Trevor's Reviews > Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions

It is important that you move this one up your list of books that you have to read. This is a particularly great book. My dear friend Graham recommended I read this book. He has recommended four books to me – and the only one I couldn’t finish was “My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist: A novel” by Mark Leyler – but he did recommend, “The Tetherballs of Bougainville” also by Leyler and that is still one of the most remarkable books I’ve ever read. I haven't written a review of that book, but where the hell would I start?

When I’m reading books I often think – you know, I would like to re-write this. I would cut out a lot of the fluff and perhaps change the voice a bit, add some cellos, perhaps even a bassoon (there is nothing that can’t be improved with some cellos and a bassoon). But not this book. I really, really liked this book.

This is a companion to Freakonomics – except I liked this one even more. Which reminds me that I must look how many stars I gave that one so that I can give this one more… If I am going to be irrational I might as well work at being consistently irrational.

Which is the point of this book. Economic Rationalism – otherwise known as the nonsense that got us into this mess – holds that the world is full of rational economic units and you are just one of those units. We always know what is good for us, we are free to choose what we need and we invariably make the choices that reflect our best interests. The absurdity of this view is being played out as I type with the world financial markets in meltdown and with the new Prime Minister of Japan saying today – “Honestly, this for us is beyond our imagination. We have huge fears going ahead," Which I believe is Japanese for, “The fundamentals are all in place. We have nothing to worry about.”

Like Freakonomics this presents a series of experiments to show how we behave under various circumstances in ways that are both less than rational and yet perfectly predictable. I’m going to have to spoil bits of this book, but just to show you how wonderful it is and why you need to run to your local purvayour of tantalising texts to obtain your copy of this fine book.

I guess one could group a lot of the experiments in this book under the general title of Placebo Effect. This makes two books in a row in which the Placebo Effect has been given a starring role and I’m, quite frankly, in seventh heaven. One of the questions this book seeks to answer is whether social stereotypes have an impact on a person’s performance. THIS IS THE SPOILER – SO LOOK AWAY IF YOU MUST.

What do we know? Well, we definitely know that all Asians are brilliant at mathematics. This is as true as the fact that anyone with an English accent is a mass murderer – or at least, that is definitely true in that strange world that is American movies and IRA propaganda. The other thing you know about mathematics is that all women are hopelessly, pathetically, mathematically inept. What is it about that Y chromosome?

You might have noticed that the particular Venn Diagram I am describing here has a rather interesting intersection – that is, woman who have a preference for thinking of themselves as Asian. Let’s see if we can’t mess around with the minds of this particular sub-set of humanity.

We are going to give them a bit of a maths test in a minute – but before we do, let’s ‘prime’ them. Let’s ask half of them some questions related to them being Asian (not too obvious, let’s just ask questions like how many languages do you speak, what is your migrant experience – you know, vague enough so we aren’t directly saying “THINK ASIAN, THINK ASIAN” at them, but actually, when you think about it a little bit, that is exactly what we are doing). The other half we will ask questions that make them think about themselves being female – when was the last time you bought Cosmo or ‘Are those really your nails?’

Anyway, then you give them the maths test. And guess what? The Asians who have been primed to think of themselves as women did worse on the test than the women who were primed to think of themselves as Asians.

When I hear things like that a shiver runs down my spine. I know I have learnt something incredibly important and something I’m going to have to think about for days and days and weeks. And this book is over-flowing with exactly that kind of idea. The sort of thing that makes you go – shit, who’d have thought?

I mean, which other book have you read lately that asks a MIT student if he would be willing to have sex with a sheep while he is masturbating to images of naked women displayed on a Mac laptop covered in Glad Wrap? Actually, don’t answer that.

The stuff in this book about stealing and its relationship to money is so interesting I can only just stop myself not telling you about it. We used to have a President of the Liberal Party (don’t be confused by the name, the Liberals here are as far right as the Republicans in the US) called John Elliot who basically stole – never tested in court (but then, he was rich and politically well connected) $66 million and was released on a technicality. Yet another of our Corporate Magnates, Richard Pratt, recently was able to steal $300 million from the Australian people and only had to repay $36 million. This time his crime was tested in court, but he is still seen as some sort of corporate hero here, rather than the thief that he is. How is this possible? Well, this book will help you understand and perhaps even help you see what we can do about these abominations.

I loved this book. It is a romp and the guy telling the stories is just the nicest person to be around while he chats away to you. Okay, sometimes I got a little annoyed with the “You’ll never guess what happened” – style – but this was such a minor criticism I feel petty bringing it up.

A large part of what I do in life involves negotiating stuff – actually, that is also true of you too, it is just that the negotiations I’m involved in are more up front than the ones you probably do day by day. As much as I don’t like to admit this, this book taught me things about negotiating that I ought to have known before. Not since Getting to Yes have I read a book quite as worthwhile or one that made me re-think stuff I do in quite the same way. I hope to be able to say in six months time that I’m still considering the implications of some of the ideas in this book – if I’m not, then more is the pity for me.

You’ve been told. What the hell are you waiting for?

Oh, except you Tina – you are the only person in the world I wouldn’t recommend buy this book. When was your birthday again?