Jonah Lehrer's "How We Decide"

Good book.  Some cool insights about how we make decisions -- the simple decisions are better left to the rational parts of our brain, but as the amount of data gets too big for us to handle, it's better to let our emotions help decide because sometimes our gut instinct is more accurate than we think.  Also, how much self-control you have when you're four years old and told that if you can wait a few minutes to eat the marshmallow that's right in front of you, you'll get a second marshmallow to eat as well is a good predictor of whether you're going to be a delinquent adult or not.  Lehrer does a nice job summarizing a whole bunch of behavioral economics research... but the problem with the book is the same problem I've had with all these kinds of books -- Ariely, Harford, Haidt, etc.  I feel like there are more people writing about behavioral economics than there are actually people doing new research in the field.  All of these books write about exactly the same studies, and once you read a few of them, every time you pick up another one it's exactly the same stuff going on.  Twersky and Kahneman clearly did some groundbreaking work, and I hope their families get some money every time anyone writes about them.  It just seems silly that there are dozens of talented, smart writers summarizing the exact same stuff in their books.  It's redundant.  The problem is, this stuff is all really fascinating to me -- how we make decisions, how our brains work, why classical economics oversimplifies, how to override our natural biases and cognitive weaknesses.  I wish I was working on this stuff, somehow, instead of just reading all the books about it.

So I recommend Lehrer's book, just like I recommend Jonathan Haidt's book about happiness and Dan Ariely's book about rationality, and Leonard Mlodinow's book about randomness, and Barry Schwartz's book about choice, and Brian Wansink's book about how our brains don't know what we're eating, and Paco Underhill's book about why we buy things, and Philip Tetlock's book about political predictions, and on and on and on....

Comments

[Andrew Campbell]

Jeremy, You may want to recommend another book - Think Again - it uses some of the same base research but explores why capable leaders make bad decisions - very relevant in the current climate. One of the strengths of the book is that is suggests ways organisations can help leaders make better decisions.

Andrew

[Jen]

I've decided not to read any of them.

[Todd I. Stark]

I have the same feeling. I'm fascinated by decision science and its potential, but the field seems to be in almost as loose a state as early social psychology: lots of fascinating findings and no overall framework to pull them together and draw good general recomendations. Maybe the lesson is that human beings are so sensitive to small changes in context that most attempts at general rules are ill-advised. I think one of these recent decision books actually suggests something like that.