The Art Of Thinking Clearly

Rolf Dobelli (born 1966) is a Swiss author, novelist, and entrepreneur whose work bridges literature, business, and behavioral science. He holds a doctorate in economic philosophy from the University of St. Gallen, where he later served as a faculty member and researcher. Before turning to full-time writing, Dobelli worked as CEO of a Swissair subsidiary and co-founded getAbstract, a company that produces concise summaries of nonfiction books. These experiences—spanning corporate leadership, academic study, and publishing—inform his ability to distill complex ideas into accessible lessons for a general audience.

Dobelli is not a psychologist or cognitive scientist by training, and he acknowledges that The Art of Thinking Clearly is a synthesis of academic insight, not an original work of research. This makes the book credible as an accessible overview of behavioral economics and decision science but also means that it reflects Dobelli’s interpretive lens—practical, business-oriented, and occasionally anecdotal. Critics have further noted that Dobelli’s focus on universal cognitive errors can understate cultural and contextual factors that shape reasoning. Still, his approachable style and synthesis of cross-disciplinary research have helped popularize behavioral thinking for readers outside academia, and the research lineage he draws on is well established. 

Dobelli’s project is therefore best read as a translation: He presents recurring patterns in accessible language, offers memorable everyday examples, and suggests low-effort interventions. The trade-off is that complex academic debates are compressed for a general audience. Readers should understand biases as probabilistic nudges on judgment rather than fixed laws, and they should assume that effectiveness varies with context, incentives, and stakes. This perspective does not diminish the book’s usefulness but clarifies how to use it—namely, to build a small toolkit of habits (premortems, base-rate checks, pre-set criteria, anchor-proofing) that improve decision quality without demanding perfect rationality.