A superbly crafted analysis of a universally deplored but seemingly irresistible technique.
An unnerving history.
“How could anyone fall for that?” remains a common reaction to wacky ideas promoted over social media, but it’s less often accompanied by a chuckle, because such ideas seem to exert an inexorable appeal. The flat Earth society is prospering; vaccine coverage is dropping. Lemov, an associate professor of the history of science at Harvard and author of Database of Dreams: The Lost Quest To Catalog Humanity, teaches a course on brainwashing. Long after the 1950-53 Korean War, when a few American prisoners “fell for” Communism, the word “brainwashing” has revived, as experts try to explain how people are persuaded to believe weird things. The first of many unsettling sections deals with the Korean War period, when Chinese overseers peppered POWs with propaganda, accompanied by treats for those who responded favorably and punishment for the uncooperative. After the armistice, citizens and the media were horrified when 23 Americans refused to return. Over the following decades, most tired of life in China and came back, proclaiming that unspeakable tortures had led to their defection. Learning the wrong lesson, the military aimed to train soldiers to resist brainwashing by inflicting brutal torments on recruits while ignoring ideology. The CIA’s ham-handed research on brain manipulation has fascinated popular writers, with an unfortunate carry-over into legitimate brain research. There are few lessons, meantime, to be learned from Patty Hearst’s 1974 kidnapping. Her months of confinement, rape, and abuse are no secret, but Americans remain titillated, and most still believe her guilty of her crimes. Matters do not improve as Lemov casts a gimlet eye on mid-20th-century mass media, later and ongoing cults, and today’s social media “hyper-persuasion,” a more acceptable term for the b-word.
A superbly crafted analysis of a universally deplored but seemingly irresistible technique.Pub Date: March 25, 2025
ISBN: 9781324075264
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our...
A psychologist and Nobel Prize winner summarizes and synthesizes the recent decades of research on intuition and systematic thinking.
The author of several scholarly texts, Kahneman (Emeritus Psychology and Public Affairs/Princeton Univ.) now offers general readers not just the findings of psychological research but also a better understanding of how research questions arise and how scholars systematically frame and answer them. He begins with the distinction between System 1 and System 2 mental operations, the former referring to quick, automatic thought, the latter to more effortful, overt thinking. We rely heavily, writes, on System 1, resorting to the higher-energy System 2 only when we need or want to. Kahneman continually refers to System 2 as “lazy”: We don’t want to think rigorously about something. The author then explores the nuances of our two-system minds, showing how they perform in various situations. Psychological experiments have repeatedly revealed that our intuitions are generally wrong, that our assessments are based on biases and that our System 1 hates doubt and despises ambiguity. Kahneman largely avoids jargon; when he does use some (“heuristics,” for example), he argues that such terms really ought to join our everyday vocabulary. He reviews many fundamental concepts in psychology and statistics (regression to the mean, the narrative fallacy, the optimistic bias), showing how they relate to his overall concerns about how we think and why we make the decisions that we do. Some of the later chapters (dealing with risk-taking and statistics and probabilities) are denser than others (some readers may resent such demands on System 2!), but the passages that deal with the economic and political implications of the research are gripping.
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our minds.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-374-27563-1
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
IN THE NEWS
These are not hard and fast rules, but Meyer delivers important reading for those engaged in international business.
A helpful guide to working effectively with people from other cultures.
“The sad truth is that the vast majority of managers who conduct business internationally have little understanding about how culture is impacting their work,” writes Meyer, a professor at INSEAD, an international business school. Yet they face a wider array of work styles than ever before in dealing with clients, suppliers and colleagues from around the world. When is it best to speak or stay quiet? What is the role of the leader in the room? When working with foreign business people, failing to take cultural differences into account can lead to frustration, misunderstanding or worse. Based on research and her experiences teaching cross-cultural behaviors to executive students, the author examines a handful of key areas. Among others, they include communicating (Anglo-Saxons are explicit; Asians communicate implicitly, requiring listeners to read between the lines), developing a sense of trust (Brazilians do it over long lunches), and decision-making (Germans rely on consensus, Americans on one decider). In each area, the author provides a “culture map scale” that positions behaviors in more than 20 countries along a continuum, allowing readers to anticipate the preferences of individuals from a particular country: Do they like direct or indirect negative feedback? Are they rigid or flexible regarding deadlines? Do they favor verbal or written commitments? And so on. Meyer discusses managers who have faced perplexing situations, such as knowledgeable team members who fail to speak up in meetings or Indians who offer a puzzling half-shake, half-nod of the head. Cultural differences—not personality quirks—are the motivating factors behind many behavioral styles. Depending on our cultures, we understand the world in a particular way, find certain arguments persuasive or lacking merit, and consider some ways of making decisions or measuring time natural and others quite strange.
These are not hard and fast rules, but Meyer delivers important reading for those engaged in international business.Pub Date: May 27, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-61039-250-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: April 15, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2014
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