A provocative and convincing case of the malleability of what we think of as “our self, which in reality is a multiplicity...
A multiangled exploration of the slippery notion of self-identity.
Levine (Psychology/California State Univ., Fresno; The Power of Persuasion: How We're Bought and Sold, 2003, etc.) explains that contrasting the physical existence of the brain and the ethereal notion of the self cannot provide the answer he seeks. He believes it to be not only inadequate, but also claustrophobic, since it fails to address the “malleability of the self—its multiplicity and plasticity.” The author offers an intriguing set of examples of how frequently we experience multiple identities without recognizing them as such. He begins by examining our physical sense of self and the experience of pain in a phantom limb after amputation of the actual limb. He then moves on to phantom personalities: people who experience multiple shifting personalities or simply fail to recognize their own mirror image. Levine also explores the relationship between thinking—listening to one's inner voice—and the experience of hearing voices, which is sometimes a normal experience but can also be symptomatic of mental illness. We also often fail to account for our future selves in our daily lives. He gives the amusing example of having casually invited acquaintances to visit without expecting them to accept and being astonished when they showed up, and he offers a more distressing instance of how people look forward to retirement and then are bored without employment. The author also refers to a classic psychological experiment in which subjects were asked to play the role of prison guards and were easily induced to behave sadistically toward their prisoners. Out of these varied examples, Levine creates an engaging tapestry that illustrates how, often, what we think of as our fixed identity is an illusion.
A provocative and convincing case of the malleability of what we think of as “our self, which in reality is a multiplicity of characters” developed through time and circumstances.Pub Date: June 1, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-691-16791-6
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Princeton Univ.
Review Posted Online: March 29, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 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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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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