Product Description

Irrational beliefs and behaviour are virtually universal. This title draws on research to examine why we are irrational, the different types of irrationality, the damage it does us, and the possible cures. It also argues that we could significantly reduce irrationality and its effects - but only if we recognize just how irrational we really are.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #2166 in Books
• Published on: 2007-01-10
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 256 pages

Features

• New
• Mint Condition
• Dispatch same day for order received before 12 noon
• Guaranteed packaging
• No quibbles returns

Review
Ben Goldacre, author of Bad Science
Superb! The thinking man's self help book; it left me infinitely wiser, but I know it won't change my behaviour one tiny bit.

Nicholas Lezard, The Guardian
You must buy this book, for every home should have it.

Richard Dawkins, author of The God Delusion
Extremely gripping and unusually well written.

Oliver Sacks, author of The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat
Terrifying, sometimes comic, very readable and totally enthralling.

Oliver Sacks
Terrifying, sometimes comic, very readable and totally enthralling.

British Journal of Psychiatry
Consistently lively, amusing and intriguing ... it should be mandatory reading.

Customer Reviews

Still the best popular book on this topic
This is a wonderful achievement of science popularisation. Sutherland had a gift for succinctly and non-technically summarising psychology experiments. In this book he surveys more than one hundred and sixty different studies that expose failings of human reasoning and judgement. Overconfidence, conformity, biased assessment of evidence and inconsistency are among the follies given their own chapters. One chapter deals with organizational (bureaucratic) irrationality.

The point is not the banal one that there are stupid people about. It is that we all make systematic errors and biases that can lead to disaster in predictable ways. The example applications include reasoning about medical tests, military disasters, the paranormal, the Rorschach test, gambling and daft purchasing decisions.

If society took the recommendations in this book, we would give up job interviews, stop awarding school prizes, totally reform the procedures for criminal trials and change many of the incentive structures we use to motivate people. Each chapter ends with a set of personal lessons for minimising the damage of one's inevitable human irrationality.

This is a potentially very depressing book, but its humiliating lesson is one that, for a better public life and personal life, we need to learn. You can either learn it from a huge corpus of technical psychology literature or from this little paperback.

The Vulcan bible and the big decision-maker's best friend
We all act on impulse and make quick decisions every day. That may be irrational but if we had to think long and hard about every decision we made then our lives would never get anywhere.

Fortunately, most of our decisions have very limited consequences if they turn out to be wrong, but sometimes a bad decision can cost a lot of money, even human lives. Then it is best to be sure that the decision was the best possible based on all the facts. Even when buying a new home or a new car, one could well save oneself some grief and perhaps a lot of money if the deal was approached in a rational manner.

As this book points out, many lives and lots of money have been lost and many projects have failed because of bad decisions due to pride, prejudice, by misinterpreting facts in ones own favor, by fear of non-conformity and many other irrational reasons.

This book is an excellent tour through a lot of topics, all of which are aspects of irrational behavior. Through many (painfully :-/ ) clear examples the author illustrates the various types of irrational behavior and how they can lead to bad or wrong decisions. For example, the "availability error" where too much emphasis is put on whatever comes first to mind, or the "halo effect" where too much emphasis is put on first impressions. These traps catch us every day and are among the advertisers' best weapons.

If you want to improve you own decision making - in you personal life as well as you professional life - or you just want to know why other people often make such bad decisions this book can give you a lot of insight into how easily people can make flawed decisions and thus what to be wary of the next time you face an important decision.

English is not my first language but I use English a lot. With this background I found the book fairly easy to read, although it is my impression that you do need to be quite proficient in the English language to get the full benefit of the book.

For those seeking more information about the topics and examples presented by the author, the book has a comprehensive list of the background material, with reference to the page where it is used, as well as a list of supplemental literature for the curious reader.

I warmly recommend this book to any Vulcan wannabe as well as to any person with the responsibility to make decisions that can affect other people's lives, jobs, careers, health etc.

Essential reading
`Irrationality - the Enemy Within' is essential reading for anyone who is interested in developing their thinking skills by becoming more aware of the numerous traps into which we can all so easily fall. The book presents many conundrums about which readers are invited to reach decisions, and time and again, in my own case at least, the correct, rational solution is surprising and enlightening. The twenty-three chapters comprise topics such as `Ignoring the evidence', `Mistaken connections in medicine', `The paranormal'. Each chapter ends with a brief coda headed `Moral' which summarises, often with wit, the main points we need to learn.

This book is scholarly, educational, extremely well written and continually entertaining. I am sure it will be appreciated by anyone who has enjoyed Dick Taverne's `The March of Unreason' - and vice versa.