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Loading... The hidden brain : how our unconscious minds elect presidents, control markets, wage wars, and save our lives (original 2010; edition 2010)by Shankar VedantamSimilar to the stories done for NPR. I enjoyed the stories and research, but I wasn't as happy on the general focus with the unconscious as something working against our own morally conscious decision making. A broader focus on the many facets of how our minds make decisions for and against our true wishes would have been better. There are other works that have done so. Being able to recognize our own decision making process, and when it can be trusted or questioned would be more advantageous. Well, I learned a lot from this book. It was fascinating when I heard the author talk about his book on NPR and I realized that I had to have it. That hasn't happened in awhile. The whole idea that our unconscious minds may play a larger part of our actions than we'd care to admit is intriguing. Vedantam supports these ideas with true-life stories that are sad, surprising and shocking at times. His biases show at times and I think the editing could have been better but I really enjoyed the read. I hope he takes it further and we can not only be aware of our own unconscious thoughts and how we act on them but how to access them and have some honest discussions. This would be a great book to discuss in so many different settings. I know a fair amount about social psychology, but the way the author and the scientists he cites apply their knowledge to major societal problems is mind blowing. I absolutely loved this book, and recommend it to anyone interested in racism, terrorism, and other problems of modern life. It's brilliant. Just did not like the book. Covered a lot of ground--most of the things a person would learn in a social psychology class--but the presentation of different biases were lost to verbose anecdotes. The stories to explain the biases would get so long and cumbersome that I would forget his original point--and all of his points I already knew or heard before elsewhere. Every story was literally 50 words too long. I was expecting a more neuroscience driven explanation for unconscious behavior/biases, but this was briefly mentioned if at all. To his credit, racial biases and the "terrorist mind" were excellently executed. Would recommend this only if you have never been exposed to any social psychology material (and like long anecdotes to prove points). Reading this in conjunction with [b:Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion|28815|Influence The Psychology of Persuasion (Collins Business Essentials)|Robert B. Cialdini|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1167956934s/28815.jpg|29303] will round out the social psychological picture. The author, Shankar Vedantam, is the host of the popular NPR program by the same name. He started looking into what he termed the hidden brain when he became curious about many decisions that people made that just didn't make rational sense. He, like everyone else, assumed that we make our best decisions by relying upon our rational mind. He sensed that this was not accurate description of the procedure by which we make all of our decisions and he sought to investigate the process by which we make our decisions. He dug into the psychological literature to get at all the existing research on biases and reasons why we usually don’t call upon our conscious or rational brain. The resulting book is a treasure trove of studies and anecdotes that goes to prove his points. Interestingly, this book came out in 2010, before Daniel Kahneman published his tome: Thinking: Fast and Slow and well before David Epstein published Range in 2019. They all investigated the same phenomenon albeit with different means. Vedantam is a journalist, as is Epstein, and Kahneman is a Nobel Prize winning economist. Both Vedantam and Epstein called upon the research of others to draw their conclusions whereas Kahneman had been conducting his own research with Amos Tversky for decades. Vedantam talks about the conscious brain versus the hidden brain when digs in deeper into the research on the subconscious biases and irrational conclusions that we draw when making quick decisions. Kahneman and Epstein uses Kahneman and Tversky terms of System 1 and System 2 thinking. Indeed, conscious brain can is the System 2 and the Hidden brain is the System 1. Vedantam establishes his argument in the first two chapters of the book and then he delves into the studies that he had gathered in the succeeding chapters. He pairs the findings with great stories which integrates nicely with his arguments and each chapter is an enjoyable read which serves a greater purpose: to show the perniciousness of the biases which dominates our hidden brain. He ultimately draws some interesting conclusions in Chapter 10, where he tries to bring everything together. I probably should have known about this book earlier, as I would have read it before I was exposed to the works of the others. Remarkably, The Hidden Brain has withstood the test of rapidly changing knowledge and research into the unconscious mind and still tells a great set of stories which shows us that our decision making prowess is indeed affected by our hidden biases, more importantly, other people, people in positions of authority or in a position to affect lives are also affected by the hidden brain. What is worse, they are not aware about how their hidden brain affects their decisions, or they just don’t care. I had a small dose of déjà vu when reading this because I was very familiar with the contents of the chapter on transgender experiences of gender bias...but it must have been an excerpt. Vedantam is a science journalist who in writing this book considered it "reporting" (he states so explicitly in chapter 8) and this book is more anecdotal than academic, though he backs up the claims with references. Still. it is an easier read than Kahneman's Thinking Fast and Slow, which I've not finished after starting it twice. The revelations of racial bias being hardwired were enlightening, despite my reading quite a bit in the past two years on brain structure, and the group reinforcement of undesired behaviors corroborated some other things I've read. One quote I added to the toolbox: Since your hidden brain values speed over accuracy, it regularly applies heuristics to situations where they do not work. A good read when read as a primer. After-the-colon bit is slightly misleading, since there’s a chapter on electing presidents and less of the other stuff, but it’s still a good overview to the research on unconscious biases of various types, including racial, gender, and number (the suffering of one person or even one dog gets us to act, but make it two or more and we become less likely to respond). Vedantam uses behavior in the World Trade Center to show how people flock: if you see others leaving the building, you’re very likely to do so as well, and if others stay in place you probably will also. This means that survival, rather than being aided in this circumstance by the unconscious mind, actually depends on two things evolution hasn’t really helped with: (1) particular quirks of fate or circumstance that get a flock leader moving or not moving, and (2) whether flight is a good idea or not at that particular time—hint, in an evacuation, you might want to leave by an exit different than the one you entered at, because the main entrances are going to be more crowded. The chapter on presidential politics has the most on potential debiasing solutions, but I would have liked to read more. |
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Google Books — Loading... GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)154.2Philosophy and Psychology Psychology Subconsciousness The Subconscious Per SeLC ClassificationRatingAverage:
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