Long-winded, but well-reasoned: a provocative, useful aid in understanding the ongoing debate on human development.
Two psychologists team up for a thorough, fairly readable study of cognitive development from earliest hominids to humans, placing strenuous emphasis on emotional interaction between infant and caregiver outlined in Greenspan's The Growth of the Mind (1997).
Greenspan (Psychiatry and Pediatrics/George Washington Univ.) and Shanker (Philosophy and Psychology/York Univ., Canada) stress that the human capacity to think, which they define as the ability to regulate emotions in the use of logic and reflection, stems primarily from the acquirement of mother-infant signaling transmitted through cultural care-giving practices. After setting out the crucial stages of a child's functional/emotional growth, the authors venture back into evolutionary history to debunk some determinist theories of human cognitive development that stress the innate, universal necessities of human biology (natural selection) while ignoring the essential and, in humans, relatively long period of close nurturing between caregiver and infant. Shanker offers observations of language acquisition in chimps and bonobos, gained from his work with primatologist Sue Savage-Rumbaugh (Apes, Language, and the Human Mind, not reviewed); there is also a fascinating chapter on emotional “derailment” in autistic children. The authors revisit problem-solving and early communication in archaic Homo sapiens and early moderns, comparing their stage of cognitive development to childhood in today’s humans. With the relatively sudden ascent of the new species of humans during the Pleistocene era, technological advances took off; yet here the authors emphasize rather a “slow and almost orderly process” that involved an enrichment of emotional signaling accompanied by beneficial physical changes in the face and skull (loss of facial hair, for example, encouraged a vastly more subtle and complex repertory of expressions). Greenspan and Shanker duly note the work of numerous other authors and scientists, such as Piaget, Chomsky, and E.T. Hall. Along the way, the study grows unwieldy and repetitive as they take on shared values of societies and “global interdependency.”
Long-winded, but well-reasoned: a provocative, useful aid in understanding the ongoing debate on human development.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-7382-0680-6
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Da Capo
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2004
BOOK REVIEW
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
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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