A worthy, only occasionally clunky treatise on matters of urgent concern.
Yawning can be contagious. Suicide, too, as this intriguing book shows.
A little knowledge can be a dangerous thing. Take bulimia, for instance. As journalist and psychologist Kravetz (co-author: Supersurvivors: The Surprising Link Between Suffering and Success, 2014) writes, once bulimia was separated from anorexia and described in the psychological literature, the incidence of the disease grew and even spread to places where it had been unknown. Said the author who first wrote it up, “once it was described, and I take full responsibility for that…there was a common language for it.” Now, it seems, psychologists are seeking a common language for epidemic suicide, the larger subject of Kravetz’s look at how harmful memes spread and to which he was introduced when, soon after moving to Silicon Valley, he was on hand to record instances of children killing or harming themselves in patterns that suggest social contagion in all its varieties of “thought, behavior, or emotion.” The author moves about in space and time to address this phenomenon, sometimes with a little definitional fuzziness (“if something as universal as economics can cue a social contagion like greed…”), eventually settling on the notion of primes, or cues “that unconsciously convince people to accept new thoughts, behaviors, and emotions.” Such cues surround us, thanks to the pervasiveness of advertising and political argument, and while some of them may suggest to the unwary that killing oneself is a cool thing to do, they also suggest that we buy things, vote for people, and suchlike things in subconscious ways—ways that succeed, notes the author, when it seems as if they are ideas of our own, formed without outside influence. Kravetz’s account is too first-personal at too many turns (“Beyond my journalist’s penchant for analysis, I personally need to understand if there’s a solution…”), but he has covered the bases well, raising provocative questions on whether social contagion can be contained in the way that we ward off leprosy and smallpox.
A worthy, only occasionally clunky treatise on matters of urgent concern.Pub Date: June 27, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-06-244893-4
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Harper Wave
Review Posted Online: April 17, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Readers unfamiliar with the anecdotal material Greene presents may find interesting avenues to pursue, but they should...
Greene (The 33 Strategies of War, 2007, etc.) believes that genius can be learned if we pay attention and reject social conformity.
The author suggests that our emergence as a species with stereoscopic, frontal vision and sophisticated hand-eye coordination gave us an advantage over earlier humans and primates because it allowed us to contemplate a situation and ponder alternatives for action. This, along with the advantages conferred by mirror neurons, which allow us to intuit what others may be thinking, contributed to our ability to learn, pass on inventions to future generations and improve our problem-solving ability. Throughout most of human history, we were hunter-gatherers, and our brains are engineered accordingly. The author has a jaundiced view of our modern technological society, which, he writes, encourages quick, rash judgments. We fail to spend the time needed to develop thorough mastery of a subject. Greene writes that every human is “born unique,” with specific potential that we can develop if we listen to our inner voice. He offers many interesting but tendentious examples to illustrate his theory, including Einstein, Darwin, Mozart and Temple Grandin. In the case of Darwin, Greene ignores the formative intellectual influences that shaped his thought, including the discovery of geological evolution with which he was familiar before his famous voyage. The author uses Grandin's struggle to overcome autistic social handicaps as a model for the necessity for everyone to create a deceptive social mask.
Readers unfamiliar with the anecdotal material Greene presents may find interesting avenues to pursue, but they should beware of the author's quirky, sometimes misleading brush-stroke characterizations.Pub Date: Nov. 13, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-670-02496-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2012
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
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