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
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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