The author’s bright anecdotes and wide-ranging research stories are certain to please many readers.
New America Foundation Future Tense fellow Holmes, a former research coordinator in the department of economics at Harvard, debuts with a provocative analysis of the roots of uncertainty.
The need for closure is a mainstay of American life—and not only after mass shootings or other tragic events. Confronted by ambiguity in our personal or professional lives, we seek answers. In the face of perceived threats, we demand absolutes. “In an increasingly complex, unpredictable world,” writes the author, “what matters most isn’t IQ, willpower, or confidence in what we know. It’s how we deal with what we don’t understand.” In this well-written book based on the latest findings in social psychology and cognitive science, Holmes explains that we are all naturally ambivalent. When we are confused, our minds either snap shut (relying on preconceptions) or unlock (allowing us to innovate). Offering innumerable examples, the author describes instances in which we try to avoid uncertainty and have a dangerously high need for closure—a critical negotiation, inconclusive medical results, or a changing business environment—and others in which we try to maximize the benefits of harnessing ambiguity, whether to help students solve problems with no clear answers or to discover new ways to cope with failure and success. Holmes shows how people and organizations have dealt with ambiguity, from the FBI’s 1993 assault on the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas, to the fashion industry, where manufacturers and retailers tried to meet the perplexing uncertainty over changing skirt hemlines in the 1970s. Most telling are the author’s discussions of hostage negotiations, which demand the patient skills of professionals with a low need for certainty in confusing situations. Ambiguity can make medical problems more agonizing, make the pleasure of mystery novels more enjoyable, and lead to devastating prejudices in our social lives.
The author’s bright anecdotes and wide-ranging research stories are certain to please many readers.Pub Date: Oct. 13, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-34837-9
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: July 7, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
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
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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