Bound to have wide popular appeal.
A fascinating look at little-known illusions that greatly affect our daily lives.
Chabris (Psychology/Union Coll.) and Simons (Psychology/Univ. of Illinois) won a 2004 Ig Nobel Prize for their widely reported “gorilla experiment,” which showed that when people focus on one thing, it's easy to overlook other things—even a woman in a gorilla suit. In their debut, they explore this habit of “inattentional blindness” and other common ways in which we distort our perception of reality. Their readable book offers surprising insights into just how clueless we are about how our minds work and how we experience the world. We think we see, know, remember or have the capacity to do something, when we actually do not. Recounting recent research and real-life examples, the authors focus on six illusions that make us overestimate our mental abilities. The illusion of attention allows us to look right at something and not consciously see it, as in the case of a gorilla appearing on court during a basketball game. The illusion of memory makes us believe we recall events precisely, when in fact we may embellish personal recollections of emotional moments like 9/11, and may even unintentionally plagiarize, thinking an idea is our own. Similarly, we hoodwink ourselves into overestimating our abilities (with the least skilled most likely to think better of themselves) and into believing we know more about the world than is justified (such as the time and expense involved in a planned project). The illusion of cause allows us to find the patterns in randomness that account for conspiracy theories and the discovery of religious images in sandwiches. Finally, we think we have enormous untapped mental ability that can be released with simple techniques, such as listening to the music of Mozart (the illusion of potential). The authors suggest that these illusions “might be so persistent and pervasive in our thought patterns precisely because they lead us to think better of ourselves than we objectively should.” Be aware of these habits of mind, they write, and you can avoid being misled.
Bound to have wide popular appeal.Pub Date: May 18, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-307-45965-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Jan. 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2010
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
The Stoics did much better with the much shorter Enchiridion.
A follow-on to the author’s garbled but popular 48 Laws of Power, promising that readers will learn how to win friends and influence people, to say nothing of outfoxing all those “toxic types” out in the world.
Greene (Mastery, 2012, etc.) begins with a big sell, averring that his book “is designed to immerse you in all aspects of human behavior and illuminate its root causes.” To gauge by this fat compendium, human behavior is mostly rotten, a presumption that fits with the author’s neo-Machiavellian program of self-validation and eventual strategic supremacy. The author works to formula: First, state a “law,” such as “confront your dark side” or “know your limits,” the latter of which seems pale compared to the Delphic oracle’s “nothing in excess.” Next, elaborate on that law with what might seem to be as plain as day: “Losing contact with reality, we make irrational decisions. That is why our success often does not last.” One imagines there might be other reasons for the evanescence of glory, but there you go. Finally, spin out a long tutelary yarn, seemingly the longer the better, to shore up the truism—in this case, the cometary rise and fall of one-time Disney CEO Michael Eisner, with the warning, “his fate could easily be yours, albeit most likely on a smaller scale,” which ranks right up there with the fortuneteller’s “I sense that someone you know has died" in orders of probability. It’s enough to inspire a new law: Beware of those who spend too much time telling you what you already know, even when it’s dressed up in fresh-sounding terms. “Continually mix the visceral with the analytic” is the language of a consultant’s report, more important-sounding than “go with your gut but use your head, too.”
The Stoics did much better with the much shorter Enchiridion.Pub Date: Oct. 23, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-525-42814-5
Page Count: 580
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: July 30, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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