Most readers already realize that online personas are often different from those in real life, but Aboujaoude offers a...
A psychiatrist who specializes in obsessive-compulsive disorders argues persuasively that the Internet can be hazardous to our mental health.
Aboujaoude (Psychiatry and Behavioral Science/Stanford Univ.; Compulsive Acts: A Psychiatrist’s Tales of Ritual and Obsession, 2008, etc.) refers to scholarly studies, media reports and his patients’ case histories to give copious examples of people altering their moral behavior and personalities online, almost always for the worse. In the virtual world, responsible adults who would never go near so much as a slot machine start gambling away their families’ life savings in virtual casinos. Individuals with low self-esteem offline spend more of their days on virtual role-playing sites like Second Life, where they can mold themselves—and sometimes others—into their idea of perfection, leaving imperfect face-to-face relationships to deteriorate. Online, mild-mannered people lie, cheat, steal, scheme and bully. Aboujaoude argues that they degrade language and, thereby, thought, reducing social communications to crude tweets of 140 characters or fewer and letting emoticons stand for their feelings. Anyone who has any experience in online forums and enterprises will recognize the ills that the author enumerates, but is it something about the Internet that causes this bad behavior, or something in human nature? Psychiatrists are undecided about whether Internet addiction is a legitimate disorder, and Aboujaoude clearly leans toward giving it its own diagnostic status. If it is indeed a “real” disorder, psychiatry may lack the tools to treat people whose psyches are more present online than in person. The author acknowledges that the Internet has wrought plenty of good; it enabled him to research much of his book from his own computer, for example. Furthermore, it isn’t going away. But just as the Industrial Revolution forever changed the physical landscape often catastrophically, the virtual revolution seems to be altering our mental world in ways we have barely begun to understand.
Most readers already realize that online personas are often different from those in real life, but Aboujaoude offers a unique psychiatrist’s perspective and an urgent wake-up call for those still in the dark.Pub Date: Feb. 7, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-393-07064-4
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Dec. 29, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
IN THE NEWS
Readers unfamiliar with the anecdotal material Greene presents may find interesting avenues to pursue, but they should...
Greene (The 33 Strategies of War, 2007, etc.) believes that genius can be learned if we pay attention and reject social conformity.
The author suggests that our emergence as a species with stereoscopic, frontal vision and sophisticated hand-eye coordination gave us an advantage over earlier humans and primates because it allowed us to contemplate a situation and ponder alternatives for action. This, along with the advantages conferred by mirror neurons, which allow us to intuit what others may be thinking, contributed to our ability to learn, pass on inventions to future generations and improve our problem-solving ability. Throughout most of human history, we were hunter-gatherers, and our brains are engineered accordingly. The author has a jaundiced view of our modern technological society, which, he writes, encourages quick, rash judgments. We fail to spend the time needed to develop thorough mastery of a subject. Greene writes that every human is “born unique,” with specific potential that we can develop if we listen to our inner voice. He offers many interesting but tendentious examples to illustrate his theory, including Einstein, Darwin, Mozart and Temple Grandin. In the case of Darwin, Greene ignores the formative intellectual influences that shaped his thought, including the discovery of geological evolution with which he was familiar before his famous voyage. The author uses Grandin's struggle to overcome autistic social handicaps as a model for the necessity for everyone to create a deceptive social mask.
Readers unfamiliar with the anecdotal material Greene presents may find interesting avenues to pursue, but they should beware of the author's quirky, sometimes misleading brush-stroke characterizations.Pub Date: Nov. 13, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-670-02496-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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