An earnest and well-researched call to action and an urgent message that will hopefully expand in Zaki’s future work.
The director of the Stanford Social Neuroscience Laboratory asserts that human empathy and kindness can be developed skills.
With alarming evidence of our society’s rapidly diminishing empathy, Zaki (Psychology/Stanford Univ.) draws on decades of clinical research, along with experiments conducted at his lab, to consider the forces that impact our modern condition. “The news is not good,” he writes. “Empathy has dwindled steadily especially in the twenty-first century. The average person in 2009 was less empathic than 75 percent of the people in 1979.” The author goes on to recount examples of how individuals and groups have worked toward reversing this trend. These include a former white supremacist who, after becoming a father, found new meaning in his life, enabling him to reverse his negative and often violent instincts. Along with a group of like-minded colleagues, he formed a nonprofit support group called Life After Hate, which “works to extract people from the dark place he once inhabited.” Similarly, the alternative sentencing program Changing Lives Through Literature helps convicts become more empathetic by expanding their self-awareness through reading about fictional characters who have struggled through their own challenging issues. Zaki further considers degrees of empathy, especially regarding health care workers and other caretakers, offering examples of how to work effectively without burning out from the pressure of needing to fix all problems. He also reviews our quickly evolving technological advances, highlighting the many opportunities where technology can serve to enhance empathy. While Zaki’s many examples offer encouragement that change is possible, the book could have further benefited by a more substantive action plan and a resource list. “In five years, or one, the world could be a meaner place or a kinder one. Our social fabric could further tear or start to mend,” writes the author, so “…the direction we take—and our collective fate—depends, in a real way, on what each of us decides to feel.”
An earnest and well-researched call to action and an urgent message that will hopefully expand in Zaki’s future work.Pub Date: June 4, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-451-49924-0
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: March 23, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2019
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
These are not hard and fast rules, but Meyer delivers important reading for those engaged in international business.
A helpful guide to working effectively with people from other cultures.
“The sad truth is that the vast majority of managers who conduct business internationally have little understanding about how culture is impacting their work,” writes Meyer, a professor at INSEAD, an international business school. Yet they face a wider array of work styles than ever before in dealing with clients, suppliers and colleagues from around the world. When is it best to speak or stay quiet? What is the role of the leader in the room? When working with foreign business people, failing to take cultural differences into account can lead to frustration, misunderstanding or worse. Based on research and her experiences teaching cross-cultural behaviors to executive students, the author examines a handful of key areas. Among others, they include communicating (Anglo-Saxons are explicit; Asians communicate implicitly, requiring listeners to read between the lines), developing a sense of trust (Brazilians do it over long lunches), and decision-making (Germans rely on consensus, Americans on one decider). In each area, the author provides a “culture map scale” that positions behaviors in more than 20 countries along a continuum, allowing readers to anticipate the preferences of individuals from a particular country: Do they like direct or indirect negative feedback? Are they rigid or flexible regarding deadlines? Do they favor verbal or written commitments? And so on. Meyer discusses managers who have faced perplexing situations, such as knowledgeable team members who fail to speak up in meetings or Indians who offer a puzzling half-shake, half-nod of the head. Cultural differences—not personality quirks—are the motivating factors behind many behavioral styles. Depending on our cultures, we understand the world in a particular way, find certain arguments persuasive or lacking merit, and consider some ways of making decisions or measuring time natural and others quite strange.
These are not hard and fast rules, but Meyer delivers important reading for those engaged in international business.Pub Date: May 27, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-61039-250-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: April 15, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2014
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