|
Sway: The Irresistible Pull of Irrational Behavior |  | Authors: Ori Brafman, Rom Brafman
Publisher: Broadway Business
List Price: $14.00
Buy New: $8.01
as of 11/20/2009 20:15 CST details
You Save: $5.99 (43%)
New (43) Used (15) from $6.75
Seller: smokymtnbooks
Rating:  97 reviews
Sales Rank: 1007
Media: Paperback
Edition: Reprint
Pages: 224
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.5
Dimensions (in): 7.9 x 5.2 x 0.7
ISBN: 0385530609
Dewey Decimal Number: 155.92
EAN: 9780385530606
ASIN: 0385530609
Publication Date: June 2, 2009
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
| |
| Features:
|
| Also Available In:
|
| Similar Items:
| |
| Editorial Reviews:
Product Description
A fascinating journey into the hidden psychological influences that derail our decision-making, Sway will change the way you think about the way you think.
Why is it so difficult to sell a plummeting stock or end a doomed relationship? Why do we listen to advice just because it came from someone “important”? Why are we more likely to fall in love 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 tendency to go to great 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 tendency 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, discover 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 think. 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.
|
| Customer Reviews:
Showing reviews 1-5 of 97
 How to resist the "seductive pull" of irrational behavior November 13, 2009
Robert Morris (Dallas, Texas)
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
The Brothers Brafman are like the Brothers Heath (Chip and Dan, co-authors of Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others and forthcoming Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard) in that they seem to have an insatiable curiosity about what may, at first, seem to be aberrational human behavior but is in fact commonplace. In their book Sway, the Brafmans seek answers to questions such as these: Why would skilled and experienced physicians made decisions that contradict their years of training? What psychological forces underlie our own irrational behaviors? How do these forces creep up on us? When and why are we most vulnerable to them? How do they shape our business and personal relationships? When and how do they put finances, even our lives, at risk? And why don't we realize when we're being swaying?
The Brafmans obviously have a sense of humor. How else to explain chapter titles such as "The Swamp of Commitment" in which they discuss how Florida's then football coach, Steve Spurrier, dominated the SEC conference because the other coaches in the conference were loss averse and committed to a "grind-it-out-and-hold-in-to-the-ball offensive strategy. He played to win; they played not to lose. He introduced the "Fun-n-Gun" offense that scored more points in less time and attracted better recruits. In anther chapter, "The Hobbit and the Missing Link," they focus on a precocious young Dutch student named Eugene Dubois (1858-1940) who, after earning his degree in medicine, marriage, starting a career as well as a family, decided to seek what was then believed to be the missing link between apes and the more humanlike Neanderthals. He found it in the East Indies but both he and his discovery was largely ignored. Why? Because his contemporaries were firmly committed to a certain view of evolution that Dubois' discovery challenged. Moreover, "there was another force at play. Here's where commitment merges with the sway of `value attribution': our tendency to imbue someone or something with certain qualities based on perceived value, rather than on objective data."(This is one of the eight deceptions that Phil Rosenzweig discusses in his book, The Halo Effect.) The Brafmans also cite a more contemporary example of how value attribution works and how it swayed the anthropological community. In Washington, D.C. on a January morning in 2007, Joshua Bell (one of the world's finest violinists) performed for 43 minutes in the L'Enfant Plaza subway station. "Here was one of best musicians in the world playing in the subway station for free, but no one seemed to care."
As Ori Brafman and Rom Brafman explain in the Preface, their objective in this book is to explore "several of the psychological forces that derail rational thinking. Wherever we looked - across different sectors, countries, and cultures - we saw different people being swayed in very similar ways. We're all susceptible to the sway of irrational behaviors. But by better understanding the deductive pull of these forces, we'll be less likely to fall victim to them in the future." They fully achieve this objective with a book I consider to be a brilliant achievement. Bravo!
Those who share my high regard for this book are urged to check out Ori Brafman's The Starfish and the Spider: The Unstoppable Power of Leaderless Organizations (co-authored with Rod Beckstrom) and the aforementioned books by the Brothers Heath as well as Dan Ariely's Predictably Irrational, Martin Lindstrom's Buyology, Gregory Berns's Iconoclast, Roger Martin's The Opposable Mind, Leonard Mlodinow's The Drunkard's Walk, Nassim Nicholas Taleb's The Black Swan, and Joseph Murphy's The Power of Your Subconscious Mind.
Fascinating Review of Why We Do Things We "Shouldn't" November 9, 2009
bronx book nerd (Bronx, NY USA)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
The Brafman Brothers have a good knack for storytelling and use this talent for explaining to us the various traps, like the diagnosis bias and the commitment bias, for example, that lead us to make irrational choices. The Brafmans use as their main story point the tragedy of the Tenerife airplane crash and investigate how the head of airline safety could make such a drastic mistake that led to the death of hundreds. In their engaging manner, the authors move from trap to trap, explaining how each trap catches us. For each trap, the results of fascinating tests are shared, as we see how our fellow humans are susceptible to these traps. Fortunately, the Brafmans end with prescrptions to innoculate the reader against these psychological missteps. A very interesting and quick read.
 Pretty good, but lacking enough substance November 5, 2009
Sasha
I bought this book because it had good reviews and it seemed to have some interesting ideas. People are irrational. This is not a controversial opinion, and this book discusses it by collecting several anecdotes and tying them in with several economic and psychological studies. It does raise some interesting points, and I enjoyed reading about most of the anecdotes.
But it is short. It does not even reach 200 pages. Furthermore, I was already familiar with many of the anecdotes - there is one about a Harvard Business School class where the professor auctions off a $20 bill for hundreds of dollars by saying that whoever got second place would have to pay his bid but receive nothing. As a result, people start bidding, but no one wants to be the "sucker," so the bid skyrockets. I had heard this anecdote, and even saw such an auction take place. Lots of the other anecdotes are repeats of existing tails of human irrationality, though some familiar ones are analyzed in slightly different ways, which can be interesting (such as the Tenerife airport disaster.)
Some of his conclusions are straightforward and make sense (once people are committed to a path, they tend to have trouble changing paths, even in the face of overwhelming evidence.) But many are made without strong evidence to back them up, and oftentimes it feels like the authors are resorting to filler when they should be presenting more conclusive evidence to back up their points.
In the end, this book's value is almost entirely as entertainment. It has entertaining anecdotes that will make you think about how humans behave. But it lacks enough substance and scientific analysis for me to give it 4 or 5 stars. It is also incredibly short, and can be read in an hour or two.
Bewilderments be Gone October 29, 2009
Scott Burns (Littleton, Colorado)
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
I Loved this Book. I liked the writing style, the examples, the insights shared. I felt the author represented what I would have previously referred to as "nuts" "holy cow" and "what were they / I thinking" in ways that allow me to reason through the irrational. Very insightful not just in generating an understanding of some of the entrepreneurs and others I've met in life, but for the guy I see in the mirror every day.
I highly recommend reading this book.
Particularly if you think that your colleagues, bosses or the world's gone mad.
 Not swayed by Sway October 13, 2009
Peter Moskos (New York, NY)
0 out of 3 found this review helpful
Some of it was interesting, but mostly it is one review after another of some minor psych experiment. I wanted fewer experiments and more discussion or links to real-world situations. Gladwell it ain't.
Showing reviews 1-5 of 97
|
|
|
|
Return to Math.com | |
