Product Description

This is an iconoclastic volume on the causes and effects of irrational behaviour. Why do doctors, army generals, high-ranking government officials, and other people in positions of power make bad decisions that cause harm to others? On the other hand, why do people insist on sitting through an awful play or film just because the tickets were expensive? Irrational beliefs and behaviour are virtually universal. It is not only gamblers and parapsychologists that fall into simple statistical traps to do with sample sizes or simple assumptions, but experts of all types, selection committees, and everyday people. "Irrationality" is an iconoclastic volume that draws on a mass of intriguing research to examine why we are irrational, the different types of irrationality, the damage it does us, and the possible cures. It also argues that we could significantly reduce irrationality and its effects - but only if we first recognize just how irrational we really are.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #420 in Books
• Published on: 2007-01-10
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 256 pages

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

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

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

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

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

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

Customer Reviews

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

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

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

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

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

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

Essential reading - Changes your way of thinking
On reading this book you are a presented with everyday problems and the simply irrational way we make decisions- from leaving the cinema to international travel. This non-technical tale provokes thinking in a way that does not confuse the reader, but keeps them enthralled throughout- always wanting to read the next section.

To give you an idea- here is one of the simple irrationalities presented to us- You've paid to go and see a film, but don't like it- do you leave early? Whilst most people would say no, this book tempts us to say yes and shows us that this the logical way to do things. Essentially do we waste our time and money (and stay in the cinema) or just our money? Surely we should cut our losses and leave, but irrationality shows that in fact we don't we stick around in a way that shows our poor decision making.

Overall, irrationality presents solid arguments in a way thats easy to understand. A fantastic book.