An accessible, empathetic book.
A close look at a widespread human behavior.
Behavioral scientist Slepian, a professor of leadership and ethics at Columbia, draws on his research with some 50,000 participants in 26 countries as well as copious studies by other researchers to examine why, how, and to what effect people keep secrets. Distinguishing between secrecy and privacy, he considers secrecy “as an intention to hold specific information back, and privacy as a reflection of how much you broadcast personal information.” Among the many issues that people hide are sexual behavior, infidelity, financial problems, and drug use. While some secrets may feel burdensome, others may not. “Some of life’s most joyous and momentous occasions,” Slepian notes, “start off as secrets we keep in order to reveal: the gifts we give, pregnancies, marriage proposals, and more.” The author is most concerned, though, with secrets that make people feel helpless, alone, and unsupported. The negative impact of secrets, he writes, “comes from having those secrets occupy our thoughts.” Perceiving a secret as immoral generates feelings of shame; “the more it feels solitary and personal, the more it feels isolating. And the more it is based on emotion rather than logic, the less insight you feel you have into it.” Slepian suggests three coping strategies for gaining insight: realizing that past mistakes are in the past and need not blight the present; realizing that keeping a secret may benefit others and so have a positive value; and acknowledging that the secret may benefit you. Sometimes, he asserts, sharing our inner worlds helps to form and maintain relationships, “but sometimes we hold back in order to protect those relationships as well,” or to enjoy an activity—a hobby, for example—without worrying about others’ judgment. Nevertheless, Slepian advises, “If you have a secret that is bothering you, consider sharing it with someone you trust.”
An accessible, empathetic book.Pub Date: June 7, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-593-23721-2
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: April 7, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 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
IN THE NEWS
IN THE NEWS
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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