Sway: The Irresistible Pull of Irrational Behavior
Where to buy Sway: The Irresistible Pull of Irrational Behavior books online?
- ISBN13: 9780385530606
- Condition: NEW
- Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
Product Description
A fascinating journey into the hidden psychological influences that ruin our choice-building, Sway will change the way you reflect about the way you reflect.
Why is it so hard to sell a plummeting stock or end a doomed relationship? Why do we listen to advice just because it came from a name “vital”? Why are we more likely to fall in like when there’s danger involved? In Sway, renowned organizational thinker Ori Brafman and his brother, psychologist Rom Brafman, answer all these questions and more.
Drawing on cutting-edge research from the fields of social psychology, behavioral economics, and organizational behavior, Sway reveals dynamic forces that influence every aspect of our personal and business lives, including loss aversion (our trend to go to fantastic lengths to avoid perceived losses), the diagnosis bias (our inability to reevaluate our initial diagnosis of a person or situation), and the “chameleon effect” (our trend to take on characteristics that have been arbitrarily assigned to us).
Sway introduces us to the Harvard Business School professor who got his students to pay $204 for a $20 bill, the head of airline safety whose disregard for his years of training led to the transformation of an entire industry, and the football coach who turned conventional strategy on its head to lead his team to victory. We also learn the curse of the NBA draft, learn why interviews are a terrible way to gauge future job performance, and go inside a session with the Supreme Court to see how the world’s most powerful justices avoid the dangers of group dynamics.
Every once in a while, a book comes along that not only challenges our views of the world but changes the way we reflect. In Sway, Ori and Rom Brafman not only uncover rational explanations for a wide variety of irrational behaviors but also point readers toward ways to avoid succumbing to their pull.
Buy Cheap Sway: The Irresistible Pull of Irrational Behavior Online
Related posts:
It took a month to get this book to me. The only positive about it is that they did finally send it after 2 e-mail inquiries.
Reader’s Rating: 2 / 5
This is a very fine book, a quick read, and highly significant to Web 2.0 and all the emergent opportunities to turn our world right side up, restoring power back to all the people. My reading has stirred heavily toward cognitive science and “open everything,” and my avowed goal, apart from making public intelligence in the public interest, is to make “right cost” visible to the public on every product and service, penetrating through the kinds of sway barriers this book describes.
Each chapter is brilliant, with a nice teaser diagram. The book is double-spaced with adequate notes and pointer.
My flyleaf highlights:
+ Diagnosis bias is huge. [The book does not focus enough on how our "experts know more and more about less and less," but the core point is valid: once their tiny small brain storage reaches a conclusion, they bend everything to fit it. this could also be called paradigm or disciplinary bias.]
+ Hidden currents in the individual and group choice support process include loss aversion, value attribution or negatiion, and a commitment to the incorrect s trategy. Holy Cow. Talk about CIA, Microsoft, Google, CISCO, they are all there.
+ NBA draft is mostly guess and speculation [so is most intelligence "analysis" and both groups get away with it because they are not held accountable for getting it incorrect.]
+ Marks *matter* and deeply influence outcomes.
+ Visualization *sells* just about anything.
+ Cues and devious messages are nuanced and complex and omnipresent. I was really engaged by this section.
+ Need to be heard is vital and the more one does that, the more value is made (this is social networking 101, as Web 2.0 starts to go over the cliff so Web 3.0 can rise like a Pheonix.] The authors stress that persons offering to listen must *hear* each individual voice.
+ Blockers matter, i.e. there have to be people in the loop who have the courage, the commitment, the *role* of adage no to abuses of power including rankism. [I reflect of all our flag officers and Congress Members who refused to challenge the criminal lies of the White House and the abuses of power by the Vice President, all documented now in the open literature. Had Colin Powell resigned and called for a stop, he would be President in 2009, as a replacement for of persons now running. all flawed in their own way [and each a testiment to how easily we are swayed by a lack of substance on the part of all three–visit Planet Intelligence Network to see the 52 questions none of the candidates can answer, and the 52 “starter” answers for a Citizens Summit to chat about (February 2009 in Chicago, over Lincoln’s birthday).
Fantastic small book. Here are some others I have establish to be valuable:
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media
The Landscape of History: How Historians Map the Past
Voltaire’s Bastards: The Dictatorship of Reason in the West
Group Genius: The Creative Power of Collaboration
The Age of Missing Information
Forbidden Knowledge: From Prometheus to Pornography
Fog Facts: Searching for Truth in the Land of Spin
Weapons of Mass Deception: The Uses of Propaganda in Bush’s War on Iraq
Not more than is the first in a series of non-profit books (also free online), significant to making public intelligence in the public interest).
Collective Intelligence: Making a Prosperous World at Peace
Reader’s Rating: 5 / 5
I believed that this book would have come up with something new. But most of their examples was rather ancient and you have probably read about them somewhere else.
Reader’s Rating: 3 / 5
Fantastic start and very entertaining early on, but the authors are confusing irrational with non-monetary. According to the authors, it’s “irrational” to make a honest choice if it results in a monetary loss. That’s not even logical. Assuming that a person cares more about things additional than just money, it can be entirely rational to make a choice that doesn’t maximize financial gain. I’d say they have some fun thoughts, but can’t really back them up with facts and logic. Ariely’s “Predictably Irrational” is a much better read (and much more logical) on this topic.
Reader’s Rating: 2 / 5
SWAY helps to further the discussion of seemingly irrational human behavior through a series of appealing, enjoyable and quickly-read anecdotes about different physiological and psychological tricks the human mind plays in helping each of us to rationalize the decisions we make. From commitment bias to differences in mental cognition being affected by whether we are doing something for altruistic or financial reasons, the tales provide excellent reading. Sorry to say, the book is so driven by anecdotes and small tales that the authors fail to bring it together into a cohesive tale that allows the reader to digest the points and gather greater insight. There are additional books of similiar content that go deeper and with greater insight while still offering enjoyable anecdotes such as Nudge or Freakonomics.
Reader’s Rating: 3 / 5