Book Review: How We Decide (Playaway Adult Nonfiction) (9781441803603): Johah Lehrer, David Colacci: Books
Book Review: How We Decide (Playaway Adult Nonfiction) (9781441803603): Johah Lehrer, David Colacci: Books
Disappointing addition to existing literature, good intro if new to the field,
By Sreeram Ramakrishnan (Yorktown Heights, NY) -
(TOP 1000 REVIEWER)
This review is from: How We Decide (Hardcover)
Perhaps my expectations of one of my favorite authors/editors in Seed magazine and from his earlier book Proust Was a Neuroscientistwas too high…nevertheless, this book is a disappointment. Not that there is anything structurally or factually incorrect - it just doesn’t add any value to a reader that is familiar with this field. The examples and studies mentioned in the book, for the most part, have been repeated many times in several books of this genre. Instead of providing additional insights or alternative interpretations, or any follow-ups to the experiments and studies, Lehrer, for the most part repeats the key points from these studies and attempts to make some points in the context of decision making. Despite best efforts, the book merely ends up reinforcing known and well-popularized concepts (even in popular literature) such as recency bias, cognitive dissonance, loss aversion, etc. If you have read books like Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions, Sway: The Irresistible Pull of Irrational Behavior, Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness you will be hard pressed to find enough value in this book to invest in this. Other books such as Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me): Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions, and Hurtful Acts and Why Choose This Book?: How We Make Decisions also cover similar concepts in a more focussed manner.
Similarity to other books is no crime. But one will be hard pressed to determine any differentiating value when the book is serving as another book referencing almost an identical set of research papers without providing a compelling counter-argument or new inferences. For a reader who is aware of the work in behavioral psychology, this book provides incremental value at best. For a reader getting initiated to this field, this book is an OK introduction to the vast research, though my no means a unique interpretation. It is written in a very accessible manner and the narration sustains the interest of the reader throughout the book. The reader may have been better served if the author provided a synopsis of each chapter in the context of his title “how we decide”.
Overall, an interesting read if you are new to this field, but an also-ran if you are familiar with the popular literature in this field.
Comparisons to Blink are inevitable,
By J Hively (York, Pa) -
This review is from: How We Decide (Hardcover)
Lehrer takes aim squarely at Malcolm Gladwell’s book, Blink, and, for my money, hits a home run. How We Decide is clearly and interestingly written, like Gladwell, but is more substantiated with recent neuroscience research. Lehrer’s conclusion is also more nuanced, i.e., the best way to make a decision depends on different factors, and argues for the effectiveness and importance of monitoring our own thought process.
This is one talented young man. I read Lehrer’s first book about Proust and neuroscience, and while I was super impressed with his intellect, it required serious effort to read and understand. How We Decide is a lighter read, but just as original and significant in its own way.
Behavioral Psychology Made Exciting,
By Herbert Gintis (Northampton, MA USA) -
This review is from: How We Decide (Hardcover)
“The science of decision-making,” says Jonah Lehrer “remains a young science. Researchers are just beginning to understand how the brain makes up its mind.” (p. 243) Unlike some of the dimmer acolytes of contemporary (as opposed to old-fashioned Skinnerian) behavioral psychology, Lehrer stresses the importance of reason in the human capacity to make successful decisions. “Simple problems require reason,” he notes, and “novel problems also require reason.” (p. 244-245) However, he correctly notes that hard problems draw on human capacities, especially the emotions and forms of knowledge that lie below the level of the conscious, that account for the stunning capacity of humans to make good decisions under stressful conditions.
Lehrer is a first-rate writer who takes great care in presenting his evidence. This is a really exciting book to read because of his manner of developing examples of human decision-making under stress and uncertainty. Because this is meant to be a popular book, not a research treatise, Lehrer uses examples rather than statistics, and he takes many creative but sometimes questionable leaps in interpreting the evidence. In the remainder of my review, I will stress the mistakes Lehrer makes because they are instructive. I do not want to dissuade the reader from buying this book—it is a great and insightful read, and the mistakes do not distort the message.
Almost all of Lehrer’s questionable assertions are based on the “people are irrational” school of contemporary behavioral psychology. Thus, he calls loss aversion and the framing effects associated with prospect theory (the idea that we are risk-loving over losses and risk-averse over gains) “irrational,” and he argues that it is “irrational” not to maximize expected value for lotteries with small stakes. Similarly, he asserts the equity premium in the stock market is due to investor irrationality, as though there is something wrong with being highly risk-averse, and that economists agree that there is a stock market risk premium (they do not).
Like the “people are irrational” behavioral psychologists, Lehrer is happy to make assertions that clearly do not contradict rationality, yet claim that they do. For instance, he relates an experiment by Dan Ariely in which a motley group of goods (French wine, computer keyboards, etc.) are to be auctioned off to a group of MIT business school students, with the restriction that no subject could bid more in dollars than the last two digits of their social security number. The experimenters found that students with high last two digits bid three times as much as those with low, and proclaimed this “irrational.” Of course, there is nothing whatever irrational about this. Suppose, for instance that all the goods are worth $100 and this were common knowledge. Then each subject would bid exactly the maximum he is allowed. Similarly, Lehrer relates an experiment of Paul Andreassen in which students were given various amounts of information and asked to choose a stock portfolio. Those that had more information made more profitable choices than those who had less! Lehrer interprets this as “irrational,” because more information is always better than less. In fact, the “less information” consisted of price history of the stocks, and “more information” added opinions of stock experts from TV and newspapers. People did better by ignoring the extra information of the “experts.” Now, I agree that we live in a strange world in which some (not all, by any means) people listen to “experts” who in fact haven’t a clue about what will transpire and whose track records are shoddy at best, but is this “irrational”? Of course it is not. You have to be an expert to know to disregard the advice of such “experts,” and in general the “experts” are very useful, although not so in the case of the stock market (the correct “experts” in financial affairs give investors good advice about portfolio diversification, cost of managing a portfolio, and how to choose types of financial instruments, but they do not tell people how to “pick winners”).
In an engaging and eloquent chapter, Lehrer documents the fact that people tend to be overly certain of their opinions, and tend to ignore or devalue evidence that goes against their opinions (so-called cognitive dissonance). Now, this is true of some people, but hardly of all people, and it is indeed a mental failing, provided the issue is important and it is costly to make a mistake. But, how costly is it to have political opinions that are inconsistent with the evidence? One vote can’t change an election, so what incentive to people have to change their ideas given the evidence? Of course, those who care about the truth for its own sake (Lehrer is one of these, and so am I), will pay close attention to the evidence. But those whose political positions give them pleasure for other reasons (religious, ideological, historical, etc.) have no interest in placing a lot of weight on the “evidence.” Calling such people “irrational” is just wrong. Moreover, even most people in the cognitive dissonance camp eventually change their mind when there is enough evidence. If that were not true, democracy could not work. Lehrer should abandon the dim-witted behavioral psychologists who incorrectly denigrate the capacity of ordinary people to make important decisions.
One final point is worth thinking about. Virtually all of the convincing evidence in this book (and in the larger world of research findings) is based on experiments dealing with individual behavior rather than neuroscientific reports of brain dynamics. I can think of one or two cases where what happens in the brain can really help us understand human behavior. For instance, we have mirror neurons that allow us to empathize with the mental states of others, so empathy and the “theory of mind” are not purely rational phenomena (i.e., a highly intelligent organism without the equivalent of mirror neurons would likely be a sociopath). Similarly, brain scans show that altruistic punishment (for instance, rejection of positive offers in the ultimatum game) and contributions to charity make people happy, so cannot be justified on reputational or deontological grounds. But, there is too much of simple description of what lights up under various choice conditions. Who cares? Of course, something is going to light up in the brain, but this is of no more interest to me than what transistors go off in my computer’s CPU when I order underwear from Calvin Klein.
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