A well-written, inviting treatise to be a better person.
An intriguing investigation of our need to belong and how to make that process easier for the bashful among us.
Stanford psychology and business professor Cohen offers a learned tour of experimental and social psychology, connecting science to real life in meaningful ways. On the issue of the pitched politics of our time, he observes that there’s an evolutionary reason for not deviating from group beliefs, no matter how ridiculous or dangerous: “Being outcast from our tribe,” he writes, “would once have presented a physical threat to survival, and our brains still seem to see it that way. To venture dissent is to risk expulsion.” The tribe element is important, for being a member of a group is an essential part of identity, and being outside of a group is, writes Cohen, as bad for one’s health as a pack-a-day smoking habit. Throw race into the mix, and things get more complicated. Drawing on a variety of disciplines, the author observes that White people are often visibly stressed when in the company of Black people, fearing that they may be called out for racism. “The accumulation of mortifications can put people in a constant state of alert, ready for the possibility of demeaning treatment,” he adds, and while those mortifications apply to oppressed minorities more often than to the dominant majority, everyone has plenty of shame-inducing incidents. The ticket out? Cohen suggests that it’s as simple as kindness, judging less and listening more, and being polite: “Not interrupting; saying ‘please’ and ‘thank you’; apologizing when we do harm, whether intended or not, and even if others seem oversensitive about the harm caused, are signs that we see other selves as belonging in the circle of those to whom we should show respect.” Cohen is to the point and unsentimental even as he points the way to a nicer way to live.
A well-written, inviting treatise to be a better person.Pub Date: Sept. 13, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-324-00618-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: July 12, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2022
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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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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