A groundbreaking book on the newly discovered special kind of intelligence for assessing risks, by the leading researcher in the field, revealing how vital risk intelligence is in our lives and how we can all raise our “RQ” and make better decisions.So keen is the interest in the newly discovered “risk intelligence” that when professor Dylan Evans posted an innovative test online that allows people to assess their Risk Quotient (RQ), it was taken by tens of thousands of people and was featured in Psychology Today and across the blogosphere. Should we have that surgery? Should we trust the advice of financial advisors? How worried should we be about terrorist attacks? Evans, who has pioneered the study of risk intelligence, shows how essential it is in our lives to make good decisions when we are facing uncertainty but that the vast majority of us are actually quite bad at doing sowe have low RQs. Some people do, though, have very high risk intelligence. What makes the difference? Introducing a wealth of fascinating research findings and using a wide range of real-life examplesfrom the brilliant risk assessment skills of horse race handicappers to the tragically flawed evaluations of risk that caused the financial crisisEvans reveals the common errors in our thinking that undermine our risk intelligence, such as “ambiquity aversion,” overconfidence in our knowledge, and the fallacy of worst-case scenarios, as well as the many ways we are duped by how information is provided to us. He then introduces a host of simple techniques we can use to boost our RQ, offering a brief test for assessing our risk intelligence and reporting on the powerful results he’s seen in experiments he’s conducted in training people to develop their RQs. Both highly engaging and truly mind-changing, Risk Intelligence will fascinate all of those who are interested in how we can improve our thinking in order to enhance our lives.

Dylan Evans is the author of several critically acclaimed books, including Emotion: The Science of Sentiment and Placebo: The Belief Effect. He holds a PhD in philosophy from the London School of Economics and is a lecturer in behavioral science at University College Cork School of Medicine in Ireland. He writes regularly for the Guardian and has appeared regularly on BBC radio.