A real hot potato, as a columnist for Fortune defends IQ tests and their unavoidable message: that not all people, nor all groups of people, are born with equal mental abilities. According to Seligman, the current distrust of IQ tests is unfounded, a result of the wishful thinking of the 1960's. In fact, he reports, almost all experts (psychologists, educators, laboratory researchers) believe that IQ tests ``do indeed measure mental abilities that might collectively be thought of as intelligence.'' Moreover, most believe that the tests are not culturally biased. The problem is, well, that some people seem to be smarter than others, which violates the cherished American belief that everyone gets an even start in life. This matters because IQ ``has enormous predictive power in real-world situations'' and correlates closely with future economic status. What's worse, different races score differently: East Asians (Chinese, Japanese) score consistently higher than whites, blacks consistently lower. What's even worse, experts agree that IQ is largely inheritable, so there's no immediate way to rectify the imbalance. The long-term solution, Seligman delicately suggests, may be eugenic planning. But first IQ must be acknowledged as a useful tool, especially for educators who need to identify students requiring remedial help. Seligman writes sympathetically of Cyril Burt and Arthur Jensen, two researchers who faced the wrath of the anti-IQ lobby. He sketches the history of intelligence testing; contrasts the high scores of Jews and Japanese (Jews excel in verbal portions of the test, Japanese in math) to demonstrate the multisided nature of intelligence; ponders the future (American kids have fewer high and low scores than in generations past; we are grouping together in mediocrity). He even takes an IQ test himself, but refuses to reveal his score. Is Seligman an unwitting racist or a hero breaking the code of silence? Either way, it doesn't take a lot of brains to guess that his levelheaded presentation will stir up a storm.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1992
ISBN: 1-55972-131-6
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Birch Lane Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1992
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
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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