"What's My Bias?" by Lee De-Wit

A book about the psychological reasons that underlie politics. This eminently readable book covers, among other things: 

• our innate morality of fairness (and the different interpretations we have of what fairness means); 
• fundamental aspects of personality such as openness to change, conscientiousness, extraversion, empathy and anxiety which govern our political choices;
• cognitive dissonance and confirmation bias;
• our tendency to vote for someone whose face suggests competence;
• the way the media frame stories;
• fake news (and fake science) and how to combat it;
• and why people don't vote.

I really enjoyed it. It was well written and easy to read with plenty of anecdote to balance the academic stuff. I knew quite a lot of it already (I wrote about cognitive dissonance as part of my own PhD thesis) but that was combined with the new stuff in a way that frequently made me think.

And as a collector of expressions I loved 'astroturfing' and 'sockpuppetry'.

Many years ago, I taught Lee A-level Physics. He has since become an academic Psychologist (working at the same department of Psychology in Cambridge where I spent the third year of my undergraduate degree). He makes certain criticisms of his schooling (not enough education about politics). Sorry Lee!

Selected quotes:

• "Political certainties are like the Berlin Wall. They appear to be concrete and immoveable, but they can crumble and fall almost overnight." (Introduction: The Political Animal)
• "ultimately many political arguments come down to the morality of fairness." (1 It’s Not Fair!)
• "if social animals are going to cooperate, they need to develop a keen sense of fairness – to prevent individuals taking advantage of others in the group." (1 It’s Not Fair!)
• "do you attribute someone’s wealth to the actions of that individual or their circumstances in life?" (1 It’s Not Fair!)
• "Absolutist thinkers are more likely to see something as inherently right or wrong, whereas contextualist thinkers are more likely to allow for circumstances that could have influenced someone’s behaviour." (1 It’s Not Fair!)
• "if you have a business that transports goods, you didn’t build the roads; if you rely on educated workers, you didn’t educate them yourself." (1 It’s Not Fair!)
• "You may well have worked hard, but that can’t explain success on its own, because there are plenty of people out there who work hard." (1 It’s Not Fair!)
• "people who identify as left and right wing differ substantially in the way they see two key moral principles: group loyalty and respect for authority" (1 It’s Not Fair!)
• "conservatives... display moral sensitivities about a wider range of topics." (1 It’s Not Fair!)
• "the greater activity in the amygdala shows that conservatives have a different cognitive process for thinking about risk, making them more sensitive to potential threats." (2 Personal Politics)
• "the political left rolls with the good and the political right confronts the bad" (2 Personal Politics)
• "there is a close correlation between the extent to which people view the world as a dangerous place, and the extent to which they think things like group loyalty and respect for authority are important moral principles." (2 Personal Politics)
• "liberals ... tend to respond more positively to change and uncertainty, which, in practice, might mean they are more likely to want to change what they perceive as social inequality, support minority rights and welfare, and be more tolerant of complexity." (2 Personal Politics)
• "Conservatives ... might be more diligent and careful (e.g. in appearance, or in their work), with greater respect for convention and tradition, perhaps being more likely to defend the status quo and support religious and traditional values." (2 Personal Politics)
• "when our feelings and the facts don’t match up, we’ll find some way to make them match." (3 Why You Always Think You’re Right)
• "Experts – pundits, commentators, talking heads who get quoted in newspaper articles as experts, and so on – ...  are wrong more often than they’re right (and that applied to TV experts in particular). And ... they weren’t right any more often than an informed layperson would have been." (3 Why You Always Think You’re Right)
• "viewing someone’s face for less than a second is enough for people to make a rating of their ‘competence’ ... the favoured candidate tends to win elections." (4 What’s In A Face?)
• "we have a tendency to assume that people who are more attractive are also more intelligent." (4 What’s In A Face?)
• "When we’re repeatedly exposed to something, its familiarity means we are more likely to be welcoming of it." (5 Making The Headlines)
• "‘Astroturfing’, the practice of hiding the sponsors of a political, advertising, religious or any other kind of message to make it appear as though it originates from ordinary folk (creating ‘fake grassroots’), and ‘sockpuppetry’, the deliberate creation of false online identities to promote opinions – including fake news – have been rampant for years." (6 Faking It)
• "if you want something to be effective in changing people’s behaviour, make it social." (7 Are You Being Nudged?)
• "just realising you have control over something can be inherently rewarding in its own right." (8 A Silent Majority)
• "voters in marginal constituencies are far more likely to be targeted by political parties, increasing the feeling that their vote counts, as opposed to voters in safe seats who frequently complain of being ignored and overlooked." (8 A Silent Majority)

This is an important book in the light of the new use of social media by political parties and the increasing polarisation of the electorate. It is also a good read, short and not at all heavy-going. It should be on your bookshelf!

August 2021

This review was written by the author of Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"Flow" by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

This influential book analyses what makes people happy. To do this he first divides pleasure (by which Csikszentmihalyi means the satisfaction of biological urges such as hunger, lust, fatigue etc) from enjoyment. Pleasure restores one to equilibrium but enjoyment, for Csikszentmihalyi, develops one. And the 'optimal experience' which gives enjoyment is 'flow'. Flow gives:

• " a sense of exhilaration, a deep sense of enjoyment" (p 3)
• "the best moments in our lives ... when a person's body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile." (p 3)

Most of us have solved "the basic problems of survival" and have moved up Maslow's hierarchy to try to make meaning of our lives and stifle our "ontological anxiety, or existential dread." (p 12) Flow gives us a purpose.

This is what flow is like:

• "You are totally involved" (p 53)
• "You aren't thinking of yourself as separate from the immediate activity." (p 53)
• "I sort of lose touch with the rest of the world, I'm totally absorbed in what I'm doing." (p 53)
• "one forgets oneself, one forgets everything" (p 63)

In flow "concentration is so intense that there is no attention left over to think about anything irrelevant, or to worry about problems. Self-consciousness disappears, and the sense of time becomes distorted." (p 71)

A flow activity needs to involve challenge and skill and these need to be matched. If we start off with low skills and a low challenge (in flow) and we work hard we soon arrive at a situation when we have higher skills. We will become bored unless we now raise the challenge. If we raise the challenge too much we will become anxious and will have to work hard to develop our skills to return ourselves to flow. So, by trying to maintain  the  flow state, we develop our skills and challenge ourselves more and more; in short we improve.

Csikszentmihalyi believes that we can all do this. He gives examples of workers in routine, boring jobs who, by turning what they have to do into a challenge and constantly seeking to improve, turn boredom into fun. He quotes paraplegics who see their accident as the thing that gave meaning to their lives ("accepting limitations is liberating" (p 179)) and helped them turn from bored ordinary people to become leaders. He examples blind people and vagrants. Some of these stories are inspirational.

But you have to be active. For example, "Everything the body can do is potentially enjoyable." (p 95) and this means sports and sex. "The body is like a probe full of sensitive devices that tries to obtain what information it can from the awesome reaches of space. It is through the body that we are related to one another and to the rest of the world. ... what we tend to forget is how enjoyable it can be." (pp 115 - 116) But "instead of doing it personally, most people are content to hear about it or watch a few experts perform it." [that seems to equate watching the Olympics on TV with watching porn!] (p 102) "Vicarious participation is able to mask ... the underlying emptiness of wasted time. But ... passive entertainment leads nowhere. Collectively we are wasting each year the equivalent of millions of years of human consciousness." (pp 162 - 163)

You can also just look and listen but again you have to be active: "occasionally people stop to 'feast their eyes' ... but they do not cultivate systematically the potential of their vision." (p 107) "Like a photographer looks at a sky and says, 'This is a Kodachrome sky. Way to go, God. You're almost as good as Kodak.'" (p 108).

Selected quotes:

• "it is very difficult for parents to compensate for the poverty of opportunities in the culture at large." (p 183)
• "What can a strong, vital, intelligent fifteen-year-old do in your typical suburb?" (p 183)
• "How can we expect people who are ill, impoverished, or stricken by adversity to control their consciousness?" (p 192)
• "'When I became paraplegic, it was like being born again ... I had to become part of the environment, and use it without trying to control it.'" (p 194)
• "'The lion, when he runs after a pack of gazelles, can only catch them one at a time." (p 197)

This is an easy to read and life-affirming book. 

August 2016; 240 pages

I came across a description of flow (in the mind of a murderer) in a 1930 novel by C S Forester called Plain Murder.

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"To sell is human" by Daniel Pink

I described Pink's Drive as "a fantastic and deeply thought provoking book". 

This suffers by comparison. Drive proposed a revolutionary third type of human motivation, neither derived from biological necessities (Maslow's hierarchy of needs) nor from externally imposed rewards and punishments but from the intrinsic pleasure of contributing such as is experienced by those who write wikipedia. 

The present book seeks first to convince the reader that we are all in the sales business: teachers 'sell' the idea of learning to pupils; doctors 'sell' to patients the treatments on which patients must sometimes gamble their lives. In other words, any employment which involves perusading anyone else to do something is, in Pink's view, selling.

Pink also suggests that the old fashioned stereotype of a seedy salesman seeking to rook his 'prospect' is precisely that, old-fashioned. That sort of salesman can only operate in a market in which there is 'information asymmetry'; for example, when the man selling the used car knows whether it is a clapped out old lemon or a juicy peach but the customer doesn't know this. Pink suggests that in the internet age information is rarely asymmetric and therefore the old-fashioned sales can no longer exist. Rather, the modern salesman has to be an advisor, helping the client navigate a landscape in which information can be deafening and sometimes conflicting and confusing.

Then Pink offers training for the new-style salesman. They have to be:

• attuned to the customers needs
• buoyant to cope easily with repeated rejection but not to ignore sings of how they can improve
• clear about what problems they can solve for their clients and how to solve them

Then Pink offers a variety of exercises to help trainee new-style salesmen improve things such as their Pitch. 

And what started out as a book with interesting ideas becomes just another sales training manual.

Don't get me wrong: some of the ideas are interesting and there are one or two neat tricks that I would like to adopt. But this book has nothing like the mind-altering impact of Drive.

April 2014; 233 pages

"Herd" by Mark Earls

his is a UK take on a US-style marketing management through popular psychology book. Mark Earls works in marketing, worships Rugby and sings in a ska group. He writes well (which kept me going because I soon discovered that I wasn't really interested in marketing) but I suspect the shallowness of his research (despite lots of references he is prone to relying too much on a few academic authors and bulking this out with websites and newspapers). He is well described in the blurb as Malcolm Gladwell on speed.

His essential thesis is that we are 'super-social' animals and that therefore classical economics, marketing and management with their attempts to understand the group as the aggregate of the individuals are wrong. Rather, you need to understand the interactions in the complex organism-ations.

Most market people seek to develop one way channels of communication in an attempt to persuade people to buy their products. They fail to realise that the best marketing is done by peer-to-peer networks of word of mouth. The only way to market in the future is through developing trust by having sincere beliefs and being truly interested in other people.

On the way I learned that the Broken Windows approach to fighting crime in NY was to always mend broken windows and clean up graffiti because by taking care of the details we can persuade people that they want to live better lives and so they will start to behave in line with our aspirations. Or maybe just copy us (super-social apes imitate one another a lot) by mending their own windows and cleaning up their own graffiti. Perhaps this would also work when trying to persuade pupils to do homework.

Interesting but not overwhelmingly so. April 2012; 370 pages