This intriguing study of the psychological dynamics of scams shows how one can live with integrity in a sucker’s world.
How to find a fruitful path between gullibility and paranoia.
Wilkinson-Ryan, a professor of law and psychology, is well situated to investigate the social and personal implications of scams, cons, and tricks. The difference between being robbed and being conned is that with the latter, the victim has somehow contributed to their loss. Consequently, it generates feelings of humiliation and self-belittlement. Often, the psychological pain relates to the sense that the trust holding society together has been taken away, replaced by cynicism and suspicion. It is a potent construct, and the author explores it from a variety of perspectives. “The goal here,” she writes, “is not so much to spot the con but to renegotiate its meaning.” Along the way, she examines a range of psychological games and research experiments, including the well-known prisoner’s dilemma and the interesting tragedy of the commons, where there is an intersection of self-interest, trust of others, risk, and reward. A personal example that she recounts involves a student who claimed to have suffered a death in the family and therefore needed an extension on an important assignment. Was it a plea from someone who needed support or a lie designed to manipulate her compassion? Wilkinson-Ryan unpacks this to demonstrate how the optimal decision can be made by assigning metrics to assess the potential gain and loss of each path. This helps clarify the choices as well as the crucial impact on the decision-maker. “The point is, you can feel cheated, but you don’t have to,” she writes. “The question is not whether threats exist but which ones deserve your attention. The prospect of playing the fool doesn’t have to feel existential.” It’s a wise conclusion based on well-reasoned analysis.
This intriguing study of the psychological dynamics of scams shows how one can live with integrity in a sucker’s world.Pub Date: Feb. 7, 2023
ISBN: 9780063214262
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Harper Wave
Review Posted Online: Dec. 23, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2023
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
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