Book Report: Sway
Sway: The Irresistible Pull of Irrational Behavior, like Blink, The Paradox of Choice and others, takes a behavioral psychology look at factors that can influence our decisions. Sway focuses on influences that may cause one to make poor decisions and provides some strategies to avoid them.
If you're a beginning chess player, one of the fastest ways to improve your game is to learn tactics. Tactics are moves you make that allow you to have more control over the game--and they have great names that sounds like wrestlers--"The Pin", "The Skewer", "The Fork", "The SuperFly." (The Superfly is a little known tactic where you attack with your Queen from the corner of the board.) The tricky part of tactics isn't their formation but recognizing when a particular tactic is in play.
There are a number of explanations for being swayed--loss aversion, authoritative influence, labeling and cultural biases just to name a few. To avoid irrational decisions, "Sway" posits that one must recognize the possibility of influence and learn to gut check opinions to discover and curtail misplaced influences.
"Sway: The Irresistible Pull of Irrational Behavior" is an easy, Gladwellian read. (Gladwellian not used pejoratively, in this case.) "Sway" doesn't provide much new information but distills the subject nicely keeping the reader interested with fun anecdotes and explanation. Repetition is probably required to avoid these behavioral pitfalls and "Sway" provides good material for a refresher course.
posted by J.T. Campbell, Jr. @ 4:56 PM
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