A mostly provocative account of how inner turmoil drives us.
The latest in the TED series: a quirky exploration of the mysteries behind human motivation, in business and relationships.
Ariely (Psychology and Behavioral Economics/Duke Univ.; The (Honest) Truth About Dishonesty: How We Lie to Everyone—Especially Ourselves, 2012, etc.) was always fascinated with why we pursue goals, whether for financial remuneration or personal satisfaction. “We are the CEOs of our own lives….Whatever our official job descriptions, we are all part-time motivators,” writes the author, whose interest in such issues stems from tragedy: badly burned in an accident when he was young, he’s since wondered why some are more driven to rise above such circumstances. He recalls that “the devastating role that helplessness played in my own experience…made me more deeply appreciate the challenges of being badly injured, the complexity of recovery, and the ways that my experience had deeply changed me.” Today, Ariely documents psychological experiments performed at tech companies and universities, convincing him that humans incentivize themselves and others in consistent yet enigmatic ways. He argues that workplace initiatives—e.g., restrictions regarding employee cubicles—“crush our natural motivation.” Yet financial compensation is far from an automatic cure-all; though “almost all companies use some kind of bonus…little is known about how effective bonuses really are.” At a semiconductor factory, Ariely found a promised voucher for a pizza or praise from a supervisor provoked productivity more reliably than extra money. In nonoccupational contexts, he notes, we have a “deep attachment to our own ideas,” explaining the satisfaction found in creative pursuits. We are even motivated to control our destinies after death—see: the mummified nobility of China or Egypt. Ariely writes in an approachable, chipper style, but some readers may find his ambiguous findings unsatisfying, as when he writes, “it is impossible to come up with one simple set of motivational rules.”
A mostly provocative account of how inner turmoil drives us.Pub Date: Nov. 15, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5011-2004-6
Page Count: 120
Publisher: TED/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 21, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2016
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our...
A psychologist and Nobel Prize winner summarizes and synthesizes the recent decades of research on intuition and systematic thinking.
The author of several scholarly texts, Kahneman (Emeritus Psychology and Public Affairs/Princeton Univ.) now offers general readers not just the findings of psychological research but also a better understanding of how research questions arise and how scholars systematically frame and answer them. He begins with the distinction between System 1 and System 2 mental operations, the former referring to quick, automatic thought, the latter to more effortful, overt thinking. We rely heavily, writes, on System 1, resorting to the higher-energy System 2 only when we need or want to. Kahneman continually refers to System 2 as “lazy”: We don’t want to think rigorously about something. The author then explores the nuances of our two-system minds, showing how they perform in various situations. Psychological experiments have repeatedly revealed that our intuitions are generally wrong, that our assessments are based on biases and that our System 1 hates doubt and despises ambiguity. Kahneman largely avoids jargon; when he does use some (“heuristics,” for example), he argues that such terms really ought to join our everyday vocabulary. He reviews many fundamental concepts in psychology and statistics (regression to the mean, the narrative fallacy, the optimistic bias), showing how they relate to his overall concerns about how we think and why we make the decisions that we do. Some of the later chapters (dealing with risk-taking and statistics and probabilities) are denser than others (some readers may resent such demands on System 2!), but the passages that deal with the economic and political implications of the research are gripping.
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our minds.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-374-27563-1
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
IN THE NEWS
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Hiccups aside, a mostly valuable compendium of irrational thinking, with a handful of blanket corrective maneuvers.
A waggish, cautionary compilation of pitfalls associated with systematic cognitive errors, from novelist Dobelli.
To be human is to err, routinely and with bias. We exercise deviation from logic, writes the author, as much as, and possibly more than, we display optimal reasoning. In an effort to bring awareness to this sorry state of affairs, he has gathered here—in three-page, anecdotally saturated squibs—nearly 100 examples of muddied thinking. Many will ring familiar to readers (Dobelli’s illustrations are not startlingly original, but observant)—e.g., herd instinct and groupthink, hindsight, overconfidence, the lack of an intuitive grasp of probability or statistical reality. Others, if not new, are smartly encapsulated: social loafing, the hourly rate trap, decision fatigue, carrying on with a lost cause (the sunk-cost fallacy). Most of his points stick home: the deformation of professional thinking, of which Mark Twain said, “If your only tool is a hammer, all your problems will be nails”; multitasking is the illusion of attention with potentially dire results if you are eating a sloppy sandwich while driving on a busy street. In his quest for clarity, Dobelli mostly brings shrewdness, skepticism and wariness to bear, but he can also be opaque—e.g., shaping the details of history “into a consistent story...we speak about ‘understanding,’ but these things cannot be understood in the traditional sense. We simply build the meaning into them afterward.” Well, yes. And if we are to be wary of stories, what are we to make of his many telling anecdotes when he counsels, “Anecdotes are a particularly tricky sort of cherry picking....To rebuff an anecdote is difficult because it is a mini-story, and we know how vulnerable our brains are to those”?
Hiccups aside, a mostly valuable compendium of irrational thinking, with a handful of blanket corrective maneuvers.Pub Date: May 14, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-06-221968-8
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 5, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2013
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