Psychorhetoric and the Psychology of Thought

Laura Macchi is Full Professor of Psychology of Thinking, Decision Making and Communication and of General Psychology in the Department of Psychology at the University of Milano-Bicocca, Italy. Her main co-edited publications include Thinking: Psychological Perspectives on Reasoning, Judgment and Decision Making (Whiley, 2003), Cognitive Unconscious and Human rationality (The MIT Press, 2016), Insight and Creative Problem Solving (Routledge, 2018).

• Acknowledgement. Chapter 1. Introduction. Psychorhetoric, the interpretative function and the enigma of thought. Bias versus insight. Chapter 2. The interpretative function and the emergence of unconscious analytic thought. Chapter 3. Solving insight problems. The cognitive unconscious and the “mystery” of the creative solution. Chapter 4. Critical thought beyond biases. Demonstrate, draw a conclusion, falsify. Chapter 5. Thinking uncertainty across possible worlds: statistical illiteracy or misleading communication? Chapter 6. Challenging the incoherence of disjunctive and framing effects in decision-making. Chapter 7. Promoting action by discourse. The power of psychorhetoric in behavioural insight and public communications. References. Index

"Is human thinking biased or rational? Or is it simply meaningful, like other acts of human communication? In Psychorhetoric, Laura Macchi demonstrates an alternative to current accounts, focusing on the interpretive gap between a question and its answer. Her approach makes sense; that is: it made me think."Karl Halvor Teigen, Professor Emeritus at University of Oslo, Norway