Category Archives: psychology

Book review, Non-fiction, popular science, psychology, Tali Sharot

The Influential Mind, What the Brain Reveals About Our Power to Change Others, by Tali Sharot, 2017

As a break from the recent relentless Pratchettery I have managed to finish this book of popular science written by Tali Sharot, a neuroscientist who also wrote ‘The Optimism Bias’. This is timely because the paperback version comes out on 2 August in the UK, and I suspect you will see piles of this book in your local bookstores.

The author is a serious scientist: she is a Ted talker, director of the Affective Brain Lab at University College London and a Wellcome Trust Fellow and has been published on various topics including the neuroscience of optimism, emotional memories and cognitive dissonance in journals such as Nature. In other words this is more than just one of those light hearted copy and paste books on science that tell you little more than you will find on Wikipedia – this is a review of the literature and science of influence, albeit presented in an accessible fashion. Why influence? Well it’s key to understanding why people behave the way they do, and surely this world needs a bit more understanding and empathy at the moment.

‘The Influential Mind will make you gasp with surprise – and laugh with recognition. Many of our most cherished beliefs about how to influence others turn out to be wrong; Sharot sets them right. Packed with practical insights, this profound book will change your life. An instant classic’ Cass R. Sunstein, bestselling co-author of Nudge

 

No it won’t, no they aren’t, and no it isn’t.

It is understandable that the publishers chose this review to illustrate this book’s entry on their website and adorn the hardback edition’s front page. This is a classic case of log-rolling – two minutes on Google told me that Sunstein has co-authored papers with Sharot – but it is also an extreme example of hyperbole. The only way this book would change your life is if you tripped over it at the top of a stairwell. I have no recollection whatsoever of gasping as I read it – maybe the occasional slow nod of recognition at a point well made – and there are few if any laughs in here either. This is a serious book, and it really does it no favours to pretend it is life-changing or ground breaking – it is no more nor less than a thoughtful review of the existing research into this subject, presented in an accessible fashion. Popular science in other words, perhaps not at its finest but no worse than the rest of what is becoming a crowded field.

The most striking example the author cites when discussing the importance of understanding how influence works relates to the vexed topic of hand washing in hospitals. A study of how frequently doctors and nurses in US hospitals wash their hands found shocking failure rates, leading directly to infections. Monitoring the staff remotely via video had no impact – as long as they knew they weren’t going to face any punishment they simply did not change their behaviour. What had a dramatic impact however was publishing hand washing rates in real time on a screen in the staff restroom. Rates shot up. Sharot speculates that this was because positive feedback on performance was perceived by staff as a non-pecuniary reward. In other words, rewarding people can influence their behaviour. Who knew? So far as I know there were no similar punishment trials where people had a % of their salary deducted each time they failed to wash their hands, but I guess it would have had the same results.

 

Elsewhere this book hits more topical and predictable targets. Trump and his power to persuade based on emotion rather than logic, the anti-vaccine movement and how to counter it (don’t try to address the lies in the anti-vaxx case, just emphasise the positives of vaccination i.e. the avoidance of death) and the times when the wisdom of crowds can be misleading. This is all packaged in an engaging and relatively short book which you will find interesting if you are looking for an introduction to this topic.

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Book review, psychology

Book review: You are Not So Smart by David Mcraney

Subtitled: Why Your Memory is Mostly Fiction, Why You Have Too Many Friends on Facebook, and 46 Other Ways You’re Deluding Yourself.

This is a very gentle, easily digestible introduction to psychology. 48 chapters, each only a few pages long, covering all the basics of how the way we perceive the world is more complicated than we think. So far so good – this book began as a blog, and it shows, and who am I to pass judgment on bloggers taking their work further? Sometimes the dumbing goes too far – not all straightforward psychology points could be used to support the books central thesis, and they really didn’t need to – they should be interesting in their own right. I also felt the central thesis itself was part of the problem – explaining that the way we perceive the world is filtered through our senses, our memory and a host of other filters to create our perception of reality is a strong enough point on its own without it being reduced to the conclusion that we are not as smart as we think we are – it’s not about intelligence at all, it’s actually much more interesting than that. I accept of course that there is a marketing strategy at work here, and it seems to have been effective.

There were a couple of other quibbles I had with this book, which I generally enjoyed and consumed quite quickly. Firstly, it focuses relentlessly on everyday perception. Whenever it tiptoes closer to the darker side of psychology – not all brains are the same, and although we can be gulled into doing things we wouldn’t normally do, the point is we wouldn’t normally do them – it quickly moved on. Some people would do abnormal things, and these outliers on the scatter graph of human psychology are probably another but much more interesting book entirely. Secondly the book had a strangely mid-Atlantic feel which was a little disconcerting – apparently this was because it was originally American and had been edited for the UK market. Lastly the research the author draws upon was largely fresh – to me – but there were a few old favourites (the prison guards/prisoners experiment for example) which I was expecting to crop up throughout the book, and which eventually made an appearance. I was hoping he would manage to avoid the obvious, but he didn’t quite make it.

If you are looking for a simple and easy to read introduction to psychology you could do a lot worse. This doesn’t claim to be an academic textbook, and you largely get what you have paid for, with that caveat about intelligence/perception.
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