A fascinating, well-rooted theory of being human, with guideposts to increasing awareness.
Cromwell explores “notions of the infrastructure of human functioning”—via the building blocks of constructs—that result in who we are.
In the author’s scheme of things, we all pull from the continuous flow of experiential input elements that we gather into sets and then fashion through discrimination (sameness/difference) into constructs that will confirm our anticipation of events. With these constructs, we build a constellation of associated constructs that are processed in an ongoing cycle—“a given function belongs to a particular segment of the cycle”—and in their variations and options come how we are human and individually build our reality. Constructs are a rich stew and as Cromwell draws their salient aspects—the anticipatory tags we invest them with, the verbal tags we give them so as to share them with others, how reification makes them into fixed qualities that (to our detriment) ignore or resist other ways of understanding, the positive and negative weights we assign to them—and does so in mesmerizing detail, an incantatory progress of forks taken in the road of life. At the same time, the author describes how constructs can be tools of openness—“All knowledge in science must entail observation within the context of doubt,” “What event can one observe that would disconfirm this formulation?” —in a constructive alternativism that is scientifically grounded, deeply humanistic and commonsensical, where, hopefully, for instance, the self hungrily takes in experience to shape and reshape constructs that in turn shape our way of being in the world. Exercising an acuity sharpened by years in the laboratory, Cromwell approaches our understanding of things as reflected in different knowledge domains (from physics to psychology to religion), anabolic and analytic cycles of creation, the role of memory in depression, selective perception, the dilemma of never communicating with another person in full congruity, the pairing of constructs into separate chains of thinking and doing, how words control us more than we do them. What gives Cromwell’s work such rigor and heft is how he melds these, and many more, facets into a flowing whole, a cycle but not a closed system, one ever available to new ideas.
A fascinating, well-rooted theory of being human, with guideposts to increasing awareness.Pub Date: Oct. 19, 2010
ISBN: 978-1450239202
Page Count: 504
Publisher: iUniverse
Review Posted Online: May 27, 2011
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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