Robert H. Thouless - Straight and Crooked Thinking

The worlds need for straight thinking and its susceptibility to crooked thinking are as great now as when my grandfather first wrote this book in the late 1920s. However, the relative importance of different kinds of abuse of language has changed, as has the political context in which they take place. For these reasons it seems a good idea to revise Straight & Crooked Thinking for the fifth time.

Although many books have been published with similar themes in the intervening years, this one has had an enduring appeal which makes it worth updating. A major part of this appeal is its emotional detachment and a dry sense of humour about the things that people do to language to obstruct clear thinking. I have attempted to retain these characteristics. By detachment I mean that, although it is made clear that straight thinking is preferable to crooked thinking, the message is not rammed down the readers throat. As a result the book has the potential to be used for evil as well as good ends. It could just as well be used by a dishonest communicator to understand and refine his technique as by an honest person to understand how he is being duped by others.

It is important to remember that this book is a field guide, not a self-improvement manual. The features that make Straight & Crooked Thinking such an attractive book are a reflection of the humanity and intellectual independence of my grandfather. He was remarkable in his ability to write and talk in a detached and objective way even on issues about which he felt deeply.

Robert Thouless was born in Norwich in 1894. He was educated at a local grammar school and won an award to Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, where he studied physical sciences. During the First World War he served as a signals officer in the Salonika expeditionary force in northern Greece. He took part in a brief and unsuccessful British offensive against the Bulgarians, known as the Second Battle of Doiran. Robert was in the thick of this battle, and his diaries describe his experience of taking a telephone line through no-mans land towards the enemy lines. He continued in his task, despite shelling, gunfire and a dose of mustard gas.

After the war he returned to Cambridge, where he turned from the physical sciences to the emerging field of psychology. He was greatly influenced by his friend and colleague William Rivers, who is now best known for his work with shell-shocked patients (including the poet Siegfried Sassoon), during the First World War. Robert wrote his doctoral thesis on The Psychology of Religion. This was published as a book which remained in print for nearly 60 years.

From 1921 to 1926 Robert was lecturer in psychology at the University of Manchester, where he met his future wife Priscilla Gorton, who was a lecturer in English. Between 1926 and 1938 he was head of the Department of Psychology at the University of Glasgow where he conducted some of the earliest experiments on visual perception, trying to understand the nature of optical illusions, and how they are seen differently by people of different cultural backgrounds. During this time he became interested in radio broadcasting, and two series of radio talks were turned into books. The Control of the Mind attracted little notice, but Straight & Crooked Thinking was immediately successful. It was deliberately written as a popular book because, as an academic psychologist, Robert Thouless thought that it was important for ordinary people to understand their unconscious impulses towards irrationality and how these irrational forces could be a major cause of war. The book was successful, perhaps partly because it presaged the rise of fascism in Europe and made comprehensible some of Hitlers tactics.

In 1938 Robert returned to Cambridge as a fellow of his old college and reader in the Department of Education. Although he had become a pacifist after the First World War, he recognized the need to fight against the Nazis and served in a Home Guard anti-aircraft battery. Ever the psychologist, he wrote notes about the morale of a small group of middle-aged and elderly men staying up night after night, sometimes in dreadful weather, without once catching sight of an enemy aircraft. Straight & Crooked Thinking was distributed to US troops during the Second World War, and a similar book with a more specialized theme, called Straight Thinking in Wartime, was published. This was based in part on a detailed analysis of Adolf Hitlers book Mein Kampf, and he was astonished by how little attention had been paid to how openly Hitler divulged his plans to gain power.

He remained at Cambridge for the rest of his life. He taught trainee teachers the basic principles of psychology, including the use of statistical methods. However, his research concentrated on visual perception and the paranormal. He was President of the British Psychological Society from 1949 to 50 and of the Society for Psychical Research from 1942 to 44. Although a frequent result of his painstaking investigations was the detection of cheating in apparent cases of psychic powers, he remained open to the possibility of such abilities. He was a close friend of the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, and some of the ideas that he added to later editions of