| Irrationality | 
 enlarge | Author: Stuart Sutherland
Publisher: Pinter & Martin Ltd.
Category: Book
List Price: £8.99
Buy New: £3.94
You Save: £5.05 (56%)
New (19) Used (9) from £3.57
Avg. Customer Rating:  13 reviews
Sales Rank: 322
Media: Paperback
Edition: 2Rev Ed
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 256
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.4
Dimensions (in): 8.4 x 5.4 x 0.9
ISBN: 1905177070
Dewey Decimal Number: 150
EAN: 9781905177073
ASIN: 1905177070
Publication Date: January 10, 2007
Availability: Usually dispatched within 1-2 business days
Condition: Brand New. Shipped from UK Mainland. Delivery is usually 2 - 3 working days from order by Royal Mail, International Delivery is by Airmail.
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| Customer Reviews:
 Essential reading - Changes your way of thinking March 24, 2008
21 out of 22 found this review helpful
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.
Still the best popular book on this topic January 5, 2008
17 out of 18 found this review helpful
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.
Read it twice November 15, 2007
6 out of 8 found this review helpful
I love this book. Rational behaviour can, well, seem a little cold. People love grey areas, they don't like to see the world in black and white. I used to be (and sometimes still am), a bit woolly in my thoughts.
But after reading this book, I can see now how people can easily manipulate you when you are behaving irrationally. This book will give you the knowledge to question dodgy statistics, recognise value, understand regression to the mean, and the fallacies that delude gamblers.
Some people have a problem with the authors view of value. If you read the examples, and judge them ONLY on the information that the author has given you - you'll get it. Some people give irrational counter arguments based on their own assumptions. For example they ask: "What happens if the person has no money to spare?". Who told you he had no money to spare - not the author!
Read it, you won't be disappointed.
Thank goodness this book is back in print April 1, 2007
20 out of 32 found this review helpful
My friends are a little tired of my quoting Sutherland ever minute of the day. Now I can buy them their own copies for their birthdays.
If you've ever worked in research or for a boss who makes decisions based on what one person has told her or him, then you need to have this book on you at all times. Every marketing and writing student I've ever talked to, every seminar I give, this book gets a plug (and I've never even met the man). It's a real, "Oh my god!" page turner. Get your own copy and look after it carefully. You'll need it as reference.
(Mind you, despite having two maths A Levels I still cannot understand the chapter about playing cards.)
What's it about then? Well, it shows that when we make decisions, very few of us use the evidence to help us to decide. We often use "gut feel". Sometimes that is right. If you are making up your mind about whether or not to marry someone, or go into business with a partner, then our feelings are crucial. We need to feel right about our decisions. When we're deciding if we launch a chocolate bar in red or green packaging - and our survey just showed us that 85% of people prefer the red - it's a bit daft to choose the green just because we feel that we know best. But people do daft things and Sutherland writes about some of the most important ones. We are influenced by others, what people think and often by our own conviction that we are a good deal wiser than we actually are. We ignore advice that doesn't agree with our opinions and we applaud it when it does. If it's about whether a chocolate bar succeeds or fails that's not so bad. When irrational decisions take us into war zones, we should be worried. Read it and do your research.
Essential reading March 19, 2007
43 out of 45 found this review helpful
`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.
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