A superbly crafted analysis of a universally deplored but seemingly irresistible technique.
An unnerving history.
“How could anyone fall for that?” remains a common reaction to wacky ideas promoted over social media, but it’s less often accompanied by a chuckle, because such ideas seem to exert an inexorable appeal. The flat Earth society is prospering; vaccine coverage is dropping. Lemov, an associate professor of the history of science at Harvard and author of Database of Dreams: The Lost Quest To Catalog Humanity, teaches a course on brainwashing. Long after the 1950-53 Korean War, when a few American prisoners “fell for” Communism, the word “brainwashing” has revived, as experts try to explain how people are persuaded to believe weird things. The first of many unsettling sections deals with the Korean War period, when Chinese overseers peppered POWs with propaganda, accompanied by treats for those who responded favorably and punishment for the uncooperative. After the armistice, citizens and the media were horrified when 23 Americans refused to return. Over the following decades, most tired of life in China and came back, proclaiming that unspeakable tortures had led to their defection. Learning the wrong lesson, the military aimed to train soldiers to resist brainwashing by inflicting brutal torments on recruits while ignoring ideology. The CIA’s ham-handed research on brain manipulation has fascinated popular writers, with an unfortunate carry-over into legitimate brain research. There are few lessons, meantime, to be learned from Patty Hearst’s 1974 kidnapping. Her months of confinement, rape, and abuse are no secret, but Americans remain titillated, and most still believe her guilty of her crimes. Matters do not improve as Lemov casts a gimlet eye on mid-20th-century mass media, later and ongoing cults, and today’s social media “hyper-persuasion,” a more acceptable term for the b-word.
A superbly crafted analysis of a universally deplored but seemingly irresistible technique.Pub Date: March 25, 2025
ISBN: 9781324075264
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
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
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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