so there’s been a dramatic reduction in global poverty. But most people don’t realise this because they don’t focus on the facts, and are possibly influenced by what they may have known about the situation in the 1960s.

If people are asked what percentage of children are vaccinated against common diseases, they almost always underestimate it. The correct answer is a very high proportion, something like 80%. Ask people what the life expectancy for every child born today is, the global average, and again they get it wrong. It’s over 70 now, another surprisingly high figure. What Rosling’s done as a statistician is he’s looked carefully at the way the world is.

“Pessimists tend not to notice changes for the better”

People assume that the present is like the past, so when they’ve learnt something about the state of world poverty or they’ve learnt about health, they often neglect to take a second reading and see the direction in which things are moving, and the speed with which things are changing. That’s the message of this book.

It’s an interesting book; it’s very challenging. It may be over-optimistic. But it does have this startling effect on the readers of challenging widely held assumptions, much as Steven Pinker ‘s The Better Angels of Our Nature has done. It’s a plea to look at the empirical data, and not just assume that you know how things are now. But pessimists tend not to notice changes for the better. In many ways, though clearly not in relation to global warming and climate catastrophe, the statistics are actually very good for humanity.

That’s reassuring.

So this is critical thinking of a numerical, statistical kind. It’s a bit different from the more verbally-based critical thinking that I’ve been involved with. I’m really interested to have my my assumptions challenged, and Factfulness is a very readable book. It’s lively and thought-provoking.

Coming back to what you said about formal logic earlier, statistics is another dense subject which needs specialist training. But it’s one that has a lot in common with critical thinking and a lot of people find very difficult—by which I mean, it’s often counter-intuitive.

One of the big problems for an ordinary reader looking at this kind of book is that we are not equipped to judge the reliability of his sources, and so the reliability of the conclusions that he draws. I think we have to take it on trust and authority and hope that, given the division of intellectual labour, there are other statisticians looking at his work and seeing whether he was actually justified in drawing the conclusions that he drew. He made these sorts of public pronouncements for a long time and responded to critics.

But you’re right that there is a problem here. I believe that most people can equip themselves with tools for critical thinking that work in everyday life. They can learn something about cognitive biases; they can learn about reasoning and rhetoric, and I believe that we can put ourselves as members of a democracy in a position where we think critically about the evidence and arguments that are being presented to us, politically and in the press. That should be open to all intelligent people, I think. It is not a particularly onerous task to equip yourself with a basic tools of thinking clearly.

Absolutely. Next you wanted to talk about Five Books alumnus Matthew Syed ‘s Black Box Thinking .

Yes, quite a different book. Matthew Syed is famous as a former international table tennis player, but—most people probably don’t know this—he has a first-class degree in Philosophy, Politics and Economics (PPE) from Oxford as well.

This book is really interesting. It’s an invitation to think differently about failure. The title, Black Box Thinking, comes from the black boxes which are standardly included in every passenger aircraft, so that if an accident occurs there’s a recording of the flight data and a recording of the audio communications as the plane goes down. When there’s a crash, rescuers always aim to recover these two black boxes. The data is then analysed, the causes of the crash, dissected and scrutinized, and the information shared across the aeronautic industry and beyond.

Obviously, everybody wants to avoid aviation disasters because they’re so costly in terms of loss of human life. They undermine trust in the whole industry. There’s almost always some kind of technical or human error that can be identified, and everybody can learn from particular crashes. This is a model of an industry where, when there is a failure, it’s treated as a very significant learning experience, with the result that airline travel has become a very safe form of transport.

This contrasts with some other areas of human endeavour, such as, sadly, much of healthcare, where the information about failures often isn’t widely shared. This can be for a number of reasons: there may be a fear of litigation—so if a surgeon does something unorthodox, or makes a mistake, and somebody as a result doesn’t survive an operation, the details of exactly what happened on the operating table will not be widely shared, typically, because there is this great fear of legal comeback.

The hierarchical aspects of the medical profession may have a part to play here, too. People higher up in the profession are able to keep a closed book, and not share their mistakes with others, because it might be damaging to their careers for people to know about their errors. There has been, historically anyway, a tendency for medical negligence and medical error, to be kept very quiet, kept hidden, hard to investigate.

“You can never fully confirm an empirical hypothesis, but you can refute one by finding a single piece of evidence against it”

What Matthew Syed is arguing is that we need to take a different attitude to failure and see it as the aviation industry does. He’s particularly interested in this being done within the healthcare field, but more broadly too. It’s an idea that’s come partly from his reading of the philosopher Karl Popper, who described how science progresses not by proving theories true, but by trying to disprove them. You can never fully confirm an empirical hypothesis, but you can refute one by finding a single piece of evidence against it. So, in a sense, the failure of the hypothesis is the way by which science progresses: conjecture followed by refutation, not hypothesis followed by confirmation.

As Syed argues, we progress in all kinds of areas is by making mistakes. He was a superb table-tennis player, and he knows that every mistake that he made was a learning experience, at least potentially, a chance to improve. I think you’d find the same attitude among musicians, or in areas where practitioners are very attentive to the mistakes that they make, and how those failures can teach them in a way that allows them to make a leap forward. The book has a whole range of examples, many from industry, about how different ways of thinking about failure can improve the process and the output of particular practices.

When we think of bringing up kids to succeed, and put emphasis on avoiding failure, we may not be helping them develop. Syed’s argument is that we should make failure a more positive experience, rather than treat it as something that’s terrifying, and always to be shied away from. If you’re trying to achieve success, and you think, ‘I have to achieve that by accumulating other successes,’ perhaps that’s the wrong mindset to achieve success at the higher levels. Perhaps you need to think, ‘Okay, I’m going to make some mistakes, how can I learn from this, how can I share these mistakes, and how can other people learn from them too?’

That’s interesting. In fact, just yesterday I was discussing a book by Atul Gawande, the surgeon and New Yorker writer, called The Checklist Manifesto . In that, Gawande also argues that we should draw from the success of aviation, in that case, the checklists that they run through before take-off and so on, and apply it to other fields like medicine. A system like this is aiming to get rid of human error, and I suppose that’s what critical thinking tries to do, too: rid us of the gremlins in machine.

Well, it’s also acknowledging that when you make an error, it can have disastrous consequence. But you don’t eliminate errors just by pretending they didn’t occur. With the Chernobyl disaster , for instance, there was an initial unwillingness to accept the evidence in front of people’s eyes that a disaster had occurred, combined with a fear of being seen to have messed up. There’s that tendency to think that everything’s going well, a kind of cognitive bias towards optimism and a fear of being responsible for error, but it’s also this unwillingness to see that in certain areas, admission of failure and sharing of the knowledge that mistakes have occurred is the best way to minimize failure in the future.

Very Beckettian . “Fail again. Fail better.”

Absolutely. Well, shall we move onto to Rolf Dobelli’s 2013 book, The Art of Thinking Clearly ?

Yes. This is quite a light book in comparison with the others. It’s really a summary of 99 moves in thinking, some of them psychological, some of them logical, some of them social. What I like about it is that he uses lots of examples. Each of the 99 entries is pretty short, and it’s the kind of book you can dip into. I would think it would be very indigestible to read it from cover to cover, but it’s a book to keep going back to.

I included it because it suggests you can you improve your critical thinking by having labels for things, recognising the moves, but also by having examples which are memorable, through which you can learn. This is an unpretentious book. Dobelli doesn’t claim to be an original thinker himself; he’s a summariser of other people’s thoughts. What he’s done is brought lots of different things together in one place.

Just to give a flavour of the book: he’s got a chapter on the paradox of choice that’s three pages long called ‘Less is More,’ and it’s the very simple idea that if you present somebody with too many choices, rather than freeing them and improving their life and making them happier, it wastes a lot of their time, even destroys the quality of their life.

“If you present somebody with too many choices, it wastes a lot of their time”

I saw an example of this the other day in the supermarket. I bumped into a friend who was standing in front of about 20 different types of coffee. The type that he usually buys wasn’t available, and he was just frozen in this inability to make a decision between all the other brands that were in front of him. If there’d only been one or two, he’d have just gone for one of those quickly.

Dobelli here is summarising the work of psychologist Barry Schwartz who concluded that generally, a broader selection leads people to make poorer decisions for themselves. We think going into the world that what we need is more choice, because that’ll allow us to do the thing we want to do, acquire just the right consumable, or whatever. But perhaps just raising that possibility, the increased number of choices will lead us to make poorer choices than if we had fewer to choose between.

Now, that’s the descriptive bit, but at the end of this short summary, he asks ‘So what can you do about this practically?’ His answer is that you should think carefully about what you want before you look at what’s on offer. Write down the things you think you want and stick to them. Don’t let yourself be swayed by further choices. And don’t get caught up in a kind of irrational perfectionism. This is not profound advice, but it’s stimulating. And that’s typical of the book.

You can flip through these entries and you can take them or leave them. It’s a kind of self-help manual.

Oh, I love that. A critical thinking self-help book .

It really is in that self-help genre, and it’s nicely done. He gets in and out in a couple of pages for each of these. I wouldn’t expect this to be on a philosophy reading list or anything like that, but it’s been an international bestseller. It’s a clever book, and I think it’s definitely worth dipping into and coming back to. The author is not claiming that it is the greatest or most original book in the world; rather, it’s just a book that’s going to help you think clearly. That’s the point.

Absolutely. Let’s move to the final title, Tom Chatfield’s Critical Thinking: Your Guide to Effective Argument, Successful Analysis and Independent Study . We had Tom on Five Books many moons ago to discuss books about computer games . This is rather different. What makes it so good?

Well, this is a different kind of book. I was trying to think about somebody reading this interview who wants to improve their thinking. Of the books I’ve discussed, the ones that are most obviously aimed at that are Black Box Thinking , the Dobelli book, and Tom Chatfield’s Critical Thinking . The others are more descriptive or academic. But this book is quite a contrast with the Dobelli’s. The Art of Thinking Clearly is a very short and punchy book, while Tom’s is longer, and more of a textbook. It includes exercises, with summaries in the margins, it’s printed in textbook format. But that shouldn’t put a general reader off, because I think it’s the kind of thing you can work through yourself and dip into.

It’s clearly written and accessible, but it is designed to be used on courses as well. Chatfield teaches a point, then asks you to test yourself to see whether you’ve learnt the moves that he’s described. It’s very wide-ranging: it includes material on cognitive biases as well as more logical moves and arguments. His aim is not simply to help you think better, and to structure arguments better, but also to write better. It’s the kind of book that you might expect a good university to present to the whole first year intake, across a whole array of courses. But I’m including it here more as a recommendation for the autodidact. If you want to learn to think better: here is a course in the form of a book. You can work through this on your own.

It’s a contrast with the other books as well, so that’s part of my reason for putting it in there, so there’s a range of books on this list.

Definitely. I think Five Books readers, almost by definition, tend towards autodidacticism, so this is a perfect book recommendation. And, finally, to close: do you think that critical thinking is something that more people should make an effort to learn? I suppose the lack of it might help to explain the rise of post-truth politics.

It’s actually quite difficult to teach critical thinking in isolation. In the Open University’s philosophy department, when I worked there writing and designing course materials, we decided in the end to teach critical thinking as it arose in teaching other content: by stepping back from time to time to look at the critical thinking moves being made by philosophers, and the critical thinking moves a good student might make in response to them. Pedagogically, that often works much better than attempting to teach critical thinking as a separate subject in isolation.

This approach can work in scientific areas too. A friend of mine has run a successful university course for zoologists on critical thinking, looking at correlation and cause, particular types of rhetoric that are used in write ups and experiments, and so on, but all the time driven by real examples from zoology. If you’ve got some subject matter, and you’ve got examples of people reasoning, and you can step back from it, I think this approach can work very well.

But in answer to your question, I think that having some basic critical thinking skills is a prerequisite of being a good citizen in a democracy . If you are too easily swayed by rhetoric, weak at analysing arguments and the ways that people use evidence, and prone to all kinds of biases that you are unaware of, how can you engage politically? So yes, all of us can improve our critical thinking skills, and I do believe that that is an aspect of living the examined life that Socrates was so keen we all should do.

December 4, 2020

Five Books aims to keep its book recommendations and interviews up to date. If you are the interviewee and would like to update your choice of books (or even just what you say about them) please email us at [email protected]

Nigel Warburton

Nigel Warburton is a freelance philosopher, writer and host of the podcast Philosophy Bites . Featuring short interviews with the world's best philosophers on bite-size topics, the podcast has been downloaded more than 40 million times. He is also our philosophy editor here at Five Books , where he has been interviewing other philosophers about the best books on a range of philosophy topics since 2013 (you can read all the interviews he's done here: not all are about philosophy). In addition, he's recommended books for us on the best introductions to philosophy , the best critical thinking books, as well as some of the key texts to read in the Western canon . His annual recommendations of the best philosophy books of the year are among our most popular interviews on Five Books . As an author, he is best known for his introductory philosophy books, listed below:

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Logical Reasoning

Bradley H. Dowden, California State University Sacramento

Copyright Year: 2017

Publisher: Bradley H. Dowden

Language: English

Formats Available

Conditions of use.

Learn more about reviews.

Reviewed by Matt Carlson, Assistant Professor, Wabash College on 8/6/19

This book takes a "kitchen sink" approach to the material that might be taught in a standard critical thinking course. There is far more material here than could be taught in one semester. The good news, though, is that the chapters are, for the... read more

Comprehensiveness rating: 5 see less

This book takes a "kitchen sink" approach to the material that might be taught in a standard critical thinking course. There is far more material here than could be taught in one semester. The good news, though, is that the chapters are, for the most part, independent of one another, so the book could be used in a relatively modular way.

Content Accuracy rating: 4

Generally good, but I found the use of 'logic' and its cognates to be a little confusing at times. If anything, this book is really about applied epistemology more than logic. That by itself isn't a criticism; it should just be called what it is. But this does introduce some problems in the sections more specifically about logic. The definition of deductive validity and implication, for example, are given in terms of certainty. The author warns against interpreting 'certainty' psychologically, but gives no clue as how to how it might be meant in a logical sense. It follows from this definition that it is possible to have P,Q such that Q "follows from P with certainty" but Q is not certain. I know what is meant by this because I already have background in logic, but I think students will be confused.

Relevance/Longevity rating: 4

A bit of a mixed bag here. I really liked the added section on "Fake News and Misinformation". I haven't seen that in a critical thinking book before, and I thought it was a valuable addition that was clearly informed by current research. I would have appreciated more guidance as to how to judge whether a source is reliable. Of course this is a hard problem (see Goldman's classic "Experts" paper), but the book just gave us a short list of reliable sources. Surely critical thinkers will ask: "But why are *those* sources reliable?"

Clarity rating: 3

The book is generally readable. But it introduces many, many distinctions and new pieces of terminology. Almost all of them are briefly explained when they are introduced, but the sheer number of terms and distinctions is difficult to keep track of. I found this to be a problem in the exercises in particular. Many of the exercises require students to employ the fine distinctions given in the text, but they haven't really been given much guidance (typically, just one example per term is given) as to how to apply those distinctions. As these are a little idiosyncratic in places, I admit that I sometimes had a hard time discerning what the intended "right answer" was supposed to be.

Consistency rating: 4

The book is generally consistent, or at least as consistent as it can be given the "kitchen-sink" approach to content that it employs.

Modularity rating: 5

See above remarks. One virtue of this text is its modularity.

Organization/Structure/Flow rating: 4

Generally good, though I found it a little strange that topics in logic (e.g. deductive validity) were briefly introduced early on, and then discussed in much more detail only in later chapters.

Interface rating: 5

Generally good.

Grammatical Errors rating: 4

Cultural Relevance rating: 5

I appreciated the wide variety of examples given.

As I said above, I think 'logical' in the title, "Logical Reasoning" is a misnomer. This is, for the most part, a book in applied epistemology and philosophy of science. And I think it generally does well in those areas. If one wants a book in logic, there are better open access choices; specifically works in the Open Logic Project, which I cannot recommend highly enough.

On an unrelated note, I found the sections on inductive reasoning somewhat confusing. I'm not sure how helpful it is to discuss inductive/statistical reasoning without requiring the student to do any mathematics. I suppose it is helpful for the student to be aware of pitfalls in statistical reasoning---and the book is helpful here---but students reading this book would have a hard time applying what that they learned about e.g. statistical significance to new cases, I think.

Table of Contents

• Chapter 1 How to Reason Logically
• Chapter 2 Claims, Issues, and Arguments
• Chapter 3 Writing with the Appropriate Precision
• Chapter 4 How to Evaluate Information and Judge Credibility
• Chapter 5 Obstacles to Better Communication
• Chapter 6 Writing to Convince Others
• Chapter 7 Defending Against Deception
• Chapter 8 Detecting Fallacies
• Chapter 9 Consistency and Inconsistency
• Chapter 10 Deductive Reasoning
• Chapter 11 Logical Form and Sentential Logic
• Chapter 12 Aristotelian Logic and Venn-Euler Diagrams
• Chapter 13 Inductive Reasoning
• Chapter 14 Reasoning about Causes and Their Effects
• Chapter 15 Scientific Reasoning

Ancillary Material

About the book.

The goal of this book is to improve your logical-reasoning skills. These skills are also called "critical thinking skills." They are a complex weave of abilities that help you get someone's point, generate reasons for your own point, evaluate the reasons given by others, decide what or what not to do, decide what information to accept or reject, explain a complicated idea, apply conscious quality control as you think, and resist propaganda. Your most important critical thinking skill is your skill at making judgments─not snap judgments that occur in the blink of an eye, but those that require careful reasoning.

This book is also available as an adaptable Word file .

Critical thinking definition

Critical thinking, as described by Oxford Languages, is the objective analysis and evaluation of an issue in order to form a judgement.

Active and skillful approach, evaluation, assessment, synthesis, and/or evaluation of information obtained from, or made by, observation, knowledge, reflection, acumen or conversation, as a guide to belief and action, requires the critical thinking process, which is why it's often used in education and academics.

Some even may view it as a backbone of modern thought.

However, it's a skill, and skills must be trained and encouraged to be used at its full potential.

People turn up to various approaches in improving their critical thinking, like:

• Developing technical and problem-solving skills
• Engaging in more active listening
• Actively questioning their assumptions and beliefs
• Seeking out more diversity of thought
• Opening up their curiosity in an intellectual way etc.

Is critical thinking useful in writing?

Critical thinking can help in planning your paper and making it more concise, but it's not obvious at first. We carefully pinpointed some the questions you should ask yourself when boosting critical thinking in writing:

• What information should be included?
• Which information resources should the author look to?
• What degree of technical knowledge should the report assume its audience has?
• What is the most effective way to show information?
• How should the report be organized?
• How should it be designed?
• What tone and level of language difficulty should the document have?

Usage of critical thinking comes down not only to the outline of your paper, it also begs the question: How can we use critical thinking solving problems in our writing's topic?

Let's say, you have a Powerpoint on how critical thinking can reduce poverty in the United States. You'll primarily have to define critical thinking for the viewers, as well as use a lot of critical thinking questions and synonyms to get them to be familiar with your methods and start the thinking process behind it.

Are there any services that can help me use more critical thinking?

We understand that it's difficult to learn how to use critical thinking more effectively in just one article, but our service is here to help.

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Misinformation and disinformation

Misinformation is false or inaccurate information—getting the facts wrong. Disinformation is false information which is deliberately intended to mislead—intentionally misstating the facts.

The spread of misinformation and disinformation has affected our ability to improve public health, address climate change, maintain a stable democracy, and more. By providing valuable insight into how and why we are likely to believe misinformation and disinformation, psychological science can inform how we protect ourselves against its ill effects.

APA resolution

Combating misinformation and promoting psychological science literacy

Approved by APA Council of Representatives, February 2024

Using psychological science to understand and fight health misinformation

This report describes the best available psychological science on misinformation, particularly as it relates to health.

It offers eight specific recommendations to help scientists, policymakers, and health professionals respond to the ongoing threats posed by misinformation.

Is it safe to get health advice from influencers?

Eight specific ways to combat misinformation

Factors that make people believe misinformation

How and why does misinformation spread?

Magination Press children’s book

True or False? The Science of Perception, Misinformation, and Disinformation

Written for preteens and young teens in lively text accompanied by fun facts, this book explores what psychology tells us about development and persistence of false perceptions and beliefs and the difficulty of correcting them, plus ways to debunk misinformation and think critically and factually about the world around us.

Advice to stem misinformation

What employers can do to counter election misinformation in the workplace

Using psychological science to fight misinformation: A guide for journalists

More from APA

Psychology is leading the way on fighting misinformation

This election year, fighting misinformation is messier and more important than ever

Stopping the spread of misinformation

The anatomy of a misinformation attack

Webinars and presentations

Tackling Misinformation Ahead of Election Day

APA and the Civic Alliance collaborated to address the impact of mis- and disinformation on our democracy. APA experts discussed the psychology behind how mis- and disinformation occurs, and why we should care.

Building Back Trust in Science: Community-Centered Solutions

APA collaborated with American Public Health Association, National League of Cities, and Research!America to host a virtual national conversation about the psychology and impact of misinformation on public health.

Fighting Misinformation With Psychological Science

Psychological science is playing a key role in the global cooperative effort to combat misinformation and change the course on how we’re tackling critical societal issues.

Studying misinformation

Explore the latest psychological research on misinformation and disinformation

How long does gamified psychological inoculation protect people against misinformation?

Perceptions of fake news, misinformation, and disinformation amid the COVID-19 pandemic: A qualitative exploration

Quantifying the effects of fake news on behavior: Evidence from a study of COVID-19 misinformation

Countering misinformation and fake news through inoculation and prebunking

Who is susceptible to online health misinformation? A test of four psychosocial hypotheses

It might become true: How prefactual thinking licenses dishonesty

Federal resources

• Centers for Disease Control and Prevention How to address Covid -19 vaccine misinformation
• U.S. Surgeon General Health misinformation

Resources from other organizations

• AARP Teaching students how to spot misinformation
• American Public Health Association Podcast series: Confronting our disease of disinformation Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4
• News Literacy Project Webinar: Your brain and misinformation: Why people believe lies and conspiracy theories
• NPC Journalism Institute Webinar: Disinformation, midterms & the mind: How psychology can help journalists fight misinformation

To find a researcher studying misinformation and disinformation, please contact our press office .

Published: 27 October 2023

Cybersecurity refers to any technology, measure or practice for preventing cyberattacks or mitigating their impact. 

Cybersecurity aims to protect individuals’ and organizations’ systems, applications, computing devices, sensitive data and financial assets against computer viruses, sophisticated and costly ransomware attacks, and more.

Cyberattacks have the power to disrupt, damage or destroy businesses, and the cost to victims keeps rising. For example, according to IBM's Cost of a Data Breach 2023 report, 

• The average cost of a data breach in 2023 was USD 4.45 million, up 15% over the last three years;
• The average cost of a ransomware-related data breach in 2023 was even higher, at USD 5.13 million. This number does not include the cost of the ransom payment, which averaged an extra USD 1,542,333, up 89% from the previous year. 

By one estimate, cybercrime might cost the world economy  USD 10.5 trillion per year by 2025  (link resides outside ibm.com). 1

The expanding information technology (IT) trends of the past few years include:

• a rise in cloud computing adoption,
• network complexity,
• remote work and work from home,
• bring your own device (BYOD) programs,
• and connected devices and sensors in everything from doorbells to cars to assembly lines.

All these trends create tremendous business advantages and human progress, but also provide exponentially more opportunities for cybercriminals to attack.

Not surprisingly, a recent study found that the global cybersecurity worker gap—the gap between existing cybersecurity workers and cybersecurity jobs that need to be filled—was 3.4 million workers worldwide. 2 Resource-strained security teams are focusing on developing comprehensive cybersecurity strategies that use advanced analytics, artificial intelligence and automation to fight cyberthreats more effectively and minimize the impact of cyberattacks.

The X-Force Threat Intelligence Index offers new insights into top threats to help you prepare and respond faster to cyberattacks, extortion and more.

Register for the Cost of a Data Breach report

A strong cybersecurity strategy protects all relevant IT infrastructure layers or domains against cyberthreats and cybercrime.

Critical infrastructure security protects the computer systems, applications, networks, data and digital assets that a society depends on for national security, economic health and public safety. In the United States, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) developed a cybersecurity framework to help IT providers in this area. The US Department of Homeland Security’ Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) provides extra guidance.

Network security prevents unauthorized access to network resources, and detects and stops cyberattacks and network security breaches in progress. At the same time, network security helps ensure that authorized users have secure and timely access to the network resources they need.

Endpoints—servers, desktops, laptops, mobile devices—remain the primary entry point for cyberattacks. Endpoint security protects these devices and their users against attacks, and also protects the network against adversaries who use endpoints to launch attacks.

Application security protects applications running on-premises and in the cloud, preventing unauthorized access to and use of applications and related data. It also prevents flaws or vulnerabilities in application design that hackers can use to infiltrate the network. Modern application development methods—such as  DevOps and DevSecOps —build security and security testing into the development process.

Cloud security secures an organization’s cloud-based services and assets—applications, data, storage, development tools, virtual servers and cloud infrastructure. Generally speaking, cloud security operates on the shared responsibility model where the cloud provider is responsible for securing the services that they deliver and the infrastructure that is used to deliver them. The customer is responsible for protecting their data, code and other assets they store or run in the cloud. The details vary depending on the cloud services used.

Information security (InfoSec) pertains to protection of all an organization's important information—digital files and data, paper documents, physical media, even human speech—against unauthorized access, disclosure, use or alteration. Data security, the protection of digital information, is a subset of information security and the focus of most cybersecurity-related InfoSec measures.

Mobile security encompasses various disciplines and technologies specific to smartphones and mobile devices, including mobile application management (MAM) and enterprise mobility management (EMM). More recently, mobile security is available as part of unified endpoint management (UEM) solutions that enable configuration and security management for multiple endpoints—mobile devices, desktops, laptops, and more—from a single console.

Malware—short for "malicious software"—is any software code or computer program that is written intentionally to harm a computer system or its users. Almost every modern  cyberattack  involves some type of malware.

Hackers and cybercriminals create and use malware to gain unauthorized access to computer systems and sensitive data, hijack computer systems and operate them remotely, disrupt or damage computer systems, or hold data or systems hostage for large sums of money (see Ransomware).

Ransomware is a type of  malware  that encrypts a victim’s data or device and threatens to keep it encrypted—or worse—unless the victim pays a ransom to the attacker. According to the  IBM Security X-Force Threat Intelligence Index 2023 , ransomware attacks represented 17 percent of all  cyberattacks  in 2022.

“Or worse” is what distinguishes today's ransomware from its predecessors. The earliest ransomware attacks demanded a single ransom in exchange for the encryption key. Today, most ransomware attacks are double extortion attacks, demanding a second ransom to prevent sharing or publication of the victims data. Some are triple extortion attacks that threaten to launch a distributed denial of service attack if ransoms aren’t paid.

Phishing attacks are email, text or voice messages that trick users into downloading malware, sharing sensitive information or sending funds to the wrong people. Most users are familiar with bulk phishing scams—mass-mailed fraudulent messages that appear to be from a large and trusted brand, asking recipients to reset their passwords or reenter credit card information. But more sophisticated phishing scams, such as spear phishing and business email compromise (BEC) , target specific individuals or groups to steal especially valuable data or large sums of money.

Phishing is just one type of social engineering —a class of ‘human hacking’ tactics and attacks that use psychological manipulation to tempt or pressure people into taking unwise actions.

Insider threats are threats that originate with authorized users—employees, contractors, business partners—who intentionally or accidentally misuse their legitimate access, or have their accounts hijacked by cybercriminals. Insider threats can be harder to detect than external threats because they have the earmarks of authorized activity, and are invisible to antivirus software, firewalls and other security solutions that block external attacks.

One of the more persistent cybersecurity myths is that all cybercrime comes from external threats. In fact, according to a recent study, 44% of insider threats are caused by malicious actors, and the average cost per incident for malicious insider incidents in 2022 was USD 648,062. 3 Another study found that while the average external threat compromises about 200 million records, incidents involving an inside threat actor resulted in exposure of one billion records or more. 4

A DDoS attack attempts to crash a server, website or network by overloading it with traffic, usually from a botnet—a network of multiple distributed systems that a cybercriminal hijacks by using malware and remote-controlled operations.

The global volume of DDoS attacks spiked during the COVID-19 pandemic. Increasingly, attackers are combining DDoS attacks with ransomware attacks, or simply threatening to launch DDoS attacks unless the target pays a ransom.

Despite an ever-increasing volume of cybersecurity incidents worldwide and ever-increasing volumes of learnings that are gleaned from them, some dangerous misconceptions persist.

Strong passwords alone are adequate protection . Strong passwords make a difference. For example, a 12-character password takes 62 trillion times longer to crack than a 6-character password. But because cybercriminals can steal passwords (or pay disgruntled employees or other insiders to steal them), they can’t be an organization’s or individual’s only security measure.  

The major cybersecurity risks are well known . In fact, the risk surface is constantly expanding. Thousands of new vulnerabilities are reported in old and new applications and devices every year. Opportunities for human error—specifically by negligent employees or contractors who unintentionally cause a data breach—keep increasing.  

All cyberattack vectors are contained . Cybercriminals are finding new attack vectors all the time—including Linux systems, operational technology (OT), Internet of Things (IoT) devices and cloud environments.  

‘My industry is safe.’ Every industry has its share of cybersecurity risks, with cyber adversaries exploiting the necessities of communication networks within almost every government and private-sector organization. For example, ransomware attacks are targeting more sectors than ever, including local governments, non-profits and healthcare providers. Threats on supply chains, ".gov" websites, and critical infrastructure have also increased.  

Cybercriminals don’t attack small businesses . Yes, they do. For example, in 2021, 82 percent of ransomware attacks targeted companies with fewer than 1,000 employees; 37 percent of companies attacked with ransomware had fewer than 100 employees. 5

The following best practices and technologies can help your organization implement strong cybersecurity that reduces your vulnerability to cyberattacks and protects your critical information systems without intruding on the user or customer experience.

Security awareness training helps users understand how seemingly harmless actions—from using the same simple password for multiple log-ins, to oversharing on social media—increases their own or their organization’s risk of attack. Security awareness training combined with thought-out data security  policies can help employees protect sensitive personal and organizational data. It can also help them recognize and avoid phishing and malware attacks.

Identity and access management (IAM) defines the roles and access privileges for each user, and the conditions under which they are granted or denied their privileges. IAM technologies include  multi-factor authentication , which requires at least one credential in addition to a username and password, and adaptive authentication, which requires more credentials depending on context. 

Attack surface management (ASM) is the continuous discovery, analysis, remediation and monitoring of the cybersecurity vulnerabilities and potential attack vectors that make up an organization’s attack surface . Unlike other cyberdefense disciplines, ASM is conducted entirely from a hacker’s perspective, rather than the perspective of the defender. It identifies targets and assesses risks based on the opportunities they present to a malicious attacker.

Organizations rely on analytics- and AI-driven technologies to identify and respond to potential or actual attacks in progress because it's impossible to stop all cyberattacks. These technologies can include (but are not limited to) security information and event management (SIEM) , security orchestration, automation and response (SOAR) , and endpoint detection and response (EDR) . Typically, these technologies are used as part of a formal incident response plan.

Disaster recovery capabilities often play a key role in maintaining business continuity in the event of a cyberattack. For example, the ability to fail over to a backup that is hosted in a remote location can enable a business to resume operations quickly following a ransomware attack (and sometimes without paying a ransom).

Outsmart attacks with a connected, modernized security suite. The QRadar portfolio is embedded with enterprise-grade AI and offers integrated products for endpoint security, log management, SIEM and SOAR—all with a common user interface, shared insights and connected workflows.

Proactive threat hunting, continuous monitoring and a deep investigation of threats are just a few of the priorities facing an already busy IT department. Having a trusted incident response team on standby can reduce your response time, minimize the impact of a cyberattack, and help you recover faster.

AI-driven unified endpoint management (UEM) protects your devices, apps, content and data. This protection means you can rapidly scale your remote workforce and bring-your-own-device (BYOD) initiatives while building a zero trust security strategy. 

Implemented on premises or in a hybrid cloud, IBM data security solutions help you investigate and remediate cyberthreats, enforce real-time controls and manage regulatory compliance.

Proactively protect your organization’s primary and secondary storage systems against ransomware, human error, natural disasters, sabotage, hardware failures and other data loss risks.

Be better prepared for breaches by understanding their causes and the factors that increase or reduce costs. Learn from the experiences of more than 550 organizations that were hit by a data breach.

SIEM (security information and event management) is software that helps organizations recognize and address potential security threats and vulnerabilities before they can disrupt business operations.

Know the threat to beat the threat—get actionable insights that help you understand how threat actors are waging attacks, and how to proactively protect your organization.

Understand your cybersecurity landscape and prioritize initiatives together with senior IBM security architects and consultants in a no-cost, virtual or in-person, 3-hour design thinking session.

Threat management is a process used by cybersecurity professionals to prevent cyberattacks, detect cyber threats and respond to security incidents.

Find insights for rethinking your ransomware defenses and building your ability to remediate an evolving ransomware situation more rapidly.

Cybersecurity threats are becoming more advanced, more persistent and are demanding more effort by security analysts to sift through countless alerts and incidents. IBM Security QRadar SIEM helps you remediate threats faster while maintaining your bottom line. QRadar SIEM prioritizes high-fidelity alerts to help you catch threats that others miss.

1  Cybercrime threatens business growth. Take these steps to mitigate your risk.  (link resides outside ibm.com)

2  Bridging the 3.4 million workforce gap in cybersecurity (link resides outside ibm.com)

3  2022 Ponemon Cost of Insider Threats Global Report  (link resides outside ibm.com)

4  Verizon 2023 Data Breach Investigations Report  (link resides outside ibm.com)

5   82% of Ransomware Attacks Target Small Businesses, Report Reveals  (link resides outside ibm.com)

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The state of AI in 2023: Generative AI’s breakout year

You have reached a page with older survey data. please see our 2024 survey results here ..

The latest annual McKinsey Global Survey  on the current state of AI confirms the explosive growth of generative AI (gen AI) tools . Less than a year after many of these tools debuted, one-third of our survey respondents say their organizations are using gen AI regularly in at least one business function. Amid recent advances, AI has risen from a topic relegated to tech employees to a focus of company leaders: nearly one-quarter of surveyed C-suite executives say they are personally using gen AI tools for work, and more than one-quarter of respondents from companies using AI say gen AI is already on their boards’ agendas. What’s more, 40 percent of respondents say their organizations will increase their investment in AI overall because of advances in gen AI. The findings show that these are still early days for managing gen AI–related risks, with less than half of respondents saying their organizations are mitigating even the risk they consider most relevant: inaccuracy.

The organizations that have already embedded AI capabilities have been the first to explore gen AI’s potential, and those seeing the most value from more traditional AI capabilities—a group we call AI high performers—are already outpacing others in their adoption of gen AI tools. 1 We define AI high performers as organizations that, according to respondents, attribute at least 20 percent of their EBIT to AI adoption.

The expected business disruption from gen AI is significant, and respondents predict meaningful changes to their workforces. They anticipate workforce cuts in certain areas and large reskilling efforts to address shifting talent needs. Yet while the use of gen AI might spur the adoption of other AI tools, we see few meaningful increases in organizations’ adoption of these technologies. The percent of organizations adopting any AI tools has held steady since 2022, and adoption remains concentrated within a small number of business functions.

Table of Contents

• It’s early days still, but use of gen AI is already widespread
• Leading companies are already ahead with gen AI
• AI-related talent needs shift, and AI’s workforce effects are expected to be substantial
• With all eyes on gen AI, AI adoption and impact remain steady

About the research

1. it’s early days still, but use of gen ai is already widespread.

The findings from the survey—which was in the field in mid-April 2023—show that, despite gen AI’s nascent public availability, experimentation with the tools  is already relatively common, and respondents expect the new capabilities to transform their industries. Gen AI has captured interest across the business population: individuals across regions, industries, and seniority levels are using gen AI for work and outside of work. Seventy-nine percent of all respondents say they’ve had at least some exposure to gen AI, either for work or outside of work, and 22 percent say they are regularly using it in their own work. While reported use is quite similar across seniority levels, it is highest among respondents working in the technology sector and those in North America.

Organizations, too, are now commonly using gen AI. One-third of all respondents say their organizations are already regularly using generative AI in at least one function—meaning that 60 percent of organizations with reported AI adoption are using gen AI. What’s more, 40 percent of those reporting AI adoption at their organizations say their companies expect to invest more in AI overall thanks to generative AI, and 28 percent say generative AI use is already on their board’s agenda. The most commonly reported business functions using these newer tools are the same as those in which AI use is most common overall: marketing and sales, product and service development, and service operations, such as customer care and back-office support. This suggests that organizations are pursuing these new tools where the most value is. In our previous research , these three areas, along with software engineering, showed the potential to deliver about 75 percent of the total annual value from generative AI use cases.

In these early days, expectations for gen AI’s impact are high : three-quarters of all respondents expect gen AI to cause significant or disruptive change in the nature of their industry’s competition in the next three years. Survey respondents working in the technology and financial-services industries are the most likely to expect disruptive change from gen AI. Our previous research shows  that, while all industries are indeed likely to see some degree of disruption, the level of impact is likely to vary. 2 “ The economic potential of generative AI: The next productivity frontier ,” McKinsey, June 14, 2023. Industries relying most heavily on knowledge work are likely to see more disruption—and potentially reap more value. While our estimates suggest that tech companies, unsurprisingly, are poised to see the highest impact from gen AI—adding value equivalent to as much as 9 percent of global industry revenue—knowledge-based industries such as banking (up to 5 percent), pharmaceuticals and medical products (also up to 5 percent), and education (up to 4 percent) could experience significant effects as well. By contrast, manufacturing-based industries, such as aerospace, automotives, and advanced electronics, could experience less disruptive effects. This stands in contrast to the impact of previous technology waves that affected manufacturing the most and is due to gen AI’s strengths in language-based activities, as opposed to those requiring physical labor.

Responses show many organizations not yet addressing potential risks from gen AI

According to the survey, few companies seem fully prepared for the widespread use of gen AI—or the business risks these tools may bring. Just 21 percent of respondents reporting AI adoption say their organizations have established policies governing employees’ use of gen AI technologies in their work. And when we asked specifically about the risks of adopting gen AI, few respondents say their companies are mitigating the most commonly cited risk with gen AI: inaccuracy. Respondents cite inaccuracy more frequently than both cybersecurity and regulatory compliance, which were the most common risks from AI overall in previous surveys. Just 32 percent say they’re mitigating inaccuracy, a smaller percentage than the 38 percent who say they mitigate cybersecurity risks. Interestingly, this figure is significantly lower than the percentage of respondents who reported mitigating AI-related cybersecurity last year (51 percent). Overall, much as we’ve seen in previous years, most respondents say their organizations are not addressing AI-related risks.

2. Leading companies are already ahead with gen AI

The survey results show that AI high performers—that is, organizations where respondents say at least 20 percent of EBIT in 2022 was attributable to AI use—are going all in on artificial intelligence, both with gen AI and more traditional AI capabilities. These organizations that achieve significant value from AI are already using gen AI in more business functions than other organizations do, especially in product and service development and risk and supply chain management. When looking at all AI capabilities—including more traditional machine learning capabilities, robotic process automation, and chatbots—AI high performers also are much more likely than others to use AI in product and service development, for uses such as product-development-cycle optimization, adding new features to existing products, and creating new AI-based products. These organizations also are using AI more often than other organizations in risk modeling and for uses within HR such as performance management and organization design and workforce deployment optimization.

AI high performers are much more likely than others to use AI in product and service development.

Another difference from their peers: high performers’ gen AI efforts are less oriented toward cost reduction, which is a top priority at other organizations. Respondents from AI high performers are twice as likely as others to say their organizations’ top objective for gen AI is to create entirely new businesses or sources of revenue—and they’re most likely to cite the increase in the value of existing offerings through new AI-based features.

As we’ve seen in previous years , these high-performing organizations invest much more than others in AI: respondents from AI high performers are more than five times more likely than others to say they spend more than 20 percent of their digital budgets on AI. They also use AI capabilities more broadly throughout the organization. Respondents from high performers are much more likely than others to say that their organizations have adopted AI in four or more business functions and that they have embedded a higher number of AI capabilities. For example, respondents from high performers more often report embedding knowledge graphs in at least one product or business function process, in addition to gen AI and related natural-language capabilities.

While AI high performers are not immune to the challenges of capturing value from AI, the results suggest that the difficulties they face reflect their relative AI maturity, while others struggle with the more foundational, strategic elements of AI adoption. Respondents at AI high performers most often point to models and tools, such as monitoring model performance in production and retraining models as needed over time, as their top challenge. By comparison, other respondents cite strategy issues, such as setting a clearly defined AI vision that is linked with business value or finding sufficient resources.

The findings offer further evidence that even high performers haven’t mastered best practices regarding AI adoption, such as machine-learning-operations (MLOps) approaches, though they are much more likely than others to do so. For example, just 35 percent of respondents at AI high performers report that where possible, their organizations assemble existing components, rather than reinvent them, but that’s a much larger share than the 19 percent of respondents from other organizations who report that practice.

Many specialized MLOps technologies and practices  may be needed to adopt some of the more transformative uses cases that gen AI applications can deliver—and do so as safely as possible. Live-model operations is one such area, where monitoring systems and setting up instant alerts to enable rapid issue resolution can keep gen AI systems in check. High performers stand out in this respect but have room to grow: one-quarter of respondents from these organizations say their entire system is monitored and equipped with instant alerts, compared with just 12 percent of other respondents.

3. AI-related talent needs shift, and AI’s workforce effects are expected to be substantial

Our latest survey results show changes in the roles that organizations are filling to support their AI ambitions. In the past year, organizations using AI most often hired data engineers, machine learning engineers, and Al data scientists—all roles that respondents commonly reported hiring in the previous survey. But a much smaller share of respondents report hiring AI-related-software engineers—the most-hired role last year—than in the previous survey (28 percent in the latest survey, down from 39 percent). Roles in prompt engineering have recently emerged, as the need for that skill set rises alongside gen AI adoption, with 7 percent of respondents whose organizations have adopted AI reporting those hires in the past year.

The findings suggest that hiring for AI-related roles remains a challenge but has become somewhat easier over the past year, which could reflect the spate of layoffs at technology companies from late 2022 through the first half of 2023. Smaller shares of respondents than in the previous survey report difficulty hiring for roles such as AI data scientists, data engineers, and data-visualization specialists, though responses suggest that hiring machine learning engineers and AI product owners remains as much of a challenge as in the previous year.

Looking ahead to the next three years, respondents predict that the adoption of AI will reshape many roles in the workforce. Generally, they expect more employees to be reskilled than to be separated. Nearly four in ten respondents reporting AI adoption expect more than 20 percent of their companies’ workforces will be reskilled, whereas 8 percent of respondents say the size of their workforces will decrease by more than 20 percent.

Looking specifically at gen AI’s predicted impact, service operations is the only function in which most respondents expect to see a decrease in workforce size at their organizations. This finding generally aligns with what our recent research  suggests: while the emergence of gen AI increased our estimate of the percentage of worker activities that could be automated (60 to 70 percent, up from 50 percent), this doesn’t necessarily translate into the automation of an entire role.

AI high performers are expected to conduct much higher levels of reskilling than other companies are. Respondents at these organizations are over three times more likely than others to say their organizations will reskill more than 30 percent of their workforces over the next three years as a result of AI adoption.

4. With all eyes on gen AI, AI adoption and impact remain steady

While the use of gen AI tools is spreading rapidly, the survey data doesn’t show that these newer tools are propelling organizations’ overall AI adoption. The share of organizations that have adopted AI overall remains steady, at least for the moment, with 55 percent of respondents reporting that their organizations have adopted AI. Less than a third of respondents continue to say that their organizations have adopted AI in more than one business function, suggesting that AI use remains limited in scope. Product and service development and service operations continue to be the two business functions in which respondents most often report AI adoption, as was true in the previous four surveys. And overall, just 23 percent of respondents say at least 5 percent of their organizations’ EBIT last year was attributable to their use of AI—essentially flat with the previous survey—suggesting there is much more room to capture value.

Organizations continue to see returns in the business areas in which they are using AI, and they plan to increase investment in the years ahead. We see a majority of respondents reporting AI-related revenue increases within each business function using AI. And looking ahead, more than two-thirds expect their organizations to increase their AI investment over the next three years.

The online survey was in the field April 11 to 21, 2023, and garnered responses from 1,684 participants representing the full range of regions, industries, company sizes, functional specialties, and tenures. Of those respondents, 913 said their organizations had adopted AI in at least one function and were asked questions about their organizations’ AI use. To adjust for differences in response rates, the data are weighted by the contribution of each respondent’s nation to global GDP.

The survey content and analysis were developed by Michael Chui , a partner at the McKinsey Global Institute and a partner in McKinsey’s Bay Area office, where Lareina Yee is a senior partner; Bryce Hall , an associate partner in the Washington, DC, office; and senior partners Alex Singla and Alexander Sukharevsky , global leaders of QuantumBlack, AI by McKinsey, based in the Chicago and London offices, respectively.

They wish to thank Shivani Gupta, Abhisek Jena, Begum Ortaoglu, Barr Seitz, and Li Zhang for their contributions to this work.

This article was edited by Heather Hanselman, an editor in the Atlanta office.

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