A pleasing mix of research, advice, and humor, this book is a useful tonic to a key social ailment.
A remarkable examination of the epidemic of loneliness and sound advice for alleviating it.
In this articulate, informative book, Franco, a psychology professor at the University of Maryland, notes that the number of friends that most people have is lower than ever before (sometimes zero), and these circumstances lead to numerous deleterious effects on our mental and physical health. “Out of 106 factors that influence depression, having a confidante is the most powerful,” she writes. “Loneliness is more fatal than a poor diet or lack of exercise, as corrosive as smoking fifteen cigarettes a day. Friendship literally saves our lives.” The author identifies work pressure as a central culprit, but also to blame is the widespread view that relationships should only focus on sex and romantic love. Many people have simply forgotten how to make and keep friends, and Franco provides a wealth of useful advice on the subject. Starting a friendship requires taking initiative, which can mean accepting vulnerability and the risk of rejection. “People think tiny acts, like saying hello, can’t have colossal consequences for their life,” she writes. “But they can. One hello can be the difference between being lonely and finding your best friend.” Having common interests is always a good place to start. Making friends with people across racial, social, and political boundaries is also important, but there has to be a set of shared values. Cultivating and maintaining a friendship requires an investment of time and energy, and both sides have to know the boundaries. Franco covers a great deal of ground, although one area she does not explore in depth is social media. Are Facebook friends, for example, really friends? Is Instagram a help or a hindrance? That is a big subject deserving a book of its own, and maybe Franco will address it in a subsequent volume. Until then, this one offers many fascinating insights.
A pleasing mix of research, advice, and humor, this book is a useful tonic to a key social ailment.Pub Date: Sept. 6, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-593-33189-7
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: June 16, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2022
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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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
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