Bristling with facts and ideas expressed in a high-energy, cliffhanger style.
A deep dive into one of today’s most pertinent psychological problems.
As Hari demonstrates, the fractured state of your attention span has more insidious causes and more drastic outcomes than you ever imagined. Tormented by his own inability to focus, the author traveled the world to speak to researchers and also abandoned his phone and computer to spend three months screen-free in Provincetown. The latter was liberating, enabling him to once again read books, have creative thoughts, and sleep well. Unfortunately, these effects didn't last long once he reconnected. As he learned from expert interviews, the causes of our attention issues are so vast that telling someone they can improve their plight by making personal adjustments is known as cruel optimism, “when you take a really big problem with deep causes in our culture—like obesity, or depression, or addiction—and you offer people, in upbeat language, a simplistic individual solution.” The trouble is not just in our devices, but in our air, food, workplaces, the way we raise children, the surveillance of our lives by corporations, and more. Social media is especially dastardly, and Hari offers numerous appalling examples: Because feeling angry is more likely to keep your attention than any other emotion, YouTube has recommended videos by belligerent conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, such as the one claiming Sandy Hook was faked, 15 billion times. In Brazil, Facebook was used to swing an election in a way that sounds eerily familiar: filling people’s heads “full of grotesque falsehoods, to the point where they can’t distinguish real threats to their existence (an authoritarian leader pledging to shoot them) from nonexistent threats (their children being made gay by penises painted on baby bottles).” Systemic change is the key to any possible solution, but some of Hari’s suggestions sound like more cruel optimism. Still, the author brings to light many important issues.
Bristling with facts and ideas expressed in a high-energy, cliffhanger style.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-593-13851-9
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Feb. 26, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
Perhaps not magic but appealing nonetheless.
Want to get ahead in business? Consult a dictionary.
By Wharton School professor Berger’s account, much of the art of persuasion lies in the art of choosing the right word. Want to jump ahead of others waiting in line to use a photocopy machine, even if they’re grizzled New Yorkers? Throw a because into the equation (“Excuse me, I have five pages. May I use the Xerox machine, because I’m in a rush?”), and you’re likely to get your way. Want someone to do your copying for you? Then change your verbs to nouns: not “Can you help me?” but “Can you be a helper?” As Berger notes, there’s a subtle psychological shift at play when a person becomes not a mere instrument in helping but instead acquires an identity as a helper. It’s the little things, one supposes, and the author offers some interesting strategies that eager readers will want to try out. Instead of alienating a listener with the omniscient should, as in “You should do this,” try could instead: “Well, you could…” induces all concerned “to recognize that there might be other possibilities.” Berger’s counsel that one should use abstractions contradicts his admonition to use concrete language, and it doesn’t help matters to say that each is appropriate to a particular situation, while grammarians will wince at his suggestion that a nerve-calming exercise to “try talking to yourself in the third person (‘You can do it!’)” in fact invokes the second person. Still, there are plenty of useful insights, particularly for students of advertising and public speaking. It’s intriguing to note that appeals to God are less effective in securing a loan than a simple affirmative such as “I pay all bills…on time”), and it’s helpful to keep in mind that “the right words used at the right time can have immense power.”
Perhaps not magic but appealing nonetheless.Pub Date: March 7, 2023
ISBN: 9780063204935
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Harper Business
Review Posted Online: March 23, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2023
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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