A Field Guide to Lies: Critical Thinking in the Information Age

Daniel Levitin — neuroscientist, cognitive psychologist, and McGill University professor — produced in this book one of the most practically useful guides to navigating the modern information environment. The book is organised around three categories of deception: misleading numbers and statistics, misleading words and framing, and misleading visual representations. Each section provides concrete tools for identifying the specific techniques used to mislead, illustrated with examples drawn from politics, advertising, journalism, and everyday life.

Published in the UK as Weaponized Lies, the book sits in a practical tradition alongside Calling Bullshit and Bad Science — works that translate epistemic principles into usable skills rather than abstract theory. What distinguishes Levitin's contribution is his focus on the neuroscience of why these techniques work: understanding the cognitive mechanisms that make misleading statistics or framing effective is the first step towards developing resistance to them. For organisations designing staff training programmes on information resilience, or practitioners advising clients on media literacy, this is one of the most transferable and accessible tools available.