ASU Common Read: A Virtual Visit with Woo-kyoung Ahn

ASU hosts Yale psychologist Woo-kyoung Ahn, author of "Thinking 101: How to Reason Better to Live Better," for a virtual visit on Thursday, Oct. 26, 2023 at 6 p.m. Ahn will discuss "Thinking 101" and answer questions from faculty and students at this event.

ASU's Writing Programs has selected Ahn's nonfiction book as its 2023-2024 Common Read.

The online event is open and free to the public and information. Please register to attend.

About the common read

The goal of a common read program is to encourage first-year students to write about pressing social problems that are relevant to ASU’s mission as a public enterprise. By learning to write about such problems as a community, we increase the probability of finding solutions to them. This year, we will write about identifying thinking biases that affect us personally and societally.

About the book and its author

Woo-kyoung Ahn had devised a course at Yale called “Thinking” to help students examine the biases that cause so many problems in their daily lives. It quickly became one of the university’s most popular courses.

Now, Ahn presents key insights from her years of teaching and research in a book for everyone. In the book, she demonstrates how “thinking problems” stand behind a wide range of challenges, from common, self-inflicted daily aggravations to our most pressing societal issues and inequities. Throughout, Ahn draws on decades of research from other cognitive psychologists, as well as from her own groundbreaking studies. And she presents it all in a compellingly readable style that uses fun examples from pop culture, anecdotes from her own life, and illuminating stories from history and the headlines. "Thinking 101" shows how we can improve not just our own daily lives through better awareness of our biases but also the lives of everyone around us.

Woo-kyoung Ahn is the John Hay Whitney Professor of Psychology and the director of Thinking Lab at Yale University. In 2022, she received Yale's Lex Hixon Prize for teaching excellence in the social sciences. Her research on thinking biases has been funded by the National Institutes of Health, and she is a fellow of the American Psychological Association and the Association for Psychological Science. "Thinking 101" is her first book.

This event is hosted by Writing Programs in the Department of English with support from The College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at ASU.