Those looking to win friends and influence people should turn to Dale Carnegie and his cheerful disciples. Mayer confines...
There is more to brainpower than IQ, writes Mayer (Psychology/Univ. of New Hampshire; Personality: A Systems Approach, 2006, etc.) in this astute exploration of a different form of intelligence: the ability to understand the personalities of other human beings as well as our own.
The “grand theorists” of the mind (Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, Alfred Adler, Henry Murray and Harry Stack Sullivan) delivered vivid insights from philosophy, literature, biology and their own observations, but it was only when subsequent generations of psychologists examined what people—not just a few patients—actually do that they discovered which insights made sense. Mayer fills his book with ingenious studies of how people judge others. We routinely decode faces, interpret motives and traits, and use these to guide our behavior. Successful judges of personal intelligence enjoy better relationships and more success in life. Poor judges are worried, manipulative, insecure and generally disagreeable. Essential to personal intelligence is the ability to know thyself, a preoccupation of philosophers since the dawn of history. Everyone, the author included, urges us to look inward, but good research reveals that introspection has its limits. It’s accurate for emotions (“I’m angry”) but less so for abilities (“I’m smart”). Perhaps too much self-knowledge depends on what others think of us: our reputations. This is no small matter since misinterpreting one’s own traits leads to mistakes in evaluating others’. “My wish,” writes the author, “is that you will feel enriched by seeing how we all use personal intelligence to reason about ourselves and others, and that you will come to appreciate this set of abilities in a new way.”
Those looking to win friends and influence people should turn to Dale Carnegie and his cheerful disciples. Mayer confines himself to invariably stimulating insights backed by solid scientific research, so readers looking to understand the human condition will certainly enjoy this book.Pub Date: Feb. 18, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-374-23085-2
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Scientific American/Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2014
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
Doyle offers another lucid, inspiring chronicle of female empowerment and the rewards of self-awareness and renewal.
More life reflections from the bestselling author on themes of societal captivity and the catharsis of personal freedom.
In her third book, Doyle (Love Warrior, 2016, etc.) begins with a life-changing event. “Four years ago,” she writes, “married to the father of my three children, I fell in love with a woman.” That woman, Abby Wambach, would become her wife. Emblematically arranged into three sections—“Caged,” “Keys,” “Freedom”—the narrative offers, among other elements, vignettes about the soulful author’s girlhood, when she was bulimic and felt like a zoo animal, a “caged girl made for wide-open skies.” She followed the path that seemed right and appropriate based on her Catholic upbringing and adolescent conditioning. After a downward spiral into “drinking, drugging, and purging,” Doyle found sobriety and the authentic self she’d been suppressing. Still, there was trouble: Straining an already troubled marriage was her husband’s infidelity, which eventually led to life-altering choices and the discovery of a love she’d never experienced before. Throughout the book, Doyle remains open and candid, whether she’s admitting to rigging a high school homecoming court election or denouncing the doting perfectionism of “cream cheese parenting,” which is about “giving your children the best of everything.” The author’s fears and concerns are often mirrored by real-world issues: gender roles and bias, white privilege, racism, and religion-fueled homophobia and hypocrisy. Some stories merely skim the surface of larger issues, but Doyle revisits them in later sections and digs deeper, using friends and familial references to personify their impact on her life, both past and present. Shorter pieces, some only a page in length, manage to effectively translate an emotional gut punch, as when Doyle’s therapist called her blooming extramarital lesbian love a “dangerous distraction.” Ultimately, the narrative is an in-depth look at a courageous woman eager to share the wealth of her experiences by embracing vulnerability and reclaiming her inner strength and resiliency.
Doyle offers another lucid, inspiring chronicle of female empowerment and the rewards of self-awareness and renewal.Pub Date: March 10, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-0125-8
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Dial Books
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
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