An interesting, deeply researched, and sometimes disturbing look into the science of what makes us tick.
Forget about doing away with inequality, writes science journalist Storr—not while humans are humans and leopards don’t change their spots.
What keeps striving humans up at night? Not wealth, sexual conquest, or security: No, writes Storr; it’s status, the relative position we hold vis-à-vis those around us. The quest for high status deforms our better angels. “Always on alert for slights and praise,” he writes, “we can be petty, hateful, aggressive, grandiose and delusional.” In fact, “status is a fundamental human need.” It’s not just that we need to be admired; we must be admired more than the person next to us, and we’re hard-wired for that golden key: Holding status affords access to wealth, sex, security, and every other thing that we desire. Digging into anthropology, psychology, neuroscience, and other realms, Storr outlines the evolutionary history of our need as social animals to belong to a group—and, once inside a group, to attain rank. Sometimes this plays out in odd ways. One of the many layered examples the author presents is the case of a Micronesian island community in which status is attained by the farmer who could grow the largest yam to present to the village leader, resulting in a society of secretive, jealous, mistrustful Mendelians and plenty of disharmony. Those who do not attain status through yams or heroics—or are shunned or ridiculed—can do very bad things. Storr locates status loss as an ingredient in the makings of serial killers, the Unabomber, and other miscreants. “Humiliation can be seen as the opposite of status, the hell to its heaven,” he writes. “Like status, humiliation comes from other people.” When other people engineer that status loss, mayhem can ensue, especially today’s “neoliberal game,” which relies on a zero-sum formula of have and have-not. Pair this eye-opening book with W. David Marx’s equally revelatory Status and Culture.
An interesting, deeply researched, and sometimes disturbing look into the science of what makes us tick.Pub Date: Aug. 23, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-00-835467-1
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Harper360
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2022
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.
An Egyptian Canadian journalist writes searchingly of this time of war.
“Rules, conventions, morals, reality itself: all exist so long as their existence is convenient to the preservation of power.” So writes El Akkad, who goes on to state that one of the demands of modern power is that those subject to it must imagine that some group of people somewhere are not fully human. El Akkad’s pointed example is Gaza, the current destruction of which, he writes, is causing millions of people around the world to examine the supposedly rules-governed, democratic West and declare, “I want nothing to do with this.” El Akkad, author of the novel American War (2017), discerns hypocrisy and racism in the West’s defense of Ukraine and what he views as indifference toward the Palestinian people. No stranger to war zones himself—El Akkad was a correspondent in Afghanistan and Iraq—he writes with grim matter-of-factness about murdered children, famine, and the deliberate targeting of civilians. With no love for Zionism lost, he offers an equally harsh critique of Hamas, yet another one of the “entities obsessed with violence as an ethos, brutal in their treatment of minority groups who in their view should not exist, and self-decreed to be the true protectors of an entire religion.” Taking a global view, El Akkad, who lives in the U.S., finds almost every government and society wanting, and not least those, he says, that turn away and pretend not to know, behavior that we’ve seen before and that, in the spirit of his title, will one day be explained away until, in the end, it comes down to “a quiet unheard reckoning in the winter of life between the one who said nothing, did nothing, and their own soul.”
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593804148
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 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
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