Another pop psychology book about the need for men to get in touch with their emotions and break the silence that keeps their fears hidden.
Addis (Psychology/Clark Univ.; co-author: Overcoming Depression One Step at a Time, 2004, etc.) draws on research interviews, conversations with former clients of his counseling practice and personal experiences to delineate the problem he sees as men's inability to recognize and speak out about their vulnerabilities. Anecdotes about men and their problems abound, making this an easy read. Keeping silent about their inner lives, writes Addis, is a survival strategy that boys adopt early in lives when they are learning to define themselves as masculine. Being silent about one's feelings is not an inherently masculine trait, but a learned one, and being more open does not mean becoming more feminine. The author’s message about the silence and vulnerabilities of men and the harm that this can cause is directed toward women at least as much as toward men. Straightforward but somewhat repetitious chapters include questions for both sexes to ask themselves and exercises for both to perform, and simple charts and diagrams summarize his concepts. Addis counsels women, often the primary emotional caretakers of the men in their lives, to avoid "mothering," and instructs men in how to overcome their fears, take stock of their relationships and improve their friendships with other men. The penultimate chapter focuses on handling life's most stressful events: divorce, job loss, illness and death of a loved one—times when men may need help, even professional help, but are reluctant to seek it. In a weak final chapter, Addis looks briefly at the ways in which societal change can alleviate the problem—e.g., developing public policies that make men's well being a major social concern. User-friendly self-help more likely to be read by a wife concerned about her husband's mental health than by the invisible man himself.
Pub Date: Dec. 20, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-8050-9200-4
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Times/Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Aug. 15, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2011
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
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
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