Too much pop and not enough psychology.
How unscrupulous political leaders turn people into sheep and make them bleat on cue.
Stout has mined for pop-psychology gold in earlier works (The Sociopath Next Door: The Ruthless Versus the Rest of Us, 2005, etc.), and her prose has softened in proportion as her apparent resolve to become Dr. Phil has hardened. Her thesis here is simple: As creatures, we are naturally subject to fear, individually and collectively, but if we know who the Bad Guys are (here: the Bush administration) and what they are doing to us, we can defeat them by following her prescriptions—e.g., “Make fun of the [frightening] image. If you enjoy irony, yell, The Russians are coming! The Russians are coming!” Stout’s approach at times seems lifted from a self-help magazine in a supermarket checkout line. Are you stressed? Find out with her 21-question “Walking-Around Anxiety Test” (“7. Right now, are your palms sweaty?”). Later, she identifies “Six Stages of a Limbic War” and lists “Ten Behavioral Characteristics of Fear Brokers.” She equates political leaders who frighten us with domestic abusers and offers a sugary case study of an abused woman who found the Courage to Be Free after spending some quality time with Martha Stout, Ph.D. The author is most effective when she explains the physiological and psychological mechanisms of individual and cultural fear. Her discussion of the limbic system is clear, as are her descriptions of our coping mechanisms. She shows how irrational fears led to events as diverse as the rise of the Ku Klux Klan, the internment of Japanese-Americans in World War II, the Red-baiting of the McCarthy era, the Patriot Act and the arrest of Cat Stevens. She cites some research that indicates our Blue State/Red State political preferences may be hard-wired, and she elicits a chuckle with her concept of a “cowbird politician”: a public official who has no core beliefs but employs the “nests” of others.
Too much pop and not enough psychology.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-374-22999-3
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Sarah Crichton/Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2007
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
IN THE NEWS
IN THE NEWS
The Stoics did much better with the much shorter Enchiridion.
A follow-on to the author’s garbled but popular 48 Laws of Power, promising that readers will learn how to win friends and influence people, to say nothing of outfoxing all those “toxic types” out in the world.
Greene (Mastery, 2012, etc.) begins with a big sell, averring that his book “is designed to immerse you in all aspects of human behavior and illuminate its root causes.” To gauge by this fat compendium, human behavior is mostly rotten, a presumption that fits with the author’s neo-Machiavellian program of self-validation and eventual strategic supremacy. The author works to formula: First, state a “law,” such as “confront your dark side” or “know your limits,” the latter of which seems pale compared to the Delphic oracle’s “nothing in excess.” Next, elaborate on that law with what might seem to be as plain as day: “Losing contact with reality, we make irrational decisions. That is why our success often does not last.” One imagines there might be other reasons for the evanescence of glory, but there you go. Finally, spin out a long tutelary yarn, seemingly the longer the better, to shore up the truism—in this case, the cometary rise and fall of one-time Disney CEO Michael Eisner, with the warning, “his fate could easily be yours, albeit most likely on a smaller scale,” which ranks right up there with the fortuneteller’s “I sense that someone you know has died" in orders of probability. It’s enough to inspire a new law: Beware of those who spend too much time telling you what you already know, even when it’s dressed up in fresh-sounding terms. “Continually mix the visceral with the analytic” is the language of a consultant’s report, more important-sounding than “go with your gut but use your head, too.”
The Stoics did much better with the much shorter Enchiridion.Pub Date: Oct. 23, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-525-42814-5
Page Count: 580
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: July 30, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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