In what is a growing genre, Aiken provides a thoughtful approach to the attractions, distractions, and pitfalls of our...
An expert in the field of cyberpsychology looks at how the interface between digital technology and our daily activities impacts social and personal relationships.
Aiken is the founder and director of the Dublin-based CyberPsychology Research Centre and has advised INTERPOL, the FBI, and the White House. Although she specializes in cybercrime, the author focuses on the broader social impact of the rapid increase of internet access over the past 15 years (“from 6.5 to 43 percent of the global population”) and the growth of cellphone use: an increase in subscriptions from 2 billion users in 2005 to 7 billion 10 years later. Moreover, average users check their phones more than 1,500 times a week. One consequence is divided attention between the digital device and the person in front of us—talking on the phone at the dinner table—and this has damaging effects on the quality of personal relationships, especially within families. Aiken is emphatic that intimate contact is essential for babies and toddlers. “A hug and a quick kiss aren't enough,” she writes. “They need to be talked to, tickled, massaged and played with. And they need your eye contact.” Even in the case of older children and adults, “intimate” relationships established and maintained online or even by phone cannot substitute for the more traditional ones based on face-to-face contact. Without the clues provided by body language and facial expression, which we normally rely on in face-to-face situations, we are handicapped in assessing trustworthiness and too easily fall victim to predators. Another major problem is the difficulty for parents and other caregivers of policing a child's access to inappropriate content and its easy availability for adolescents. The author argues for more regulation of internet content by governments so that children are denied access to “extreme content online—be it adult pornography or violence.”
In what is a growing genre, Aiken provides a thoughtful approach to the attractions, distractions, and pitfalls of our digital culture.Pub Date: Aug. 23, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9785-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: June 29, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2016
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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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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