The Art of Thinking Clearly by Rolf Dobelli: The Biases Worth Your Time

You read twenty chapters of The Art of Thinking Clearly on a flight, and a week later could not name a single bias you were meant to watch for. Rolf Dobelli’s book is a catalogue of thinking errors, one per short chapter. For someone running a business, about a dozen of them change how you hire, spend and forecast. The rest can be skimmed, and eight repeat what Daniel Kahneman covered in more depth.

Below is what the book is, the chapters our newsroom would keep, where it overlaps with Kahneman, and how to use it on a real decision.

What The Art of Thinking Clearly Is

Dobelli is a Swiss writer and businessman. According to his Wikipedia entry, he holds a doctorate from the University of St. Gallen, worked as chief financial officer and managing director at Swissair subsidiaries, and co-founded the book summary company getAbstract in 1999.

The book first appeared in German in 2011 as Die Kunst des klaren Denkens, published by Carl Hanser Verlag. It entered Der Spiegel’s bestseller list at number one and was the bestselling non-fiction book in Germany and Switzerland in 2012, the same entry records. The English edition, translated by Nicky Griffin, followed in 2013.

Harper published it in New York that year. The library catalogue record lists 99 chapters across 358 numbered pages, each chapter named after one error: survivorship bias, the sunk cost fallacy, the halo effect, and on through to the news illusion. By our arithmetic that is about three and a half pages per error.

Dobelli is open about where the ideas come from. In the introduction, quoted on his own site, he describes his role in writing it as that of “a translator”. He adds that the book’s success “is fundamentally a tribute to their research”, meaning the psychologists and economists whose work he summarises.

That is the right way to read The Art of Thinking Clearly. The value lies in the compression. A busy reader gets a working vocabulary for 99 errors in a few hundred pages, then goes back to the original research for the handful that matter in their own work.

How to Read a Book of 99 Chapters

Publishers Weekly reviewed the English edition in March 2013. Its reviewer found the chapters interesting one at a time and overwhelming taken together, and grew tired of the repeated pattern of anecdote followed by concept.

We agree with the first half of that. Read straight through, the errors blur. Around chapter 60 you meet information bias, effort justification and the law of small numbers in three consecutive chapters, and none of them sticks.

The format suits a different habit. One chapter a day, read before the first decision of the morning, takes a few minutes and gives you one error to look for in that day’s work. Over a quarter you cover the book. More usefully, you notice which chapters keep coming back to you. Those are the errors your business actually makes.

The faster route is to read selectively from the start. The table below is our shortlist for someone running a company or a team.

The Chapters in The Art of Thinking Clearly That Matter for a Business

We picked these twelve because each one shows up in a decision that costs money: a hire, a budget, a forecast, a pay plan, or a project that should have been stopped. Chapter numbers follow the order of the 2013 Harper edition in the catalogue record.

Chapter	Error	Where it costs a business	Pair it with
1	Survivorship bias	Copying the companies that made it	Chapter 2
2	Swimmer’s body illusion	Crediting a programme for people it selected	Taleb, via Farnam Street
5	Sunk cost fallacy	Projects kept alive by past spending	Thinking, Fast and Slow
18	Incentive super-response tendency	Pay plans that reward the wrong thing	Munger’s talk
19	Regression to mean	Paying advisers for a natural recovery	Chapter 20
20	Outcome bias	Judging a decision by its luck	Chapter 14
30	The anchor	Negotiations and price setting	Thinking, Fast and Slow
32	Loss aversion	Refusing to close a losing line	Thinking, Fast and Slow
38	Halo effect	Hiring on one impressive trait	Chapter 36
56	Motivation crowding	Bonuses that reduce effort	Chapter 18
89	Strategic misrepresentation	Forecasts written to get approval	Chapter 91
91	Planning fallacy	Late, over-budget projects	Thinking, Fast and Slow

Money Already Spent

Chapter 5, on the sunk cost fallacy, is the one we would hand to any new manager. Farnam Street’s summary puts it plainly: “Rational decision making requires you to forget about the costs incurred to date.” Most companies have a project that survives because of what has already gone into it. The test is easy to state and hard to apply. If you were starting today, with nothing spent, would you fund this?

Chapter 32, on loss aversion, explains why the test is hard. Stopping a project turns a vague cost into a recorded loss, and people act more strongly to avoid a loss than to secure an equal gain, as the summary of Thinking, Fast and Slow puts it.

Hiring and Judging People

Chapter 38, the halo effect, carries the title “Why attractive people climb the career ladder more quickly”. One strong trait, such as an easy manner in interview or a famous former employer, colours the judgement of everything else. Appearance plays into it, which is why our guide to the smart casual dress code for men is less trivial than it sounds.

Chapter 36, the fundamental attribution error, is the mirror image. When a manager misses a target, we blame the person and underrate the situation they were in. Before you replace someone, ask what anyone in that seat would have done with the same budget and the same brief.

Chapter 76, domain dependence, applies to promotions. Its title is “Knowledge is nontransferable”. A star salesperson may manage salespeople badly, and a strong engineer may struggle as head of engineering. Our piece on what is upskilling covers how to close that gap on purpose instead of assuming it away.

Forecasts and Plans

Chapter 91, the planning fallacy, is titled “Why you take on too much”. Kahneman covers the same error, describing how people underestimate costs and overestimate benefits. Chapter 89, strategic misrepresentation, is the darker relative. The term describes a forecast that is wrong on purpose, because the person making it needs the project approved.

Put the two together and you have most of the budget overruns in a typical company. The practical defence is to ask for the outcome of the last three similar projects before you accept the estimate for the next one. Our guide to short term career goals applies the same check to personal plans: a goal set in January should be measured against what you managed last year.

Chapter 40, the forecast illusion, is shorter and blunter. Its title is “False prophets”. Treat any forecast that arrives without a track record as an opinion.

Incentives and Pay

Chapter 18 is called the incentive super-response tendency. The name echoes Charlie Munger, whose talk on human misjudgement, in a version he revised in 2005, lists “Reward and Punishment Superresponse Tendency” first. Dobelli’s chapter title, “Never pay your lawyer by the hour”, gives the idea in seven words. People do what they are paid to do, including the parts you never intended. Our piece on Charlie Munger’s mental models covers the rest of his list.

Chapter 56, motivation crowding, runs the other way. Its title is “How bonuses destroy motivation”. Paying for something people were already doing for their own reasons can leave them doing less of it. Read both chapters before you redesign a bonus plan.

Judging Results

Chapter 20, outcome bias, has the most useful title in the book: “Never judge a decision by its outcome”. A sound decision can turn out badly and a reckless one can work. Judge the decision on what was known when it was made.

Chapters 1 and 2 come at the same problem from another side. Survivorship bias is “Why you should visit cemeteries”: you hear about the companies that made it and never about the many that tried the same thing and folded. Farnam Street’s summary puts the second error this way: “Whenever we confuse selection factors with results, we fall prey to what Taleb calls the swimmer’s body illusion.” Graduates of a famous university may do well partly because the university picks people likely to do well.

Chapter 19, regression to mean, has a title consultants will not enjoy: “The dubious efficacy of doctors, consultants, and psychotherapists”. A business at a low point tends to recover partly on its own, and the adviser hired at the bottom gets the credit for the bounce. Our guide to the big 4 consulting firms covers tying fees to deliverables, which is the best protection against paying for a recovery that was coming anyway.

Where Dobelli Overlaps With Kahneman

Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow came out in 2011, the same year as Dobelli’s German original, from Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Its Wikipedia summary lists anchoring, availability, loss aversion, framing, the sunk cost fallacy, the planning fallacy, hindsight and the Linda problem among the errors it covers.

Each of those has a Dobelli chapter: the anchor (30), availability bias (11), loss aversion (32), framing (42), the sunk cost fallacy (5), the planning fallacy (91), hindsight bias (14) and the conjunction fallacy (41), the standard name for the error the Linda problem demonstrates.

If you have read Kahneman, skim those eight. You already have the longer version, with the experiments described in full. If you have not, Dobelli’s chapters are a fair introduction, and our list of psychology books sets out where Kahneman sits among the alternatives.

Kahneman’s book carries its own warning. The same Wikipedia page records that the integrity of some priming studies he cited has been questioned during the replication crisis, and quotes him conceding: “I placed too much faith in underpowered studies.” A summary of research inherits the weaknesses of the research. Treat any chapter in either book as a prompt to check, never as settled science.

Dobelli adds most where he borrows from Nassim Taleb and Charlie Munger. The swimmer’s body illusion is Taleb’s term. The incentive chapter and chapter 57, the twaddle tendency, share their names with items on Munger’s list, where “Twaddle Tendency” appears as number 23. Chapter 39, on alternative paths, is titled “Congratulations! You’ve won Russian roulette”. Those chapters are the strongest reason for a reader of Kahneman to open this book at all.

The Chapters You Can Skim

Some chapters are thin for an operator. Chapter 54, contagion bias, asks “Would you wear Hitler’s sweater?”, which is a good question and rarely a business one. Chapter 58, the Will Rogers phenomenon, is a statistical curiosity. Chapter 65, volunteer’s folly, is titled “Volunteer work is for the birds”, and belongs to your private life more than your working one.

Chapter 99, the news illusion, is the most opinionated in the book. Dobelli later expanded the argument into a whole book, Stop Reading the News, published in 2020 according to his Wikipedia entry. Whether you agree depends on your job. An investor or a founder in a regulated market needs the news. A manager who reads it all morning probably does not.

Others are worth one read and no more. The clustering illusion, the gambler’s fallacy, coincidence and the problem with averages will be familiar to anyone who sat through a statistics course. Our critical thinking exercises turn several of them into short drills, which stick better than rereading.

What the Book Leaves Out

The weakness is the one Publishers Weekly put its finger on. Ninety-nine errors with equal weight give no sense of which ones matter. A manager armed with the whole list can find a bias in any argument they dislike, and the vocabulary becomes a way to win meetings. “That is just confirmation bias” ends a discussion without improving it.

The book also pulls in two directions at once. Chapter 43 warns against action bias, the urge to do something when waiting would be better. Chapter 85 warns against procrastination. Both warnings are sound. A list of errors cannot tell you which one you are making on a given Tuesday. Our piece on dialectical thinking covers how to hold two true warnings at once and still decide.

Mood is the other gap. Chapter 66, the affect heuristic, is titled “Why you are a slave to your emotions”, and chapter 53 covers decision fatigue. Neither chapter can fix a bad night’s sleep or a fourth espresso. Our pieces on caffeine and anxiety and how to get more deep sleep cover the physical side, which no book on biases can do for you.

How to Use The Art of Thinking Clearly on a Real Decision

Pick the five chapters from the table that match your last three bad decisions. Keep their titles where you make decisions, on the first page of the budget pack or at the top of the hiring template.

Before any decision above a set amount, run through them as questions. Have we already spent money on this, and would we fund it from zero? Who benefits if the forecast is high? Are we judging the last attempt by its result or by the decision? Would anyone in this role have done better? What happened to the last three plans like this one?

Then make the answer concrete. Our piece on concrete thinking explains why “what will be different on Monday” beats a general intention, and our decision making matrix gives a simple way to score the options once the biases have been named.

Chapter 14, on hindsight bias, carries its advice in the title: “Why you should keep a diary”. Write down what you expected before the decision and what you knew at the time. Six months later, compare. Nothing else we know of cures the feeling that you saw it coming.

The same habits apply to money at home. Chapter 81, the default effect, is titled “Why you go with the status quo”, and retirement savings are where the status quo sits longest. Our guides to 403b vs 401k and the Roth IRA 5 year rule are worth an hour for anyone whose savings have never moved from the settings they started with. For owners, the legal structure of the business is another choice that tends to stay where it began, and our guide to llc vs s corp sets out when to revisit it.

Chapter 46, the hedonic treadmill, is the one to read before a move or a big raise. Its title is “Be careful what you wish for”. Our guide to the countries with best work life balance makes a good companion, since the treadmill runs in a new country as much as in a new house.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is The Art of Thinking Clearly worth reading?

Yes, if you read The Art of Thinking Clearly selectively. The dozen chapters on sunk costs, incentives, forecasts, hiring and outcome bias repay the time. If you have read Kahneman, skim the eight chapters that cover the same ground.

How many biases are in The Art of Thinking Clearly?

The 2013 Harper edition has 99 chapters, from survivorship bias in chapter 1 to the news illusion in chapter 99. Confirmation bias takes two of them, chapters 7 and 8, so the book covers 98 distinct errors.

Should I read Dobelli or Kahneman first?

Dobelli first if you want a quick working vocabulary, Kahneman first if you want the evidence behind it. Our preference is Kahneman for depth, then Dobelli’s chapters on incentives and selection effects, which draw on Taleb and Munger.

Read The Art of Thinking Clearly as a reference you return to: a dozen chapters you know well, and a decision diary that shows you which of them your business needs.