This book was very interesting, on the cover it states; "The fallibility of human reason in everyday life". Gilovich talks about how us as individuals trust in what we think. This book really is all about perception and how stereotypes help us process information. The three main topics he covers is beliefs about special psychological powers, beliefs about New Age health practices, and beliefs about the effectiveness of various dysfunctional social strategies.
This book has many good chapters, but there is one chapter that stood out the most; Chapter 4 Seeing What We Expect to See. The reason why I chose this chapter was because it explains that we can believe in whatever we want to believe in. An example Gilovich used in this chapter is that "No feature of human judgement and reasoning illustrates this trade-off of advantage and disadvantage better than the tendency for our expectations, preconceptions, and prior beliefs to influence our interpretation of new information". I really like this because the belief isn't necessarily religion but it can be any belief. Such as a belief is extraterrestrials, the belief that astrological predications are true, believing in something is endless. And if it makes you happy, just keep believing in it, theres nothing wrong with that.
I really think this chapter goes great with our class. Since this is a "paranormal"class, belief falls right into it. Looking as some of the posts, you can easily see what people do and don't believe in aliens, The Jersey Devil, Medications, the list goes on.
https://vimeo.com/21988909
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