Rolf Dobelli

Swiss author and entrepreneur whose The Art of Thinking Clearly catalogues the cognitive biases and logical fallacies that derail our decision-making.

Rolf Dobelli is a Swiss author, entrepreneur, and intellectual whose 2013 book The Art of Thinking Clearly became an international bestseller by providing an accessible catalogue of the cognitive biases, logical fallacies, and mental errors that reliably distort human decision-making. Dobelli, who founded the curated book summary platform getAbstract, draws on behavioral economics, psychology, and philosophy to present ninety-nine distinct thinking errors in short, readable chapters.

The book’s format — each bias or fallacy gets a few pages of clear explanation, illustrated with vivid examples from everyday life, business, and history — makes it exceptionally practical for readers who want to improve their thinking without wading through dense academic literature. Entries cover familiar cognitive errors like confirmation bias and the sunk cost fallacy alongside less well-known traps like the availability heuristic, the swimmer’s body illusion, and the narrative fallacy.

Dobelli was criticized by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, who argued that some of the ideas attributed to behavioral economists were developed in Taleb’s own work and insufficiently credited — a controversy that circulated widely in intellectual media. Regardless, the book’s usefulness as a reference and its accessible structure have made it a practical companion for anyone seeking to make better decisions in personal and professional life. Dobelli followed it with The Art of the Good Life, applying similar thinking to questions of personal flourishing. For readers who enjoyed Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow and want a more concise and practical distillation of similar ideas, Dobelli’s work is a useful complement.