A winning smile is widely recognized as social currency even by our primate cousins, but—as LaFrance (Psychology/Yale Univ.) shows—its meaning is not always so obvious.
The author deconstructs the hidden content of smiles and their role in our lives, beginning with the startling information that babies have been observed to practice smiling while still in the womb. This is believed to be an unconscious survival mechanism that prepares them to elicit the care they need from adults in order to survive, rather than a spontaneous expression of pleasure. The author identifies this act as the baby's social manipulation. By five or six weeks, the infant has learned to lock eyes with caretakers and smile responsively. “[E]volution has made that behavior adaptive,” she writes, providing “babies with the ability and inclination to flex their smile muscles but maturity and social context affect whether, when and how they will materialize.” Smiles are recognizably spontaneous or voluntary, engaging different neural pathways and involving different facial muscles; and they can represent a panoply mixed emotions, which are recognizable according to the facial muscles they engage, their size and duration. Humans are wired to respond empathetically to the smiles of others, and experimental evidence suggests that people who smile more tend to live longer because the act evokes a positive emotional state. Psychologists describe this as the “facial feedback hypothesis.” LaFrance presents an abundance of contemporary research to demonstrate how our smiles are conditioned socially. Women tend to smile more than men, people in power positions smile less than their subordinates and service-with-a-smile is expected. Americans smile at the children of strangers, while Europeans don't, and there are subtle differences between the smile of an Englishman and an American, or a French woman and a French-speaking Canadian—as discernible as their different accents. By unveiling the complexity of something as simple as a smile, the author provides surprising insights into culture and psychology.
Pub Date: Aug. 8, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-393-06004-1
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2011
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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IN THE NEWS
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
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