The Age of Magical Overthinking
The Age of Magical Overthinking: Notes on Modern Irrationality
By: Amanda Montell
[On my list of Most Anticipated Books of 2024]
I enjoyed Montell’s book, Cultish, even though there were some problematic areas because I thought there were some really interesting and important things to think about. I think my conclusion for this book is about the same.
I guess I was a little surprised by all the negative reviews for this book. Probably because I wasn’t coming into this book expecting a scholarly work or even a perspective I completely agreed with. I felt like it met my expectations.
I think the idea that people are irrational overthinkers intrigued me because I like to try to understand why people reach different conclusions or decisions than I would, especially when the choices don’t make any sense to me. Of course, I never have cognitive biases so I didn’t have to do any self-reflection at all while reading this book, which is always nice.
Ha.
No, there were lots of interesting things in these pages that did make me think about my own biases. And just like parts of Cultish reminded me of The Coddling of the American Mind, so too, did this book. She should be friends with Jonathan Haidt if she isn’t already. CBT buddies. (That sounds like drugs but it’s not.)
As many critical reviewers pointed out: cognitive biases are not a new phenomenon and you’ve probably heard of most of the ones she talks about— although I will say the IKEA effect was new to me. But that’s the sneaky thing about cognitive biases; they are triggered in our thinking when we don’t even realize it. I think we all need to be thinking more about how we think. What is that, meta thinking? Oh, I was close. It’s metacognition; just looked it up.
Let’s be more metacognitive!!
The title of this book is a relative to the 2005 book, The Year of Magical Thinking, in which the author, Joan Didion explores some of the ‘magical thinking’ she had during her husband’s illness and grieving his loss— magical thinking broadly meaning “the belief that one’s internal thoughts can affect external events” or one’s thoughts can avoid the unavoidable.
Montell’s take is on magical OVERthinking. She describes it this way:
“We’re living in what they call the ‘Information Age’, but life only seems to be making less sense. We’re isolated, listless, burnt out on screens, cutting loved ones out like tumors in the spirit of ‘boundaries’, failing to understand other people’s choices or even our own…
Faced with a sudden glut of information, cognitive biases cause the modern mind to overthink and underthink the wrong things. We obsess unproductively over the same paranoias, but we blitz past complex deliberations that deserve more care.”
The Biases
Using a lot of personal stories and confessions, she explores these biases:
the halo effect: “deceives the unconscious tendency to make positive assumptions about a person’s overall character based on our impressions of one single trait”
proportionality bias: “fools even the most rational minds into overestimating cause-and-effect relationships…In virtually every context, we cannot seem to rest until we find some intentional force either to fault for our misery or credit for our success. The greater the effect, the greater we desire the cause to be.”
sunk cost fallacy: “the deeply ingrained conviction that spending resources you can’t get back (money, time, emotional resources) justifies spending even more”
zero-sum bias: “the false intuition that another party’s gain directly means your loss”
survivorship bias: “propensity to focus on positive outcomes while ignoring any accompanying misfortunes… beckons thinkers to draw incorrect conclusions about ‘why’ something turned out well by fixating too narrowly on the people or objects that made it past a certain benchmark, while overlooking those that didn’t”
recency illusion: “the tendency to assume that something is objectively new, and thus threatening, simply because it’s new to you… that something only just happened because you only just happened to notice it”
overconfidence bias: “people overvalue their actual skills, express excessive certainty in their evaluations, and over credit themselves with positive outcomes”
illusory truth effect: “our penchant to trust a statement as factual simply because we’ve heard it multiple times. Like how we thought if we swallowed gum it would take 7 years to digest. This is how political propaganda is able to spread so effortlessly.”
confirmation bias: “characterized by a universal tendency to favor information that validates our existing views and discard that which refutes them”
declinism: “the false impression that things are worse now than they were in the past, and it’s all downhill from here” [partners with fading effect bias where, with the exception of severe trauma, we tend to only remember the good things]
the IKEA effect: “propensity to ascribe disproportionately high worth to items we helped create”
Her use of personal anecdotes have many reviewers upset, claiming this book to be ‘too memoirish’. Apparently they were looking for a textbook?
I, personally, liked the way she used her own life because it shows that she was writing with honesty and her own self-reflection. Even though I think she has a few blindspots (don’t we all?) I think it adds an authenticity to the book that is often missing in more scholarly work. If we are to take to heart the warnings she offers, isn’t it easier to take her advice if we see she’s taken her own advice and applied these personally?
I also like the more memoirish writing voice because it made it more enjoyable to read. I’m sure there are more scientific books out there that talk about these more in-depth but I bet it’s a slower, more boring read. I found her writing voice had a whimsy and humor to it that also made the book more relatable.
Another ‘memoirsh’ element that caused negative reviews were the ‘disjointedness’ and ‘click bait’-edness of the chapters. I don’t know if I disagree with this observation because the book didn’t have a great flow from chapter to chapter and some of the titles do seem like click-bait. However, it didn’t bother me. It didn’t feel disjointed because it was like- ‘Okay, we did that one, let’s move on to the next.’ I think the concept of the book requires that disjointedness because it’s not necessarily a cohesive string of thought. There may be some overlap in the biases but they are largely different spheres of thinking.
It seems a lot of people really just wanted Montell to stop being transparent and interesting.
I was cool with it.
Resonations
So what are the big takeaways or things that stood out to me?
The halo effect talks about celebrity worship. We put people we don’t really even know on pedestals and we shape a lot of our worldview on who they are, what they say, what they do, acting as if we really do know them. Taylor Swift was the main example given, but we see this all the time with influencers and people that are followed on Instagram. We forget that the public view is highly curated. We don’t really know them; they don’t really know us.
She cited a 2003 survey (results would probably be more intensified nowadays) that found “those who ‘worshiped’ people they really knew, like parents and teachers who could make tangible contributions to their lives, had overall higher self-esteem and educational achievement. Glorifying pop stars and athletes predicted the opposite—lower confidence, weaker sense of self.”
Here’s the thing. (And these are extra-book thoughts, not Montell’s) We were made to worship. Everyone worships something. It might be a pop star. It might be yourself. We can’t help but worship and idolize things. Some have called people ‘idol factories.’ But we were never meant to worship created things.
The apostle Paul wrote “They exchanged the truth of God for a lie, and worshiped and served what has been created instead of the Creator, who is praised forever.” [Rm 1:25]
I thought it interesting that she says this,
“In both private and public spheres, worship is dehumanizing. To be deified is not so flattering; the dynamic risks annihilating a person’s room for complexity and blunders, and this sets up everyone for suffering.”
I’m not sure if dehumanizing is the right word, but we are created beings, and so we were never meant to bear the weight of another’s worship. We can’t live up to that scrutiny or deserve that praise.
When we worship the Creator, aligning ourselves and our belief with his consistent, reliable, and trustworthy truth, imitating Jesus who is our ultimate example, we will not be let down like the failings and shortcomings of fallible humans. We will not be whiplashed back and forth on the winds of trends or emotions.
“I’m 2018, MIT found that true stories take six times longer to reach 1500 people on Twitter than false ones. That’s because ‘false news is more novel, and people are more likely to share novel information.’”
This is particularly relevant today. I don’t know how many times I see certain articles or headlines shared by people online with very passionate opinions and reactions only to find out later they had false information.
This also ties into the illusory truth effect because people think just because multiple people told them the same thing, it must be true, without considering the source of that information.
I think when splashy headlines hit our screens, instead of jumping on the bandwagon to be relevant and share our hot take, we should be more hesitant and wait it out. Do more digging. Just because a headline is repeated, new to you, or everywhere, does not mean it’s true.
I thought her sharing her experience with an emotionally abusive boyfriend in terms of sunk-cost fallacy was really important. I think it’s true that a lot of people stay in abusive or just bad relationships because they don’t want to admit that they’ve wasted so much of their time, resources, or love and can’t bear ‘leaving it behind.’
It’s sometimes hard to not see that ‘getting out’ doesn’t mean losing. This is obviously an economic principle to heed, but can also be applied to relationships.
Her message to others who might be in the same type of relationships as her is this:
“It’s okay to be ‘disloyal’ to someone who is hurting you… it is never an unreasonable time to stop and ask of your relationship: who is this person for whom I’m rewriting my story? Not who were they seven years ago or who do I hope they’ll be, but who are they right now?’”
Montell is critical of the government’s “unquestionably pro-marriage policies” and world religions that are “critical of divorce.” This was something I needed to reflect on. From my perspective, it’s not marriage that’s the problem. Marriage, rightly ordered, is beneficial and for human and societal flourishing. I think it’s that marriage isn’t taken seriously anymore. I think if marriage was seen more as the covenant relationship it is, defined by the One who Created it, people would spend more time preparing for it and investing in it.
Of course, even Jesus allows for divorce in certain circumstances, though it wasn’t originally meant to be that way. It gets tricky to write in black and white what circumstances merit a divorce and is a conversation for another time, but I think at least infidelity and abuse would count as breaking the covenant and freeing a person to divorce. I know the church must answer for the times they’ve kept women in abusive marriages for the sake of perserving a marriage, but I’ll plug here this organization that I believe is doing a lot to aid in correcting this.
There is more here that could be talked about, but the main point is that we should be thinking of our relationships in terms of the present, not who we think they could be and that we should not allow the sunk-cost fallacy to keep us in a place of harm because we falsely believe the alternative would mean admitting defeat.
Along those same lines I thought it was really interesting when she shared the study that asked participants to look at two sets of colored blocks on the table and make them symmetrical. Most of the participants added new blocks to achieve symmetry. Very few removed blocks. This was classified as additive solution bias.
“When presented with a problem, most people naturally think the cause must be that something is missing, rather than that something is gratuitous or out of place.”
So whether it’s a relationship with a person or struggling with fatigue or stress, we tend to look for solutions that ‘add’ something— we just need to go on more dates together, I just need to take more calming vitamins or take an exercise class— instead of considering that maybe we need to remove something from the equation— a relationship with that person, not staying up so late or having my phone in my bedroom or not letting the kids be in so many activities.
Another thing that resonated with me was her thoughts on awe.
“Learning about black holes and lightyears feels like therapy to us, too sensitive teenagers turned overthinking adults, who need regular reminders of how puny we are. Sometimes I wonder if that’s why people in L.A. can be so self-centered: The narcissism isn’t innate, there’s just too much light pollution to see the stars.”
I couldn’t help but think of Thaddeus Williams’ book ‘Don’t Follow Your Heart.’ In his chapter called #Liveyourbestlife he challenges the reader on self-worship citing that and lack of awe as being culprits for joy-robbers.
He says, “Theology and science agree— the more awe we experience, the more satisfyingly human we become. We don’t just want to be awestruck, we need to be awestruck… Self-worship leaves us awe less and empty because we aren’t nearly as awesome as we like to think.”
Montell reflects on how nature inspires her and leaves her in awe. Could it be that she has seen some of the evidence of a Being who could have created that?
Even secularist, Jonathan Haidt (Montell’s future BFF) spoke of the need for awe in his book The Anxious Generation, going as far as to say that he agrees with Pascal who said “there is a God-shaped hole in every human heart.”
He quotes Dacher who said, “[awe] causes shifts in neurophysiology, a diminished focus on the self, increased prosocial relationality, greater social integration, and a heightened sense of meaning.”
Haidt observes, “There is a hole, an emptiness in us all, that we strive to fill. If it doesn’t get filled with something noble and elevated, modern society will quickly pump it full of garbage.”
I think it’s curious that even people like Haidt and Montell, who don’t necessarily believe in God, still recognize humanity’s need for ‘awe.’ There is no other compelling reason for that except that we were made to worship and be in awe of the One who created us and everything around us. Any other explanation leaves us empty.
I think one of the most convicting things she talks about in her book was in the Overconfidence chapter. In an age of information, answers are always at our fingertips making us think we know more than we do.
I am a question-asker, an answer-finder, a truth-seeker. Although my Google history is probably embarrassing, it would no doubt expose how much I need to know things. Even things that don’t really matter much.
But maybe life should have more mystery. She suggests:
“Next time we have a question, let’s hold out for as long as we humanly can before googling the answer… It’s quite nice, I am learning, just to wonder indefinitely. To never have certain answers. To sit down, be humble, and not even dare to know.”
To not even dare to know. To not know what other movie that guy was in. To be unsure how a roller coaster works or why a platypus lays eggs. To just be okay with not knowing the answer. I’m having a hard time imagining that, but I think it would lead to some good humility and some good awe, both of which will remind me that I worship the God who does know everything and I can trust him with all the mysteries of life.
Google chisels away at our awe, our humility, and our trust.
The Behemoth
My main criticism is a behemoth of a topic that usually causes angst and division so I hesitate to even put it here, but I’m not one to shy away from many controversies and it directly ties to her claims so I’m going for it.
Montell loves dinosaurs. I’m guessing she was being facetious, but she holds them in such high regard that she thinks humanity should have been evicted from Earth instead of the dinosaurs.
Now, I have to admit. I’m still forming what I believe about dinosaurs specifically and this book has sent me on some rabbit trails, but I think Montell makes some ironic statements about dinosaurs and evolution, that I wanted to point out.
She says,
“When you start with a conclusion that’s difficult or impossible to prove (say, ‘The earth is only two thousand years old’) confirmation bias is the crooked detective helping you work backwards to find the right clues”
“When fossil hunters started uncovering prehistoric skeletons in heaps during the so-called Bone Wars of the nineteenth century, inerrant Christians freaked out. They worked backwards from their conclusions about Genesis to make these discoveries line up. The bones were God testing their faith. I can’t imagine the cognitive dissonance those people must have felt. Sounds far more exhausting in the long run than just admitting you might’ve been wrong.”
I actually think it’s a little bit funny that she puts ‘the earth is only two thousand years old’ as difficult or impossible to prove, but ‘the earth evolved out of nothing over billions of years’ as not that…
I know there are many Christians who believe God used evolution in his creation. I have done a lot of reading and thinking through this belief and have been heavily influenced by the arguments and evidence in several books, including A Biblical Case Against Theistic Evolution.
I’m not going to get into that here, but I just wanted to point out that the THEORY of evolution is like the poster child for the illusory truth bias and confirmation bias. Evolution is a theory yet it’s constantly presented as fact. Repeated over and over again: this is what happened. Not, this is what could have happened, but this IS what happened. It’s the only option taught in schools.
Their worldview says God doesn’t exist and so confirmation bias says, we need to figure out another explanation for what the heck this earth is all about and why there are humans and animals and nothing in between because it can’t be God and we can’t be wrong about that. Let’s go with evolution.
In some ways, I suppose, it could be said that Christians do the same thing, but I would argue with her above statement that my first conclusion is not ‘the earth is only a couple thousand years old’. My first conclusion that’s the basis for everything moving forward is: Jesus lived, died, and resurrected. So he must be who he says he is (God) and what he said was true, must be true. (Can we believe the resurrection? There are plenty of reasons to that are outlined in this very short book: Is Easter Unbelievable?)
To then forms beliefs around that conclusion isn’t necessarily confirmation bias. Unless someone can prove Jesus didn’t resurrect, the foundation of my beliefs is secure. If someone were to present evidence that Jesus didn’t actually resurrect— which after thousands of years of people trying to do that and havent— and I didn’t consider that evidence, then we would be in confirmation bias territory.
Refusing to admit we could’ve been wrong is definitely something that has to be considered- both for Montell and her evolutionary theory and for me and my belief about God; humility is important. However, to some extent, one must believe what they believe. It’s possible that we could be wrong about Jesus. And if so, Paul says we should be pitied above all (1 Cor 15:14-19) but if we are right, we cannot be lukewarm in our faith.
I wouldn’t call this a bias. I call it a core belief, a conviction. Not a preconceived notion that influences judgment.
To her point on the fossils discovered. I’m still forming my beliefs, but so far I don’t find dissonance with what has been discovered. The dating method of soils and fossils is also a theory that has been disproven on multiple occassions. I also believe the conditions of the flood can account for the fossilizations that have been found and the extinction of the larger dinosaurs.
One thing I read that was interesting too, was that we have drawings and descriptions of ‘dinosaurs’ (a word that originates in 1841) from people who lived way before the discovery of the fossil record indicating they most likely lived during the same time as these creatures. We have also discovered soft tissue in dinosaur fossils that could not have lasted millions of years.
All that to say, I think she should have found some better examples for this bias and reflected a little more on how evolution actually fits into these categories.
[And one other sidenote: as to confirmation bias and Jesus, there are plenty of people who set out determined to specifically disprove Christianity and then they came to faith, so not sure how she would explain that…]
The Non-Behemoths
Some other criticisms that have nothing to do with evolution.
I was a little turned off by her comment on tradwives in her chapter on declinism. She is trying to make sense of the trend of women ‘going back’ to the prairie times via how they cook or dress. She references Maggie Nelson here so I’m not sure what part of this is Nelson and what part is Montell, but she explains how progressive women might have ended up there because “they were promised a kind of liberation that didn’t pan out as they hoped, so they decided to swing back into a form of aesthetically updated Puritanism.”
But then she contrasts these progressive women with: “a demographic of right-wing anti feminists who arrived in the farmhouse kitchen for different reasons, darker reasons.”
That’s all she says about that, but what’s with the stage-whisper mystery? I mean I’m not about to go make my own bread and churn my own butter and I’m definitely not going to live my days in calico dresses, but anti-feminist? Dark reasons? With no further explanation? That seems like a cheap shot to a lot of women in the tradwives trend.
And, might I add, an example of attribution bias where you try to interpret meaning to others’ behaviors but tend to perceive good motives to yourself and your own group (seeing negative things as a result of situational circumstances) and you perceive bad motives in others (seeing negative things as a result of intrinsic character traits rather than external situations).
I think it’s an interesting thought path to consider in what ways the tradwives trend fits in line with a declinism cognitive bias, but to present this stark contrast and attribute motives based on political position feels irresponsible. This could have been thought through in a better way.
In a similar political vein, she again affirms her confirmation bias by repeating something that might not be true, but is in line (I’m guessing) with her political beliefs:
“During the Nazis’ initial rise to power, Hitler used the slogan ‘Make Germany Great Again,’”
She is trying to connect how politicians’ campaigns often tap into people’s sense of nostalgia for ‘better times’ which is valid. And even though she acknowledges that it wasn’t just Trump that used this ‘familiar’ phrase, if Montell had done a little more snopes’ing she would have seen that Hitler never actually used it as a slogan as she presents here. He did talk about making Germany great again. But to use our full cognitive awareness, we realize that politicians everywhere at all times talk about making their countries great again. It’s kinda their job.
Again, the train of thought in regards to political campaigns and declinism is valid, but the presentation as it was is a cheap and inaccurate shot that was unnecessary.
Book Club Discussion Questions
This book has a lot of great launching points for good discussion. If you would like to read this with some other people, here are some questions to get you started:
With each chapter, think of an example from your own life where you were influenced by that particular cognitive bias.
What do you think the difference is between a belief and a bias? Does it matter?
In the Halo Effect chapter Montell comments on women (and marginalized women) getting worse judgement when it comes to getting knocked off a pedestal. She had more judgment towards her mom than her dad when they did something ‘out of character.’ Do you find this to be true in your own experience? Think and evaluate this speculation: women, generally speaking, tend to be more caring and nurturing than men; do you think this creates a bigger dissonance because we already expect women to be a certain way? When they don’t meet our expectations does it feel like a bigger ‘betrayal’ because the gap between reality and expectation is bigger with women than it might be for men?
What conspiracy theory(s) do you tend to think is true? Does reading this book cause you to question any parts of that theory?
What’s an area of life where you might be trying to solve a problem by adding something to your life rather than removing something? (additive solution bias)
In what ways has overconfidence helped you or sabotaged you?
Do you think it’s true to say- ‘the more you know, the more you realize you don’t know much’?
What’s the last question you Googled? How long could you have gone without the answer you received?
Have you ever ‘met your hero’ and been disappointed? How did it change the way you perceive celebrities?
Why do you think people believe manifestation works? Is there any merit to that theory?
Do you have a hard time believing a transaction between two people could be equally beneficial for both parties? Were you playing Settlers of Catan at the time?
When’s the last time you felt a sense of awe? Can you see a difference in your outlook on life when you haven’t felt awe' in awhile?
She says, “At the risk of sounding dramatic, repetition very well might be the closest thing we have to a magical spell.” What are some ways that repetition can harm or help? Think through the importance of ‘truth’ when it comes to repetition.
How does thinking about these cognitive biases affect how you may or may not parent your children?
How might knowing about these biases influence or change how you spend your money?
On page 199 there is a brief comment about taking a break from consuming in order to create. Explore the difference between consuming and creating and how that influences the way you see the world.
How do we manage the reality that not all days past were better days but that not all ‘progress’ is good progress? This could be ideologies, technologies, social interaction tendencies, etc.
Think about the sense of accomplishment discused in the IKEA effect chapter and the looming reality of AI creating things. Does AI capabilities enhance or hinder humans’ ability to create?
In the Confirmation Bias chapter Montell refers to Emily St. John Mandel’s book Station Eleven: “No longer could we expect a group of random pedestrians to tune in to the same broadcast and all hear the same thing. ‘We’ve lost consensual reality, and I don’t know how to get it back. It’s like a menu now—choose your own reality,’ says Mandel.” What do you think about this quote, do you agree, disagree? In what ways are we choosing our own realities?
What are some other biases that aren’t talked about in this book?
Words
I didn’t know where else to put these things so….
I recently learned what the word ‘macabre’ means and how to pronounce it and it was in this book at least 5 times. Which phenomenon is that?
I learned two new words that are wonderful.
Tempusur (she coined this one): an elusive nostalgia for the current moment, so precious in its ephemerality that the second you notice it, it’s already slipped away.
Looseleft: the feeling of loss after finishing a good book
Recommendation
Even if this isn’t a scientific textbook about cognitive biases, I think it’s still a great and easy book to read that challenges you to think about the ways you think.
If you find yourself skeptical of reading it, I would recommend reading it in a group or with a friend to discuss and ask questions of each other (perhaps use my question suggestions above).
I think the main strength of this book is in reflection and application. I don’t have the same worldview or theology of Montell, but I don’t have to in order to put my own thoughts and beliefs under a microscope.
You may not agree with everything she says, but it never hurts to recalibrate our thought process and evaluate our methods of knowing truth.
I’m a big fan of finding truth and I think this book helps to that end.
[Content Advisory: a handful of f- and s-words]
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