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FOOL PROOF

HOW FEAR OF PLAYING THE SUCKER SHAPES OUR SELVES AND THE SOCIAL ORDER―AND WHAT WE CAN DO ABOUT IT

This intriguing study of the psychological dynamics of scams shows how one can live with integrity in a sucker’s world.

How to find a fruitful path between gullibility and paranoia.

Wilkinson-Ryan, a professor of law and psychology, is well situated to investigate the social and personal implications of scams, cons, and tricks. The difference between being robbed and being conned is that with the latter, the victim has somehow contributed to their loss. Consequently, it generates feelings of humiliation and self-belittlement. Often, the psychological pain relates to the sense that the trust holding society together has been taken away, replaced by cynicism and suspicion. It is a potent construct, and the author explores it from a variety of perspectives. “The goal here,” she writes, “is not so much to spot the con but to renegotiate its meaning.” Along the way, she examines a range of psychological games and research experiments, including the well-known prisoner’s dilemma and the interesting tragedy of the commons, where there is an intersection of self-interest, trust of others, risk, and reward. A personal example that she recounts involves a student who claimed to have suffered a death in the family and therefore needed an extension on an important assignment. Was it a plea from someone who needed support or a lie designed to manipulate her compassion? Wilkinson-Ryan unpacks this to demonstrate how the optimal decision can be made by assigning metrics to assess the potential gain and loss of each path. This helps clarify the choices as well as the crucial impact on the decision-maker. “The point is, you can feel cheated, but you don’t have to,” she writes. “The question is not whether threats exist but which ones deserve your attention. The prospect of playing the fool doesn’t have to feel existential.” It’s a wise conclusion based on well-reasoned analysis.

This intriguing study of the psychological dynamics of scams shows how one can live with integrity in a sucker’s world.

Pub Date: Feb. 7, 2023

ISBN: 9780063214262

Page Count: 288

Publisher: Harper Wave

Review Posted Online: Dec. 23, 2022

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2023

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A PEOPLE'S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES

For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.

Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979

ISBN: 0061965588

Page Count: 772

Publisher: Harper & Row

Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979

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THINKING, FAST AND SLOW

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

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