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Irrationality the Enemy Within
Why do doctors, generals, civil servants and others consistently make wrong decisions that cause enormous harm to others? Irrational beliefs and behaviours are virtually universal. In this iconoclastic book Stuart Sutherland analyses causes of irrationality and examines why we are irrational, the different kinds of irrationality, the damage it does us and the possible cures.
357 pages, Hardcover
First published November 1, 1992
160 people are currently reading
3079 people want to read
About the author
Stuart Sutherland
31 books18 followersBritish Psychologist Norman Stuart Sutherland (26 March 1927 – 8 November 1998), always known professionally as Stuart Sutherland, was a British psychologist and writer.
Sutherland was educated at King Edward's School, Birmingham, before going to Magdalen College, Oxford, where he read Psychology, Philosophy and Physiology. He stayed at Oxford for his DPhil which he took in zoology under the supervision of J. Z. Young. He held a lecturing post at Oxford before moving in 1964 to the recently opened University of Sussex as the founding Professor and head of its Laboratory of Experimental Psychology; with the young colleagues he appointed, he rapidly built an international reputation for Sussex in this field.
Among psychologists, Sutherland is best known for his theoretical and empirical work in comparative psychology, particularly in relation to visual pattern recognition and discrimination learning. In the 1950s and 1960s he carried out numerous experiments on rats but also on other species such as octopus; the two-factor theory of discrimination learning that he developed with Nicholas Mackintosh was an important step in the rehabilitation of a cognitive approach to animal learning after the dominance of strict behaviourism in the first half of the twentieth century. He was also interested in human perception and cognition, and in 1992 he published Irrationality: The enemy within, a lay reader's guide to the psychology of cognitive biases and common failures of human judgement.
Among a wider public, Sutherland is most famous for his 1976 autobiography Breakdown, detailing his struggles with manic depression. A second edition of Breakdown was published in 1995. Stuart Sutherland died from a heart attack in November 1998.
Sutherland was educated at King Edward's School, Birmingham, before going to Magdalen College, Oxford, where he read Psychology, Philosophy and Physiology. He stayed at Oxford for his DPhil which he took in zoology under the supervision of J. Z. Young. He held a lecturing post at Oxford before moving in 1964 to the recently opened University of Sussex as the founding Professor and head of its Laboratory of Experimental Psychology; with the young colleagues he appointed, he rapidly built an international reputation for Sussex in this field.
Among psychologists, Sutherland is best known for his theoretical and empirical work in comparative psychology, particularly in relation to visual pattern recognition and discrimination learning. In the 1950s and 1960s he carried out numerous experiments on rats but also on other species such as octopus; the two-factor theory of discrimination learning that he developed with Nicholas Mackintosh was an important step in the rehabilitation of a cognitive approach to animal learning after the dominance of strict behaviourism in the first half of the twentieth century. He was also interested in human perception and cognition, and in 1992 he published Irrationality: The enemy within, a lay reader's guide to the psychology of cognitive biases and common failures of human judgement.
Among a wider public, Sutherland is most famous for his 1976 autobiography Breakdown, detailing his struggles with manic depression. A second edition of Breakdown was published in 1995. Stuart Sutherland died from a heart attack in November 1998.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 101 reviews
January 21, 2016
İrrasyonelin sözlük anlamı, akıl, mantık ve sağduyudan yoksun demek. Bu kitap da günlük hayatta verdiğimiz kararların büyük çoğunluğunun irrasyonel olduğunu sayısız psikolojik deney ile ortaya koyuyor.
İrrasyonellik yanlış gözlem, uyum gösterme ihtiyacı, yersiz tutarlılık, kanıtları gözardı etmek, hatalı neden sonuç ilişkileri kurmak ya da aşırı özgüven gibi birçok alt başlık altında inceleniyor kitapta. Giriş aşamasında biraz sıkıcı olsa da ileriki sayfalarda nispeten akıcı bir hal alıyor kitap. İnsan psikolojisi üzerine okumak istiyorsanız bu kitap kütüphanenizde bulunmalı. Özetle "hepimiz irrasyoneliz!"
İrrasyonellik yanlış gözlem, uyum gösterme ihtiyacı, yersiz tutarlılık, kanıtları gözardı etmek, hatalı neden sonuç ilişkileri kurmak ya da aşırı özgüven gibi birçok alt başlık altında inceleniyor kitapta. Giriş aşamasında biraz sıkıcı olsa da ileriki sayfalarda nispeten akıcı bir hal alıyor kitap. İnsan psikolojisi üzerine okumak istiyorsanız bu kitap kütüphanenizde bulunmalı. Özetle "hepimiz irrasyoneliz!"
October 21, 2014
Posted on my blog.
Background: I was given this book by a friend on Christmas, and I started reading it soon afterward, but unfortunately had to stop for a couple of months and just recently finished it. This is unfortunate, since I recall a lot of things I thought about the book while I was reading it, but didn't mark any of the pages for quoting. Oh well.
Review: This book in a nutshell: humans can be very irrational at times. The book goes on to try to explore, explain and offer solutions to the various forms of human irrationality, always relying on studies to back up the conclusions. Unfortunately, in my opinion, it just fell short of what it was trying to do.
Be warned. This book was written in 1992, and it shows. I noticed right away some very strange factual errors that, at times, by light of new evidence that has since been gathered, completely defeat the points being given by the author. I noticed this particularly with medical studies - having been in medical school myself I spotted the, at times, glaring mistakes, which didn't impress me at all. I guess I was using one of the irrational thought processes he described - the "halo effect", which when applied to this, means that when I saw that he was completely wrong in some thing he vehemently defended, it made me look at the rest of his book in a negative light. It probably means this review is tainted by irrationality as well.
I wish I had marked the exact quotes to back up what I'm saying. I recall at least that at some point in the book he goes on and on about how doctors were wrong to think that blood cholesterol levels had anything to do with what you eat, because a study had proven they had no correlation. Yeah. This reminded me of all the smokers who will quote one study that says that smoking is not bad for you at all and has nothing to do with lung cancer. Let's not ignore the rest of the studies who say otherwise. please.
I also had a problem with the tone of this book. It was too patronizing, and the author seemed to have personal vendettas against some members of society, namely feminists, members of the medical profession, and psychologists who do social experiments.
There were some positive aspects to it, and I found a few pearls of wisdom, but overall, the book was simply not worth it.
What's Next: If anything, reading this book made me wish there was a better one on the subject that I could read.
Background: I was given this book by a friend on Christmas, and I started reading it soon afterward, but unfortunately had to stop for a couple of months and just recently finished it. This is unfortunate, since I recall a lot of things I thought about the book while I was reading it, but didn't mark any of the pages for quoting. Oh well.
Review: This book in a nutshell: humans can be very irrational at times. The book goes on to try to explore, explain and offer solutions to the various forms of human irrationality, always relying on studies to back up the conclusions. Unfortunately, in my opinion, it just fell short of what it was trying to do.
Be warned. This book was written in 1992, and it shows. I noticed right away some very strange factual errors that, at times, by light of new evidence that has since been gathered, completely defeat the points being given by the author. I noticed this particularly with medical studies - having been in medical school myself I spotted the, at times, glaring mistakes, which didn't impress me at all. I guess I was using one of the irrational thought processes he described - the "halo effect", which when applied to this, means that when I saw that he was completely wrong in some thing he vehemently defended, it made me look at the rest of his book in a negative light. It probably means this review is tainted by irrationality as well.
I wish I had marked the exact quotes to back up what I'm saying. I recall at least that at some point in the book he goes on and on about how doctors were wrong to think that blood cholesterol levels had anything to do with what you eat, because a study had proven they had no correlation. Yeah. This reminded me of all the smokers who will quote one study that says that smoking is not bad for you at all and has nothing to do with lung cancer. Let's not ignore the rest of the studies who say otherwise. please.
I also had a problem with the tone of this book. It was too patronizing, and the author seemed to have personal vendettas against some members of society, namely feminists, members of the medical profession, and psychologists who do social experiments.
There were some positive aspects to it, and I found a few pearls of wisdom, but overall, the book was simply not worth it.
What's Next: If anything, reading this book made me wish there was a better one on the subject that I could read.
September 25, 2017
Questo libro, opera dello psicologo inglese Stuart Sutherland (1927-1998) venne pubblicato nel 1992, ed è un peccato che sia rimasto senza traduzione in italiano fino al 2010. Si tratta di un'opera divulgativa seria e di livello abbastanza "alto" ma comunque sempre ben leggibile che, come dice il titolo, dimostra con una serie impressionante di esempi (alcuni dei quali divertenti) che l'essere umano è molto più irrazionale di quello che si pensa. E le conseguenze possono essere gravi o addirittura catastrofiche. Dopo aver letto questo libro ho rivisto il mio concetto di "buon senso" o di "senso comune".
Oltre che di piacevole lettura (tranne qualche raro passaggio un po' troppo tecnico), è un libro che può rivelarsi molto utile per tutti coloro che, soprattutto sul lavoro, si rapportano agli altri.
Oltre che di piacevole lettura (tranne qualche raro passaggio un po' troppo tecnico), è un libro che può rivelarsi molto utile per tutti coloro che, soprattutto sul lavoro, si rapportano agli altri.
December 31, 2009
This is a catalogue of wrong thinking: inconsistency, misinterpretation, false inferences, distortion, overconfidence, conforming to the general opinion, obeying authoritative figures and making bad bets. We form instant impressions and then only look for the evidence that will support our view, we suffer from availability error, meaning that we give more weight to the dramatic and memorable, or the most recent, and ignore the less exciting evidence, and after reading the chapter on reward and punishment, you begin to wonder how any kind of education has ever worked at all. What always fascinates me about books like this is the ingenuity of psychologists in devising experiments that will expose the specific ways how our minds work. The only slight irritation was the 'raised finger' approach that Mr Sutherland takes. Irrationality is A Bad Thing, and We Shouldn't Do This. But it's just how we function. Unstoppable, like the glaciers.
August 9, 2016
Halbuki heyecanlı başlamıştı, bir şeyler vadeder gibiydi, deneyler, gözlemler fena değildi. Ne gerek vardı o demode, ön yargılı cümlelere sonrasında? Hele ki "sezgilere bağlı yanılgılar" bölümü beni benden aldı.
Kıssadan hisse: Bu kitap 1992 yılında yazılmış ve bu etki okurken hemen hissediliyor. Kitap akmıyor ve yazarın dili oldukça patronize. Hali hazırda psikoloji, sosyoloji, vb. alanlarda kitaplar okuyan, araştırmalar yapan insanlar için yeni bir şey sunmuyor.
Başlardaki ilginç deneyler hatrına 2 yıldız..
Kıssadan hisse: Bu kitap 1992 yılında yazılmış ve bu etki okurken hemen hissediliyor. Kitap akmıyor ve yazarın dili oldukça patronize. Hali hazırda psikoloji, sosyoloji, vb. alanlarda kitaplar okuyan, araştırmalar yapan insanlar için yeni bir şey sunmuyor.
Başlardaki ilginç deneyler hatrına 2 yıldız..
August 31, 2021
Interesting topic.
English: https://elifthereader.com/books/irrat...
Türkçe: http://kitaplikkedisi.com/kitaplar/ir...
English: https://elifthereader.com/books/irrat...
Türkçe: http://kitaplikkedisi.com/kitaplar/ir...
March 14, 2009
This book shows a number of psychological biases during human assessment of reality which, the author claims, moves us away from taken optimal decisions. It does so by means of captivating and many times funny examples, mainly drawn from psychological experiments, but also from interesting historical events and common behavior.
The author is competent in explaining each type of irrational behavior, but the book lacks a global perspective. The instances of irrational behavior introduced in the book could be classified into three categories: psychological biases, sociological base biases and biases due to the lack of knowledge. This classification is only implicitly present, and in this case only partially, since the chapters slightly follow it, but the fact that it is never made explicit impoverishes the book’s explanatory capacity of irrationality and reduces the chances that the reader acquires a permanent idea of the most important biases. I think that a book whose main purpose is to inform should be written in a way to help the reader get an overall idea of the main topics explained. This book lacks such structure. A complementary negative effect of this decision is that when every single instance of irrational behavior is isolated, it is more difficult to explain the causes of the behavior. In the last chapter the author dares to approach this issue, but at that point he can only relate single causes with single instances of behavior, missing the whole picture again.
This book deals with irrationality so the author begins describing what we should understand from that word. I would not apply that word to many instances of behavior in the book. For example, I find that the behavior based on sociological factors is not irrational. Rather it responds, most of the time unconsciously to social incentives. It is important to observe how they are affecting us, but I would not say that it is irrational. However, the name we attach to this behavior is not as important as its identification. I myself find important that for all of us the word irrationality to mean the same so that semantic conflicts could be avoided, but it is far more important to identify all these different type of behavior to get conscience about ourselves, whether this is irrational or not.
And nevertheless, I gave it four stars out of five. The issues this book handles are essential for a better individual life and a better social engagement. They show us some biases that make our judgement poorer, and therefore our decisions. And we know so little! I would like these issues to be treated in schools so people could grow up taking better decisions. Wouldn’t it be great if we were just a little bit less stubborn? If each person recognizes that he or she may be wrong because of some of the reasons outlined throughout the book, it might be that we could live in better harmony with each other.
Since this book does not offer a comprehensive idea, a better title should be ‘Instances of Irrationality’. This is not a treatise on human irrationality, but it is an entertaining, funny and very valuable array of examples that everybody should be more conscious of.
The author is competent in explaining each type of irrational behavior, but the book lacks a global perspective. The instances of irrational behavior introduced in the book could be classified into three categories: psychological biases, sociological base biases and biases due to the lack of knowledge. This classification is only implicitly present, and in this case only partially, since the chapters slightly follow it, but the fact that it is never made explicit impoverishes the book’s explanatory capacity of irrationality and reduces the chances that the reader acquires a permanent idea of the most important biases. I think that a book whose main purpose is to inform should be written in a way to help the reader get an overall idea of the main topics explained. This book lacks such structure. A complementary negative effect of this decision is that when every single instance of irrational behavior is isolated, it is more difficult to explain the causes of the behavior. In the last chapter the author dares to approach this issue, but at that point he can only relate single causes with single instances of behavior, missing the whole picture again.
This book deals with irrationality so the author begins describing what we should understand from that word. I would not apply that word to many instances of behavior in the book. For example, I find that the behavior based on sociological factors is not irrational. Rather it responds, most of the time unconsciously to social incentives. It is important to observe how they are affecting us, but I would not say that it is irrational. However, the name we attach to this behavior is not as important as its identification. I myself find important that for all of us the word irrationality to mean the same so that semantic conflicts could be avoided, but it is far more important to identify all these different type of behavior to get conscience about ourselves, whether this is irrational or not.
And nevertheless, I gave it four stars out of five. The issues this book handles are essential for a better individual life and a better social engagement. They show us some biases that make our judgement poorer, and therefore our decisions. And we know so little! I would like these issues to be treated in schools so people could grow up taking better decisions. Wouldn’t it be great if we were just a little bit less stubborn? If each person recognizes that he or she may be wrong because of some of the reasons outlined throughout the book, it might be that we could live in better harmony with each other.
Since this book does not offer a comprehensive idea, a better title should be ‘Instances of Irrationality’. This is not a treatise on human irrationality, but it is an entertaining, funny and very valuable array of examples that everybody should be more conscious of.
September 18, 2019
Algının nasıl kolaylıkla yanılabilen bir şey olduğunu, günlük hayatımızda yaptığımız irrasyonel eylemler neyse de profesyonellerin bile rasyonellikten nasıl uzak olduğunu, muhakememize yüzde yüz güvenmememiz ve daima karşı delilleri de düşünmemiz gerektiğini deneylerle anlattı bize yazar. Üst üste çok deney ve istatistik okumak beyni yoruyor, o yüzden bu kitap öyle baştan sona kısa sürede yutulacak türden değil; bir tür kaynak kitap olarak bir kenarda durup zaman zaman başvurulacak cinsten.
July 7, 2012
This is the first pop science book on rationality I ever read, and it made a great impression on me. Of course, this is now more than twenty years old (the first edition dates from 1992), and probably nowadays there are many eqivalent books, but this one gives a good overview of many common pitfalls in decision making, illustrating many cognitive biases: from selective evidence, to overconfidence and ignoring or misinterpreting evidence. So you wont' get exposure to the latest developments on decision making, but the topics he treats are still current - Sutherland was a psychologist by trade, and he seems to know very well what he was writing about, adding to this a gripping writing style.
One thing I learned is: if you phone your friend to tell him you wrecked his car, then tell him it was a joke, he will forever think of you as a bad driver, even if you returned the car he lent you in absolutely pristine conditions! The moral of it - careful when making jokes :-)
One thing I learned is: if you phone your friend to tell him you wrecked his car, then tell him it was a joke, he will forever think of you as a bad driver, even if you returned the car he lent you in absolutely pristine conditions! The moral of it - careful when making jokes :-)
January 6, 2016
I didn't realize this is a reprint of a work that is 20 years old, but it's still quite relevant. Just a little harder to get ahold of. Like most psychology books written by academics, this reads like a textbook so it's a bit of work to get through. Still, Sutherland injects a lot more wit into his writing than most, such as mentioning students who had ten grandparents with a distressing mortality rate. The material is quite good as a survey of various human tendencies to make irrational decisions. The purpose is for the reader to appreciate poor fallible human nature, and maybe avoid a few of the frailties that plague human cognition. Most of the examples I have read in other work, and even though this predates most of where I've seen it before, I found myself wishing studies would find more examples to use.
September 27, 2014
I'm soooooo bored with this.
Reads like a GCSE social psychology text book.
At times like this I really wish I was so OCD that I have to finish every book I start. This one is never ending.
I've abandoned it. Really dated, and really, really boring. It now has the honour of being the first ever book I've started but not finished, and has annoyed me further by making me create a new 'abandoned' shelf on Goodreads, which clutters things up.
Reads like a GCSE social psychology text book.
At times like this I really wish I was so OCD that I have to finish every book I start. This one is never ending.
I've abandoned it. Really dated, and really, really boring. It now has the honour of being the first ever book I've started but not finished, and has annoyed me further by making me create a new 'abandoned' shelf on Goodreads, which clutters things up.
February 7, 2017
İnsanların iş dünyası, maddi konular, insan ilişkileri, eğitim, siyaset ve benzeri konularda verdikleri kararların ne kadar mantık dışı olduğunu bir çok bilimsel deneyden örnekler vererek gösteriyor. Aslında yazıldığı tarihin üzerinden çok zaman geçmiş olmasına rağmen konular halen güncelliğini koruyor.
Benzer konularda kitaplar okuduysanız biraz sıkıcı gelebilir. Ama o çok bilindik deneyleri insan psikolojisi, antropoloji ve mantık açısından değerlendirdiği için ufuk açıcı bir kitap.
Benzer konularda kitaplar okuduysanız biraz sıkıcı gelebilir. Ama o çok bilindik deneyleri insan psikolojisi, antropoloji ve mantık açısından değerlendirdiği için ufuk açıcı bir kitap.
June 29, 2017
The book summarizes studies done by others in the field in a fairly concise package. Problem is, if you read books by Kahneman, Sunstein, Thaler, Milgram, etc. there's nothing new for you to learn. Probably should be considered an intro to those books and then you can delve further into whichever piques your interest.
July 1, 2009
This book is only actually interesting if you think people act rationally more than, say, 5% of the time. Otherwise it is just a book of commonplaces backed up by a lot of studies and anecdotes you've already heard about before.
May 8, 2013
agree with one point: don't keep reading not to waste your money, at the end money won't be the only thing wasted.
one more book telling you what to do as if you did't have a brain, irrationality comes from here.
one more book telling you what to do as if you did't have a brain, irrationality comes from here.
December 20, 2015
Kişisel gelişim kitapları ile uğraşacağınıza bunu okuyun.
February 21, 2021
Hard to form a completely fair opinion on. Very interesting, very through, well explained and mainly very clear - this is a great introduction to (and expansion on) the nature of cognitive biases. Originally published a quarter century ago, Sutherland writes with authority and wit, and the republish with preface and afterword bringing this to a new audience is 'a good thing'. I would recommend many people read this as they could benefit from it.
Alas though, as someone who has an interest in psychology and sociology, and as someone who has possibly more of a mathematical bent than average, I found much of it slightly repetitive and dated and that there was a lot I already had learned about elsewhere. This is the problem with certain areas of non-fiction - the paradigms are by their nature referred to again and again. Had I read this as a twenty year old I would've probably given it a five star review - but as it turned out I found it less impactful reading it in my forties with what I already know.
Maybe too I would've liked more about the balance between 'irrational' and 'human nature' - as much as I hate to admit it, sometimes being wrong isn't all bad, if ignorance is bliss/comfort. I struggle also with statements such as 'THHTHT' is just as likely as 'TTTTTT' or 'HHHHHH' when tossing coins, 'cause after five tosses in the latter two cases you'd naturally start to form an evidence-based opinion that the coin is biased.
Alas though, as someone who has an interest in psychology and sociology, and as someone who has possibly more of a mathematical bent than average, I found much of it slightly repetitive and dated and that there was a lot I already had learned about elsewhere. This is the problem with certain areas of non-fiction - the paradigms are by their nature referred to again and again. Had I read this as a twenty year old I would've probably given it a five star review - but as it turned out I found it less impactful reading it in my forties with what I already know.
Maybe too I would've liked more about the balance between 'irrational' and 'human nature' - as much as I hate to admit it, sometimes being wrong isn't all bad, if ignorance is bliss/comfort. I struggle also with statements such as 'THHTHT' is just as likely as 'TTTTTT' or 'HHHHHH' when tossing coins, 'cause after five tosses in the latter two cases you'd naturally start to form an evidence-based opinion that the coin is biased.
July 17, 2015
Ancient, published in 1992, but still interesting if not entertaining, even if much of its contents has now been rehashed in later works, though still poignantly relevant for our extensive modern online discourse, where reason is often not the primary concern.
Sutherland spends roughly half the book explaining the different types of irrationality and then uses the remainder to highlight how these work in practice.
Judging by the first thing that comes to mind is called the availability error.
Related are the halo and devil effect, if a person has one salient good, or bad, trait, it overshadows, coloring the person's other properties.
Being more influenced by early than by late items in a list is called the primacy error.
The habit of obedience is so ingrained that people can act out of obedience without even knowing that they are doing so. And that's on top of what happens when obeying is central to your position, like in the military, or only has consequences for outsiders, like when you are not directly confronted with the results of your actions.
Related, but different, is conformity, behaving in the same way as one's peers. Connected to this is the boomerang effect, where people become more convinced that they are right when their (public) beliefs are challenged. In other words, it's near-impossible to convince someone he's wrong.
Conformity to crowds can lead to panic and violence. And religious conversion.
Within groups, opinions tend to shift beyond the typical, average, opinion of the individuals. Liberals, in a group, tend to become more liberal, conservatives more conservative. Essentially, this is groupthink.
This means that committees, subgroups of in-groups tend to be more extreme than the group from which they are drawn.
One consequence of the in-group/out-group dichotomy is that competitive sports, even as friendly matches, more typically foster animosity as opposed to friendship. To alleviate this, nembers of different groups can cooperate to work towards a common goal, though this only is shown to bring people together when the goal is achieved. Otherwise, prejudice is maintained.
As a consequence, organizations, particularly public ones, tend to make irrational decisions. Opening up the decision process to the public can alleviate this to some extent.
Misplaced consistency is when people hold on to initial decisions for the sake of not being seen to backtrack, whether publicly or not. It's why people tend to not cut their losses. Hence the 'sunk cost error'.
Tests show that rewards devalue any activity considered worth doing in its own right. The activity in question will be valued less after the rewards no longer are handed out.
As a consequence, a carrot for promoting good behavior does not facilitate institutional change.
The exception is 'praise', non-monetary rewards, which can be seen as a form of reward, but typically has a positive influence on the future completion of tasks.
In the obverse, mild threats produce stronger results than strong threats.
Related, large rewards, strong motivation, but also stress, foster inflexibility when attempting to solve a problem.
When a particular belief is involved, we tend to go to extreme lengths to look for supporting evidence while refusing to believe contrary evidence. If that fails, we distort existing evidence.
Specifically, evidence favoring a belief strengthens it, while if the same evidence disproves a belief, it is ignored.
A very surprising consequence is that we seek confirmation of our own opinions of ourselves, even when they are derogatory.
Drawing causal conclusions from unrelated events is called illusory correlation. This is typically reinforced by what the person expects in the first place, being blind to non-matching results and having an eye for comparative, but possibly meaningless, outliers. And statistics, though essential for, for example, diagnosis, is a bitch.
We tend to feel there's an increased likelihood of something implausible happening when that is paired with something very plausible, even though that should decrease the chances of it happening.
Of similar difficulty is the ability to identify cause and effect. What's more, the more prominent an effect, from the same action, the more we hold the agent responsible.
With hindsight on our side, we become overconfident in our ability to predict future outcomes of events.
Risk assessment is difficult for specialists and engineers, but nearly impossible for the general public: misunderstandings, fear of the unknown, untested technologies, overconfidence, etc, all result in the less specialized relying on a, typically, very bad, gut feeling, typically underestimating risk in general or associating irrelevant imagery with the risk involved (like, for example, nuclear energy).
Sutherland also discusses utility theory, basically a statistical method to not only include expected outcomes, but including the usefulness of these outcomes.
The related cost/benefit analysis, though having its own place, is limited by it only addressing financial gains and losses.
In medicine, a similar technique is QALY, the quality-adjusted life year.
The book is full of conclusions that are fairly obvious to skeptics and represent hard to convey truths in practice. For one, there's a large gap between what people think they do and what they in fact do. This may sound obvious, but in practice it will mean you hit a brick wall when pointing this out in the real world: in one study, 77% of subjects were shown to not read the warning labels on dangerous consumer products, while 97% claimed to do so, when interviewed.
At the end, Sutherland attempts to list underlying causes for irrationality:
+ Evolution, where our ancestors typically had to make many crucial decisions under duress.
+ The analog, imperfect, nature of the brain favors generalizations.
+ Our implicit desire to take mental shortcuts in deducing conclusions.
+ Our general incapacity to apply basic statistics.
+ The self serving bias.
Sutherland spends roughly half the book explaining the different types of irrationality and then uses the remainder to highlight how these work in practice.
Judging by the first thing that comes to mind is called the availability error.
Related are the halo and devil effect, if a person has one salient good, or bad, trait, it overshadows, coloring the person's other properties.
Being more influenced by early than by late items in a list is called the primacy error.
The habit of obedience is so ingrained that people can act out of obedience without even knowing that they are doing so. And that's on top of what happens when obeying is central to your position, like in the military, or only has consequences for outsiders, like when you are not directly confronted with the results of your actions.
Related, but different, is conformity, behaving in the same way as one's peers. Connected to this is the boomerang effect, where people become more convinced that they are right when their (public) beliefs are challenged. In other words, it's near-impossible to convince someone he's wrong.
Conformity to crowds can lead to panic and violence. And religious conversion.
Within groups, opinions tend to shift beyond the typical, average, opinion of the individuals. Liberals, in a group, tend to become more liberal, conservatives more conservative. Essentially, this is groupthink.
This means that committees, subgroups of in-groups tend to be more extreme than the group from which they are drawn.
One consequence of the in-group/out-group dichotomy is that competitive sports, even as friendly matches, more typically foster animosity as opposed to friendship. To alleviate this, nembers of different groups can cooperate to work towards a common goal, though this only is shown to bring people together when the goal is achieved. Otherwise, prejudice is maintained.
As a consequence, organizations, particularly public ones, tend to make irrational decisions. Opening up the decision process to the public can alleviate this to some extent.
Misplaced consistency is when people hold on to initial decisions for the sake of not being seen to backtrack, whether publicly or not. It's why people tend to not cut their losses. Hence the 'sunk cost error'.
Tests show that rewards devalue any activity considered worth doing in its own right. The activity in question will be valued less after the rewards no longer are handed out.
As a consequence, a carrot for promoting good behavior does not facilitate institutional change.
The exception is 'praise', non-monetary rewards, which can be seen as a form of reward, but typically has a positive influence on the future completion of tasks.
In the obverse, mild threats produce stronger results than strong threats.
Related, large rewards, strong motivation, but also stress, foster inflexibility when attempting to solve a problem.
When a particular belief is involved, we tend to go to extreme lengths to look for supporting evidence while refusing to believe contrary evidence. If that fails, we distort existing evidence.
Specifically, evidence favoring a belief strengthens it, while if the same evidence disproves a belief, it is ignored.
A very surprising consequence is that we seek confirmation of our own opinions of ourselves, even when they are derogatory.
Drawing causal conclusions from unrelated events is called illusory correlation. This is typically reinforced by what the person expects in the first place, being blind to non-matching results and having an eye for comparative, but possibly meaningless, outliers. And statistics, though essential for, for example, diagnosis, is a bitch.
We tend to feel there's an increased likelihood of something implausible happening when that is paired with something very plausible, even though that should decrease the chances of it happening.
Of similar difficulty is the ability to identify cause and effect. What's more, the more prominent an effect, from the same action, the more we hold the agent responsible.
With hindsight on our side, we become overconfident in our ability to predict future outcomes of events.
Risk assessment is difficult for specialists and engineers, but nearly impossible for the general public: misunderstandings, fear of the unknown, untested technologies, overconfidence, etc, all result in the less specialized relying on a, typically, very bad, gut feeling, typically underestimating risk in general or associating irrelevant imagery with the risk involved (like, for example, nuclear energy).
Sutherland also discusses utility theory, basically a statistical method to not only include expected outcomes, but including the usefulness of these outcomes.
The related cost/benefit analysis, though having its own place, is limited by it only addressing financial gains and losses.
In medicine, a similar technique is QALY, the quality-adjusted life year.
The book is full of conclusions that are fairly obvious to skeptics and represent hard to convey truths in practice. For one, there's a large gap between what people think they do and what they in fact do. This may sound obvious, but in practice it will mean you hit a brick wall when pointing this out in the real world: in one study, 77% of subjects were shown to not read the warning labels on dangerous consumer products, while 97% claimed to do so, when interviewed.
At the end, Sutherland attempts to list underlying causes for irrationality:
+ Evolution, where our ancestors typically had to make many crucial decisions under duress.
+ The analog, imperfect, nature of the brain favors generalizations.
+ Our implicit desire to take mental shortcuts in deducing conclusions.
+ Our general incapacity to apply basic statistics.
+ The self serving bias.
September 7, 2022
Herkesin okuması gereken müthiş bir kitap. Nasil düşünüyoruz, irrasyonel/akıl dışı karar alma mekanizmalarımız, karar alma süreçlerimizi nasıl daha akılcı hale getirebiliriz vb konularda çok önemli ipuçları veren bir kitap. Orta bölümlerinde istatistik konularında biraz detaya giriyor, olasılık ve istatistik üzerine okurken alışkın olmayanları biraz yavaşlatabilir. Sabredenlerle ve sona ulaşanlara lezzetli bir tat bırakacağını söyleyebilirim. Kitap sonundaki ilave okuma önerileri üzerine yeni okuma hedefleri ile konu üzerinde daha da ilerlemek mümkün.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
December 7, 2020
Pretty good, but Thinking, fast and slow, might be a bit more accessible: https://blogendorff.com/2020/12/07/bo...
January 18, 2017
Review from https://darrengoossens.wordpress.com/2017/01/18/irrationality-the-enemy-within-by-stuart-sutherland-too-true/
Penguin, 1994, 357 pages.
Well. This book is replete with summaries of studies that on the whole show that we are creatures of habit, instinct and fear more than thought and reason. We suffer from the illusion of control. We make emotional decisions and then convince ourselves they were carefully reasoned. We avoid data that might prove us wrong, even when being proved wrong is the best thing that could happen to us.
The cover of Irrationality by Stuart Sutherland.
I can't say I was shocked. There's a time and a place for aiming for the utmost in rationality, of course, and times when that's not sensible, and it is useful to know the difference. If you're being chased by a bear a quick but sub-optimal decision may be better than making the right one too late. And it's useful to know when it doesn't really matter and you can just please your inner reptile, and when you really do need to sit down and analyse things properly.
And in a sense that is the key point. He basically says that only by understanding statistics and by essentially falling back on some means of scoring the alternatives and then picking the one with the best score can we really make rational decisions. Otherwise we rely on impressions, feelings and hunches, none of which are actually reliable. In the end, only by breaking down the problem and applying some kind of rigorous-as-possible analysis, generally relying on mathematics, can a really rational decision be made. And what fraction of decisions are made like than? In my life, relatively few.
Each chapter tackles various forms of irrationality, and each ends with a 'moral' which is really a bullet-point summary, the last one of which is usually humorous/facetious. ('Eat what you fancy.')
There is some repetition, but the points being made deserve hammering home. There are some lovely little 'try this yourself' puzzles, where even though I knew there was a trick and I desperately did not want to answer like an irrational creature, I still got it wrong. The simple two card trick, for example, which I won't describe in detail here since it would be too much like giving away the twist in the tail.
In summary, if you think you are good at making decisions, you might find this book useful. If you already believe that we're basically animals in clothes, this will not disabuse you. It's funny, opinionated, amusing and entertaining, but a little, I repeat, repetitive. Some of the case studies of how really really really important 'decisions' were made are a little worrisome, especially because (of course) human nature has not really changed in the meantime. I sometimes look around at a skyscraper, or read about a decision to go to war or spend billions of dollars on a useless aeroplane, and this book comes to mind. Will the building fall down? Is the war really worthwhile? Will the aeroplane get off the ground, and if it does will it stay up?
In some ways the book makes our achievements all the greater. Okay, the planet is in trouble. Okay, we don't always elect great leaders or do the right thing by our neighbours, family, friends. Yet so much has been done. We're not always rational, no, and neither should we be. Would more people be happier if the balance shifted towards more rationality? Probably. Yet on the whole we go forward, stumbling sometimes, by accident sometimes, yet we do live longer, we have sent people (okay, men) to the moon, vastly fewer children and mothers die in childbirth. It's not all bad, this world.
Anyway, it's a good book.
Book book book.
Penguin, 1994, 357 pages.
Well. This book is replete with summaries of studies that on the whole show that we are creatures of habit, instinct and fear more than thought and reason. We suffer from the illusion of control. We make emotional decisions and then convince ourselves they were carefully reasoned. We avoid data that might prove us wrong, even when being proved wrong is the best thing that could happen to us.
The cover of Irrationality by Stuart Sutherland.
I can't say I was shocked. There's a time and a place for aiming for the utmost in rationality, of course, and times when that's not sensible, and it is useful to know the difference. If you're being chased by a bear a quick but sub-optimal decision may be better than making the right one too late. And it's useful to know when it doesn't really matter and you can just please your inner reptile, and when you really do need to sit down and analyse things properly.
And in a sense that is the key point. He basically says that only by understanding statistics and by essentially falling back on some means of scoring the alternatives and then picking the one with the best score can we really make rational decisions. Otherwise we rely on impressions, feelings and hunches, none of which are actually reliable. In the end, only by breaking down the problem and applying some kind of rigorous-as-possible analysis, generally relying on mathematics, can a really rational decision be made. And what fraction of decisions are made like than? In my life, relatively few.
Each chapter tackles various forms of irrationality, and each ends with a 'moral' which is really a bullet-point summary, the last one of which is usually humorous/facetious. ('Eat what you fancy.')
There is some repetition, but the points being made deserve hammering home. There are some lovely little 'try this yourself' puzzles, where even though I knew there was a trick and I desperately did not want to answer like an irrational creature, I still got it wrong. The simple two card trick, for example, which I won't describe in detail here since it would be too much like giving away the twist in the tail.
In summary, if you think you are good at making decisions, you might find this book useful. If you already believe that we're basically animals in clothes, this will not disabuse you. It's funny, opinionated, amusing and entertaining, but a little, I repeat, repetitive. Some of the case studies of how really really really important 'decisions' were made are a little worrisome, especially because (of course) human nature has not really changed in the meantime. I sometimes look around at a skyscraper, or read about a decision to go to war or spend billions of dollars on a useless aeroplane, and this book comes to mind. Will the building fall down? Is the war really worthwhile? Will the aeroplane get off the ground, and if it does will it stay up?
In some ways the book makes our achievements all the greater. Okay, the planet is in trouble. Okay, we don't always elect great leaders or do the right thing by our neighbours, family, friends. Yet so much has been done. We're not always rational, no, and neither should we be. Would more people be happier if the balance shifted towards more rationality? Probably. Yet on the whole we go forward, stumbling sometimes, by accident sometimes, yet we do live longer, we have sent people (okay, men) to the moon, vastly fewer children and mothers die in childbirth. It's not all bad, this world.
Anyway, it's a good book.
Book book book.
October 24, 2010
This book was first published in 1992, but don't let that put you off - the topics are more relevant today than ever before, particularly given the way we appear to be sliding head-first into another age of unreason. One example would be the chapter on stereotypes: very appropriate in this post 9/11 world, showing the development of prejudice towards out-groups and detailing 9 reasons why they occur - and shouldn't.
There are stacks of case studies in the book - well over a hundred, described in great detail (sometimes so much detail that you need to re-read the rules of the experiment to remember them) and you will soon get used to reading the phrase "In one experiment..." along with references to subjects and stooges.
This is a comprehensive eye-opening read but also a somewhat infuriating one, though not through any fault of the author. Quite simply, you start to wonder why on earth more children aren't taught basic statistical concepts and probability at school, as it is ignorance of these areas that plays such a large part in human irrational thinking, in people from ALL walks of life.
Other common causes of ignorance and mistakes - the availability error, the primacy error, the halo effect, the anchoring effect, and plenty more are all discussed at great length.
If you see a correlation between A and B and conclude that A must have 'caused' B, if you're prone to seeing strange coincidences and suspect that last night's dream managed to predict an event from today, then this book is for you.
There are stacks of case studies in the book - well over a hundred, described in great detail (sometimes so much detail that you need to re-read the rules of the experiment to remember them) and you will soon get used to reading the phrase "In one experiment..." along with references to subjects and stooges.
This is a comprehensive eye-opening read but also a somewhat infuriating one, though not through any fault of the author. Quite simply, you start to wonder why on earth more children aren't taught basic statistical concepts and probability at school, as it is ignorance of these areas that plays such a large part in human irrational thinking, in people from ALL walks of life.
Other common causes of ignorance and mistakes - the availability error, the primacy error, the halo effect, the anchoring effect, and plenty more are all discussed at great length.
If you see a correlation between A and B and conclude that A must have 'caused' B, if you're prone to seeing strange coincidences and suspect that last night's dream managed to predict an event from today, then this book is for you.
December 18, 2023
Irrationality by Stuart Sutherland
(I'm using this version because Goodreads isn't showing the Audible version that I listened to.)
BIBLIOGRAPHIC DETAILS -PRINT: © (First Published by Constable and Company 1992) November 1, 1994; 978-0813521503; Rutgers University Press; First Edition; 357 pages; unabridged (Hardcover Info from Amazon.com)
-DIGITAL: © August 7, 2013; Pinter & Martin; 978059333132; 274 pages; unabridged (Digital version info from Amazon.com)
- *AUDIO: © December 17, 2009; Audible Studios; 10 hours, 32 minutes; unabridged (Audio info from Audible version)
-FILM: No
SERIES: No.
CHARACTERS:
N/A
SUMMARY/ EVALUATION:
-SELECTED: Don had added this to our Audible library years ago. It didn’t look too enticing, but I figured it would at least be a good one to listen to at nightif I had trouble getting to sleep.
-ABOUT: The author discusses how people often do make decisions, why it’s irrational, and how they should make them. He discusses medical mistakes frequently made by physicians who do not understand how to apply statistics. The book is chalk full of statistics.
-OVERALL IMPRESSION: Well, yes, it was good at putting me to sleep, and it often insisted I put my brain to work to follow the logic being explained, but it actually was quite interesting, and actually quite useful for everyday decision making.
AUTHOR: Stuart Sutherland: From Wikipedia
“(Norman) Stuart Sutherland (26 March 1927 – 8 November 1998) was a British psychologist and writer.[2][3]
Education
Sutherland was educated at King Edward's School, Birmingham, before going to Magdalen College, Oxford, where he read Psychology, Philosophy and Physiology. He stayed at University of Oxford for his PhD[4] which was awarded in 1957 for research supervised by John Zachary Young.[citation needed]
Career and research
Sutherland held a lecturing post at Oxford from 1960, and was elected a Fellow of Merton College, Oxford in March 1963,[5] before moving the following year to the recently opened University of Sussex as the founding Professor and head of its Laboratory of Experimental Psychology; with the young colleagues he appointed, he rapidly built an international reputation for Sussex in this field.
Among psychologists, Sutherland is best known for his theoretical and empirical work in comparative psychology, particularly in relation to visual pattern recognition and discrimination learning. In the 1950s and 1960s he carried out numerous experiments on rats but also on other species such as octopus; the two-factor theory of discrimination learning that he developed with Nicholas Mackintosh was an important step in the rehabilitation of a cognitive approach to animal learning after the dominance of strict behaviourism in the first half of the twentieth century. He was also interested in human perception and cognition, and in 1992 he published Irrationality: The enemy within,[6] a lay reader's guide to the psychology of cognitive biases and common failures of human judgement.
Among a wider public, Sutherland is most famous for his 1976 autobiography Breakdown, detailing his struggles with manic depression. A second edition of Breakdown was published in 1995. Stuart Sutherland died from a heart attack in November 1998.”
NARRATOR: Kris Dyer. Excerpt from bytethebook-dot-com
“Kris Dyer: Co-Founder of Rakkit Productions
Other
Kris is the co-founder of Rakkit Productions Ltd who produce podcasts, audiobooks and radio for clients such as Penguin Random House, Bloomsbury, Bonnier, Orion, Pan MacMillan, Audible and the BBC. They are currently working on a podcast series for the British Council, a documentary for BBC Radio 4 and an audiobook about the history of comedy series Blackadder.
He is an award-winning audiobook narrator and has worked on over 250 audiobooks including bestselling titles like The Rotherweird Trilogy by Andrew Caldecott, The Jackdaw Mysteries Series (6 books) by SW Perry and The Little History of Philosophy by Nigel Warburton.”
GENRE: Non-fiction; Psychology
LOCATIONS: N/A
TIME FRAME: Contemporary (first edition written in 1992)
SUBJECTS: Economics; Values; Math; Probability Theory; Statistics; Decision Making; Medicine; Education; Business; Management; Psychology
DEDICATION: Not found
SAMPLE QUOTATION: Excerpt From “Introduction”
"Taken all in all, rationality has had a good press. Hamlet declared, 'What a piece of work is a man! How noble in reason!' Thomas Husley, a fervent exponent of rationality, went much further: 'If some great Power would agree to make me always think what is true and do what is right, on condition of being turned into a sort of clock, and would up every morning before I got out of bed, I should instantly close with the offer.' Whether or not rationality is as desirable a gift as Huxley believed, it is certain that people exhibit it only sporadically, if at all. Consider, for example, how you would answer the following questions.
Which is more likely -- that a mother with blue eyes has a daughter with blue eyes or that a daughter with blue eyes has a mother with blue eyes? Are there more words beginning with the letter 'k' than with 'k' as a third letter? Is an interview a useful selection procedure? Smoking increases the risk of lung cancer by a factor of ten and of fatal heart disease by a factor of two: do more smokers die of lung cancer than of heart disease? Are you a better than average driver? Could you be persuaded to give potentially lethal shocks to someone as part of a psychological experiment? Do more people die of strokes than of accidents? Which is more dangerous, cycling or riding the Big Wheel? Consider two maternity hospitals, one averaging forty-five births a day, the other fifteen: in which hospital is it more likely that on any given day 60 per cent of births will be boys? Is it always beneficial to reward people for performing a task well?
Unless you have been put on your guard by the title of this book, some of your answers to these simple questions are likely to be irrational, as indeed were some of mine when I first encountered them. Moreover, if you answered all of them, you were certainly irrational, since some contain insufficient information to warrant an answer: the inability to suspend judgement is one of the most prevalent aspects of irrationality."
RATING: 3 stars.
STARTED-FINISHED
12/16/2023-12/18/2023
(I'm using this version because Goodreads isn't showing the Audible version that I listened to.)
BIBLIOGRAPHIC DETAILS -PRINT: © (First Published by Constable and Company 1992) November 1, 1994; 978-0813521503; Rutgers University Press; First Edition; 357 pages; unabridged (Hardcover Info from Amazon.com)
-DIGITAL: © August 7, 2013; Pinter & Martin; 978059333132; 274 pages; unabridged (Digital version info from Amazon.com)
- *AUDIO: © December 17, 2009; Audible Studios; 10 hours, 32 minutes; unabridged (Audio info from Audible version)
-FILM: No
SERIES: No.
CHARACTERS:
N/A
SUMMARY/ EVALUATION:
-SELECTED: Don had added this to our Audible library years ago. It didn’t look too enticing, but I figured it would at least be a good one to listen to at nightif I had trouble getting to sleep.
-ABOUT: The author discusses how people often do make decisions, why it’s irrational, and how they should make them. He discusses medical mistakes frequently made by physicians who do not understand how to apply statistics. The book is chalk full of statistics.
-OVERALL IMPRESSION: Well, yes, it was good at putting me to sleep, and it often insisted I put my brain to work to follow the logic being explained, but it actually was quite interesting, and actually quite useful for everyday decision making.
AUTHOR: Stuart Sutherland: From Wikipedia
“(Norman) Stuart Sutherland (26 March 1927 – 8 November 1998) was a British psychologist and writer.[2][3]
Education
Sutherland was educated at King Edward's School, Birmingham, before going to Magdalen College, Oxford, where he read Psychology, Philosophy and Physiology. He stayed at University of Oxford for his PhD[4] which was awarded in 1957 for research supervised by John Zachary Young.[citation needed]
Career and research
Sutherland held a lecturing post at Oxford from 1960, and was elected a Fellow of Merton College, Oxford in March 1963,[5] before moving the following year to the recently opened University of Sussex as the founding Professor and head of its Laboratory of Experimental Psychology; with the young colleagues he appointed, he rapidly built an international reputation for Sussex in this field.
Among psychologists, Sutherland is best known for his theoretical and empirical work in comparative psychology, particularly in relation to visual pattern recognition and discrimination learning. In the 1950s and 1960s he carried out numerous experiments on rats but also on other species such as octopus; the two-factor theory of discrimination learning that he developed with Nicholas Mackintosh was an important step in the rehabilitation of a cognitive approach to animal learning after the dominance of strict behaviourism in the first half of the twentieth century. He was also interested in human perception and cognition, and in 1992 he published Irrationality: The enemy within,[6] a lay reader's guide to the psychology of cognitive biases and common failures of human judgement.
Among a wider public, Sutherland is most famous for his 1976 autobiography Breakdown, detailing his struggles with manic depression. A second edition of Breakdown was published in 1995. Stuart Sutherland died from a heart attack in November 1998.”
NARRATOR: Kris Dyer. Excerpt from bytethebook-dot-com
“Kris Dyer: Co-Founder of Rakkit Productions
Other
Kris is the co-founder of Rakkit Productions Ltd who produce podcasts, audiobooks and radio for clients such as Penguin Random House, Bloomsbury, Bonnier, Orion, Pan MacMillan, Audible and the BBC. They are currently working on a podcast series for the British Council, a documentary for BBC Radio 4 and an audiobook about the history of comedy series Blackadder.
He is an award-winning audiobook narrator and has worked on over 250 audiobooks including bestselling titles like The Rotherweird Trilogy by Andrew Caldecott, The Jackdaw Mysteries Series (6 books) by SW Perry and The Little History of Philosophy by Nigel Warburton.”
GENRE: Non-fiction; Psychology
LOCATIONS: N/A
TIME FRAME: Contemporary (first edition written in 1992)
SUBJECTS: Economics; Values; Math; Probability Theory; Statistics; Decision Making; Medicine; Education; Business; Management; Psychology
DEDICATION: Not found
SAMPLE QUOTATION: Excerpt From “Introduction”
"Taken all in all, rationality has had a good press. Hamlet declared, 'What a piece of work is a man! How noble in reason!' Thomas Husley, a fervent exponent of rationality, went much further: 'If some great Power would agree to make me always think what is true and do what is right, on condition of being turned into a sort of clock, and would up every morning before I got out of bed, I should instantly close with the offer.' Whether or not rationality is as desirable a gift as Huxley believed, it is certain that people exhibit it only sporadically, if at all. Consider, for example, how you would answer the following questions.
Which is more likely -- that a mother with blue eyes has a daughter with blue eyes or that a daughter with blue eyes has a mother with blue eyes? Are there more words beginning with the letter 'k' than with 'k' as a third letter? Is an interview a useful selection procedure? Smoking increases the risk of lung cancer by a factor of ten and of fatal heart disease by a factor of two: do more smokers die of lung cancer than of heart disease? Are you a better than average driver? Could you be persuaded to give potentially lethal shocks to someone as part of a psychological experiment? Do more people die of strokes than of accidents? Which is more dangerous, cycling or riding the Big Wheel? Consider two maternity hospitals, one averaging forty-five births a day, the other fifteen: in which hospital is it more likely that on any given day 60 per cent of births will be boys? Is it always beneficial to reward people for performing a task well?
Unless you have been put on your guard by the title of this book, some of your answers to these simple questions are likely to be irrational, as indeed were some of mine when I first encountered them. Moreover, if you answered all of them, you were certainly irrational, since some contain insufficient information to warrant an answer: the inability to suspend judgement is one of the most prevalent aspects of irrationality."
RATING: 3 stars.
STARTED-FINISHED
12/16/2023-12/18/2023
February 25, 2016
Kitap aslında bir çok sosyoloji -psikoloji deneyinin özetlenmiş derlemesi gibi. Okurken aslında rasyonel gibi görünen ama irrasyonel olan pek çok davranışa tanıklık ediyoruz. Hem çevremizden hem de kendi davranışlarımızdan bolca örnek var. İyi bir okuma yapabilirseniz, insanların ve toplulukların davranışlarını yönetmek ve yönlendirmek için güzel hileler bulabilirsiniz.
Hayata bakışınızı biraz daha berraklaştıracak bir kitap olmasına rağmen çerezlik diyebileceğimiz bir konumda duruyor. Kitaptaki bölümler de oldukça kısa ve yatmadan önce entelektüel birikim için keyifle okunur.
Sonunda da belirttiği istatistik bilimine dair temelleri öğrenmek daha rasyonel kararlar vermenizi sağlayacaktır.
Kitaptaki en beğendiğim olay olan batık masraf örneğini de vermeden geçmeyeyim. 15 lira verip sinemada izlediğimiz film kötü olmasına rağmen izlemeye devam etmek, batık masraf hatasıdır. Oysa film çok kötü, 15 lira vermişiz ve 1 saatimizi kaybetmişiz. Sadece para verdiğimiz için, izlemeye devam etmek kaybımızı daha da artırmaktan başka bir işe yaramayacak. Gereksiz yere sıkılacaksınız. Aynı olaya siyasiler de bolca düşüyor. Kötü bir projeyi "milletin parası boşa mı gitsin" diyerek devam ettirmek gibi. Oysa milyonlarca lira boşa gitmiş, en kısa sürede projeyi sonlandırarak zararın daha da artmasını engelleyebilirsiniz.
Hayata bakışınızı biraz daha berraklaştıracak bir kitap olmasına rağmen çerezlik diyebileceğimiz bir konumda duruyor. Kitaptaki bölümler de oldukça kısa ve yatmadan önce entelektüel birikim için keyifle okunur.
Sonunda da belirttiği istatistik bilimine dair temelleri öğrenmek daha rasyonel kararlar vermenizi sağlayacaktır.
Kitaptaki en beğendiğim olay olan batık masraf örneğini de vermeden geçmeyeyim. 15 lira verip sinemada izlediğimiz film kötü olmasına rağmen izlemeye devam etmek, batık masraf hatasıdır. Oysa film çok kötü, 15 lira vermişiz ve 1 saatimizi kaybetmişiz. Sadece para verdiğimiz için, izlemeye devam etmek kaybımızı daha da artırmaktan başka bir işe yaramayacak. Gereksiz yere sıkılacaksınız. Aynı olaya siyasiler de bolca düşüyor. Kötü bir projeyi "milletin parası boşa mı gitsin" diyerek devam ettirmek gibi. Oysa milyonlarca lira boşa gitmiş, en kısa sürede projeyi sonlandırarak zararın daha da artmasını engelleyebilirsiniz.
January 18, 2010
Academic attempts to hit the "trade" market have made for the creation of a capacious graveyard down the years. Everyone recalls the successes without taking into account that they form way less than 1% of the attempts. This is one of the modest triumphs - an at times fascinating exploration of why people behave irrationally.
For most of the book, Sutherland is a master with the juicy anecdote, although the book sags in the middle as he abandons real world examples in favour of that boring, over familiar, Person A, Person B, Person C scenario. His arguments boil down to the fact that we need to make more considered decisions and manage the buffeting influence of emotions, over confidence and plain silliness. This does bring things round to a pro-statistics angle, but Sutherland is never guilty of what Mark Blaug termed "mindless instrumentalism" - he's cynical about Cost-Benefit Analysis as a technique.
I'll give it three stars because politically, this leads to some overly individualist conclusions - Popperian falsification is evoked and the UK public sector comes in for a major bashing - Sutherland mentions only fleetingly that irrationality is rife in private companies too.
For most of the book, Sutherland is a master with the juicy anecdote, although the book sags in the middle as he abandons real world examples in favour of that boring, over familiar, Person A, Person B, Person C scenario. His arguments boil down to the fact that we need to make more considered decisions and manage the buffeting influence of emotions, over confidence and plain silliness. This does bring things round to a pro-statistics angle, but Sutherland is never guilty of what Mark Blaug termed "mindless instrumentalism" - he's cynical about Cost-Benefit Analysis as a technique.
I'll give it three stars because politically, this leads to some overly individualist conclusions - Popperian falsification is evoked and the UK public sector comes in for a major bashing - Sutherland mentions only fleetingly that irrationality is rife in private companies too.
June 13, 2013
Clearly something of a classic, this book has been described as a "thinking man's self-help guide" by Ben Goldacre. It's interesting to get an expert scholarly (but not heavy) view on the various and many ways in which the human brain has irrational tendencies. Much of what is discussed should be common sense (e.g. people tend to ignore evidence that doesn't fit their beliefes) but it's backed up with discussions of psychology experiments that have been replicated and offer some proof.
Of course, one can argue that rationality is a) overrated and b) has ideological hinterland. In fact, to be fair, the author does discuss some of this at the end of the book. Some of the best decisions I've ever made would have seemed irrational at the time they were taken - unintended consequences abound. Also, there's much to be said in criticism of "evidence-based" thinking (e.g. who has paid to provide the evidence, why did they investigate in the way they did, would the results have been different if there were other variables considered, and so forth). Having said this, the book encourages the reader to think critically throughout and given where higher education is headed (neoliberal wasteland), it's hard to argue that this book should be required reading across the academy.
Of course, one can argue that rationality is a) overrated and b) has ideological hinterland. In fact, to be fair, the author does discuss some of this at the end of the book. Some of the best decisions I've ever made would have seemed irrational at the time they were taken - unintended consequences abound. Also, there's much to be said in criticism of "evidence-based" thinking (e.g. who has paid to provide the evidence, why did they investigate in the way they did, would the results have been different if there were other variables considered, and so forth). Having said this, the book encourages the reader to think critically throughout and given where higher education is headed (neoliberal wasteland), it's hard to argue that this book should be required reading across the academy.
September 17, 2008
A very good book examining the irrational decisions people make. It also provides methods on how best to make a rational decision and not fall into the common traps. Learning statistics and probability theory are a start.
I did find it a little boring to read at times. The writing style is a little bland and technical in nature. Also, one thing the book only touched on was why people are irrational. Is it because of the way the brain works, or is it because of our schooling, society norms or culture?
For me, people are not purely rational machines that make Mr. Spock-like decisions because the brain is very different to that of a computer. The brain is an excellent pattern recognition device. It’s so good that it’s able to find patterns where none exist. People are also ruled by past experiences and learning, emotions, values, instinct and desires. Any decision a person makes is clouded by all these things. It’s incredible we can function at all let alone make a rational decision.
I did find it a little boring to read at times. The writing style is a little bland and technical in nature. Also, one thing the book only touched on was why people are irrational. Is it because of the way the brain works, or is it because of our schooling, society norms or culture?
For me, people are not purely rational machines that make Mr. Spock-like decisions because the brain is very different to that of a computer. The brain is an excellent pattern recognition device. It’s so good that it’s able to find patterns where none exist. People are also ruled by past experiences and learning, emotions, values, instinct and desires. Any decision a person makes is clouded by all these things. It’s incredible we can function at all let alone make a rational decision.
December 21, 2009
Human beings are not nearly as reasonable as we think we are. Intuition, the failure to understand how probabilities work, and the curious phenomenon of "availability" (universalizing the most recent experience we can remember or alternatively the first experience, depending on whether you perceive later information as replacing or augmenting the original) all conspire to help us survive, but not to be reasonable.
Sutherland has written a satisfying little book that opens the door to being slightly less irrational than we would have been. He doesn't claim you'll be a fully rational being once you've read his book, in fact, one might even claim that full rationality would not even be desirable. Regardless of his intention, you will certainly come away being suspicious of things that you previously took for granted as "common sense" or beyond needing to be understood.
Sutherland has written a satisfying little book that opens the door to being slightly less irrational than we would have been. He doesn't claim you'll be a fully rational being once you've read his book, in fact, one might even claim that full rationality would not even be desirable. Regardless of his intention, you will certainly come away being suspicious of things that you previously took for granted as "common sense" or beyond needing to be understood.
August 17, 2014
The most readable and well-written popular-level book about the irrationality of humans that I have discovered. I am not a fan of the first chapter, but this is possibly because I've read a lot more of the literature on irrational behaviour and the philosophy of it, and I feel he is a little inaccurate. Furthermore, the morals at the end of each chapter could be a little less whimsical and a little more useful. The entirety of the rest of the book is excellent however, and the discussion especially focused on the practical implications of the psychological studies discussed.
Not as theoretical as Daniel Kahneman's "Thinking, Fast and Slow" and subsequently not as deep, yet I (and the friends I have who have also read both) have found Sutherland's book to be the more clearly written and practical.
Not as theoretical as Daniel Kahneman's "Thinking, Fast and Slow" and subsequently not as deep, yet I (and the friends I have who have also read both) have found Sutherland's book to be the more clearly written and practical.
March 3, 2014
This book was a extensive list of the ways in which humans are irrational. Although the advice at the end of each chapter on how to avoid these irrationality were almost simply "don't be irrational", ie if humans tend to over count X in importance the advice would be "don't over count X", the book was helpful.
While the book was written 21 years ago, it was very helpful and insightful and the editor made sure to comment on things that had changed in a footnote (but it was rarely needed).
The book was engaging, interesting, and at points humorous. The last chapter did a great job of summarizing (without repeating) the main fallacies into a few key categories grouped by a possible explanation (and yet the author recognized that many of these were not proven and just conjecture).
While the book was written 21 years ago, it was very helpful and insightful and the editor made sure to comment on things that had changed in a footnote (but it was rarely needed).
The book was engaging, interesting, and at points humorous. The last chapter did a great job of summarizing (without repeating) the main fallacies into a few key categories grouped by a possible explanation (and yet the author recognized that many of these were not proven and just conjecture).
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