Unique, well-curated brain food for readers intrigued with the human psyche and how it can be recorded, indexed, and...
A detailed exploration of a historic, one-of-a-kind social archive project.
Lemov (History of Science/Harvard Univ.; World as Laboratory: Experiments with Mice, Mazes, and Men, 2005) diligently scrutinizes a long-lost collection of sociological data collected in the mid-20th century. Her excavation was a frustrating one, she notes, due to the data’s whereabouts and its availability, as well as the difficulty in accessing the machines required to view them. The author traces the histories of the many evaluative scientists fascinated with projective testing data in the early 1900s and the subsequent paper trail of diagnostic results in the wake of their human psychological evaluations. Capitalizing on this need to collect social-scientific data was anthropological researcher–turned–Harvard psychologist Bert Kaplan, whose pioneering societal experiments progressed from New Mexico’s Zuni Pueblo to the assemblage of dream data from Native American tribal subjects (augmenting the work of American anthropologist Dorothy Eggan). It also encompassed Rorschach tests, which often revealed the hidden personality traits of participants. All of these findings were then recorded through the then-innovative yet now-vastly-outdated Microcard archival and Readex retrieval system. In her comprehensive text, dense with detailed research and intelligent speculation, Lemov ably deconstructs how the possibility of an archive could even exist in the mid-1900s, why it was stored in the way that it was, how the hybridized data storage devices actually worked, and the way Kaplan’s professional modesty contributed to the eventual evaporation of his legendary project. In what she calls a “parable for our time,” Lemov notes that this database, however obscure, is a reflection on the nature and behavior of modern humanity within an increasingly digitized society.
Unique, well-curated brain food for readers intrigued with the human psyche and how it can be recorded, indexed, and cross-referenced.Pub Date: Nov. 24, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-300-20952-5
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Sept. 23, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2015
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
Readers unfamiliar with the anecdotal material Greene presents may find interesting avenues to pursue, but they should...
Greene (The 33 Strategies of War, 2007, etc.) believes that genius can be learned if we pay attention and reject social conformity.
The author suggests that our emergence as a species with stereoscopic, frontal vision and sophisticated hand-eye coordination gave us an advantage over earlier humans and primates because it allowed us to contemplate a situation and ponder alternatives for action. This, along with the advantages conferred by mirror neurons, which allow us to intuit what others may be thinking, contributed to our ability to learn, pass on inventions to future generations and improve our problem-solving ability. Throughout most of human history, we were hunter-gatherers, and our brains are engineered accordingly. The author has a jaundiced view of our modern technological society, which, he writes, encourages quick, rash judgments. We fail to spend the time needed to develop thorough mastery of a subject. Greene writes that every human is “born unique,” with specific potential that we can develop if we listen to our inner voice. He offers many interesting but tendentious examples to illustrate his theory, including Einstein, Darwin, Mozart and Temple Grandin. In the case of Darwin, Greene ignores the formative intellectual influences that shaped his thought, including the discovery of geological evolution with which he was familiar before his famous voyage. The author uses Grandin's struggle to overcome autistic social handicaps as a model for the necessity for everyone to create a deceptive social mask.
Readers unfamiliar with the anecdotal material Greene presents may find interesting avenues to pursue, but they should beware of the author's quirky, sometimes misleading brush-stroke characterizations.Pub Date: Nov. 13, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-670-02496-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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