Customer Reviews: Read 4 more reviews...
 Really Thought Provoking June 28, 2008
This is my first and I hope many more reviews to come, as I find them very useful in choosing whether to buy a book or not.
Anyway, I have had this book for 3 months now and found it completely enthralling. The book is about why we all at times make irrational choices such as when we are in groups, committees and depending on our emotional state. It all seems to "click" and when you see real life examples at work you feel as if you know why! For me it does make me aware of how I am making my decision.
I recommend this for anyone interested in how the human mind comes to decisions, why politicians make awful policies and cannot go back and why military generals should not believe in their own abilities.
 Essential reading - Changes your way of thinking March 24, 2008
9 out of 10 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
5 out of 6 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
5 out of 7 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
19 out of 31 found this review helpful
My copy is almost falling apart so I can get a nice shiny new one! Hooray! 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. (Mind you, despite having two maths A Levels I still cannot understand the chapter about playing cards.)
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 to wave under people's noses until they promise to read it. Every marketing and writing student I've ever talked, 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.
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