Checking out my daily email of NY Times headlines, I was intrigued by this story, "Overcoming the 'Sway' in Professional Life." Looking into, I discovered it contained an interview with two fellows who recently published "a provocative new book about the psychological forces that lead us to disregard facts or logic and behave in surprisingly irrational ways."
What exactly is "new" about the fact that human decisions are directed by unconscious biases? Remember this guy Sigmund Freud? I think he published a book called The Psychopathology of Everyday Life in 1901(!). Guess what? It said that people's "normal" behavior betrayed unconscious, seemingly irrational influences. Guess what else? His thesis was "provocative"! For all the "discrediting" of Freud, people seem to make a lot of bank off rehashing his ideas. I'm just saying.
While I can understand people forgetting about, or "repressing," Freud, what about Malcolm Gladwell, whose Blink (2005) addressed the same topic, and whose writing on overcoming biases in the interviewing process through "structured interviewing" predates this book by 8 years?
Even more recently, Dan Ariely brought out Predictably Irrational (2008), which, lo and behold, describes the many ways that humans are subject to predictably fallible cognitive behavior and recommends ways to address this socially in order to, in a sense, save people from themselves.
How quickly we forget. Perhaps this points to a collective cognitive deficit when it comes to awareness of our cognitive deficits? I guess we'll have to wait for a "provocative new" book to find out what's really going on with us and our ever-so-faulty brains.
Image Courtesy of aturkus.
Hi Matt,
The pysch thinking may be old, but the book itself is undeniably "new". I'm not sure the NYT quote claims anything more than that.
Am I missing something?
James
You may be missing something, but I may not have articulated myself with absolute clarity.
The book may be "new" in the trivial sense of "just came out," but the ideas aren't new, even for 2008 - see Dan Ariely's bestseller.
I think I was just trying to express surprise at the idea that people are still surprised to "discover" that human beings are "swayed" by unconscious influences. I may also have been expressing my own dismay at not having jumped on this bandwagon sooner.
Finally, I was semi-disappointed to be reminded that the goal of a publicist is to get a newspaper like the NY Times to write that their book is "new and provocative" and that the NY Times would do just that when the book, as described, seems neither to me.
Matt