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Review: Pause To Think

Previously published as: Hart, G. 2025. Review: Pause To Think: Using Mental Models to Learn and Decide. IEEE Book Reviews. https://procomm.ieee.org/human-factors-accessibility-usability/

Lester, J. 2024. Pause To Think: Using Mental Models to Learn and Decide. Columbia Business School Publishing. 232 pages.

Mental models let us create simplified understandings of our complex world and weave a framework that can efficiently store new information. Subsequently, referring to these models rather than having to create a new one for every situation lets us respond to situations faster and more efficiently and choose the optimal response. We use similar mechanisms to recall stored knowledge and integrate new knowledge into an ever-growing model of our world, thereby creating an increasingly powerful and useful set of tools for understanding. But this approach has drawbacks.

In Pause To Think: Using Mental Models to Learn and Decide, Jaime Lester describes a powerful suite of tools for remembering, thinking, deciding, and learning based on the many ways we use mental models. In particular, he describes the cognitive biases that can get in our way. This book will interest anyone who wants to learn, judge alternatives, make better decisions or solve problems better in real-world contexts. But as the title suggests, we must first learn to pause and reconsider our immediate reactions to situations—reactions that often invoke subconscious biases and learned responses that may not be appropriate in a new situation. Lester reminds us that all models have omissions, errors, and limitations (“the map is not the territory”) (p. 93). Pausing to re-examine our biases lets us choose the most appropriate models—those that support a more effective response.

This pause is important because instinctive, subconscious assessments (our “gut feelings”) may reflect either learned wisdom or subconscious cognitive biases. Though these shortcuts help us respond rapidly when we need to think fast, incorrect or misleading biases increase the risk of reaching the wrong conclusion. Pausing to identify the biases that might be affecting our thought process lets us assess those biases and integrate them with a more conscious assessment. Lester lists thirty-two biases to avoid that he discusses in five contexts: decision-making, learning, understanding, investing, and happiness. Each context has its own chapter.

Chapters 2 to 5 introduce key rules for improving our models in disciplines such as science and business, and illustrate how to think about problems both in the discipline that gave rise to a method and in unrelated disciplines. Lester supports these principles by thought exercises that would be useful in a classroom discussion, and he provides potential answers in an appendix. His approach reveals how strongly perspective affects what we see and how considering multiple perspectives provides a more holistic view of any situation, as in the parable of the blind men describing an elephant. Two observations about expectations struck me as particularly profound: First, we judge outcomes relative to our expectations rather than the actual outcome quality, so making expectations explicit helps us to be more satisfied with the outcomes. Second, it’s easier to quantify risks than rewards, so we should not over-weight risks. As communicators, this also reminds us of the importance of managing expectations.

Lester presents  a simple, flexible seven-step framework for making better decisions and notes that for decisions with greater consequences, we should apply the framework most rigorously. However, it lacks an explicit step to examine trade-offs among alternatives, although that trade-off is mentioned in subsequent chapters. He doesn’t explicitly reference schema theory and inadequately describes game theory, two research fields that would have deepened his descriptions. Comic strips begin each chapter to illustrate key principles, but the tiny text is often almost unreadable and I’m not sure how much value they add.

Unfortunately, serious errors escaped peer review. Lester’s discussion of statistical significance doesn’t explain important concepts such as the difference between means and medians, and whether a “statistically significant” result has practical significance. He provides a good discussion of the criteria for judging a scientific study, but erroneously describes Occam’s razor as meaning that the simplest solution is most likely to be right; the actual meaning is that we should not make an explanation more complex than necessary (“parsimony”). Similarly, his claim that “Newtonian physics lost out to Einstein’s” misses a more important point: Newton’s physics remain valuable, but Einstein expanded them to cover important new situations (p. 24). Though Lester correctly counsels caution in predicting trends, his explanation of “reversion to the mean” incorrectly states that “trends tend to reverse” (pp. 95–96). That’s only true for random processes, for which there is no causal (non-random) factor that drives a directional trend.

His description in Chapter 9 of investing is dangerously misleading. He states  that “most [investment advice books] are now hopelessly out of date,” without noting that many traditional principles (investing in sound enterprises, diversifying investments) remain valid (p. 159). He incorrectly suggests that equities are the best investment approach, thereby ignoring the importance of diversification and of mixing speculative and conservative investments. His claim that investors are better off choosing stocks randomly than hiring a professional advisor is based on a long-ago observation that investment professionals rarely outperform the market in the long term, but he neglects to mention that amateurs usually do worse. His suggestion that “prospective [stock] returns are best when the current situation seems worst, and vice versa” (p. 161) is called “contrarian” investing, and to succeed, it requires knowledge of what factors are changing a stock’s price; not knowing that reason can lead to disaster. His suggestion that it’s easy to become an above-average investor by following his advice ignores an inconvenient fact: to paraphrase Garrison Keillor, were this possible, all investors could be above average. He also fundamentally misunderstands the importance of the price to earnings ratio by suggesting it defines how long it would take to repay a stock investment, thereby ignoring the stock's underlying value.

The book’s overall message is this: pause to think things through rather than relying solely on your gut. That’s good advice for readers given the abovementioned errors, which undermine confidence in Lester’s many other well-founded suggestions. Pause to Think won’t teach you much you didn’t already know, but it packages this knowledge in a strong framework that will help you apply this knowledge in your daily life or work. In particular, it does a decent job of showing how our mind and gut are more powerful when they work together than apart, so long as we pause to think about their sometimes-contradictory advice.

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