Good clues for detecting lies but better insights into human nature.
The latest from the veteran psychotherapist and author of Get Anyone To Do Anything and Never Be Lied to Again.
Readers will perk up at Lieberman’s claim to offer “near-telepathic” techniques to reveal what people think and detect lies. “You will be privy to what lies deep in their subconscious mind,” he writes, “even when they themselves may be in denial and unwilling (or unable) to confront their thoughts, feelings, and fears on a conscious level.” The author is well versed in the latest advances in psycholinguistics and neurophysiology, but no mind reading miracles appear. Nonetheless, Lieberman is a fine writer, so readers searching for sensible clues that someone might be deceiving them will receive a solid education along with sporadic warnings not to rely on a single tactic. Despite a deep understanding of human psychology and the occasional caution, Lieberman hints but never stresses that no perfect lie detector (human or electronic) exists—not even one that is 95% effective. The best human lie detectors—interrogation experts with the police, military, CIA, FBI, etc.—regularly indict innocent suspects, and criminology gurus who proclaim techniques for ferreting out the guilty are almost always debunked. Near the halfway point of the text, Lieberman changes course, eschewing clues for winning at poker in favor of an excellent primer on healthy versus pathological human behavior. Perhaps most intriguing is the author’s explanation of the contrast between self-esteem and egotism, qualities that seem similar but are inversely related. Individuals with self-esteem like themselves, so they don’t require respect from others to feel worthy. As self-esteem declines, egotism assumes power to defend against a presumably hostile world—or at least to make excuses. Egotists seem powerful, but the opposite is true: “It’s the insecure person who has to tell us how confident he is—because that’s the only way we’re going to find out.”
Good clues for detecting lies but better insights into human nature.Pub Date: Aug. 16, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-593-23618-5
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Rodale
Review Posted Online: June 3, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2022
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
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
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