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Cat's Reviews > The Upside of Irrationality: The Unexpected Benefits of Defying Logic at Work and at Home
The Upside of Irrationality: The Unexpected Benefits of Defying Logic at Work and at Home
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I did NOT like this book. This is one of a long line of behavioral-economic-statistics books a la Tipping Point and Blink, but is not well written and comes late in the game. At times (many times) Dan Ariely uses "research" consisting of a handful of young people, collected from the not-so-diverse environment of his local Starbucks. He asks them to complete 5 min tasks and then makes widespread generalizations about human behavior. It seems as though the author is trying to cash in on American's trend of eating up books on this subject. Fail.
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Reading Progress
Started Reading
December 1, 2010
–
Finished Reading
January 5, 2011
– Shelved
January 5, 2011
– Shelved as:
bookclub
Comments Showing 1-4 of 4 (4 new)
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Joy
(new)
Jan 06, 2011 07:37AM
Oh darnit. Getting a PhD seems to have turned you into an intellectual elitist. You have a problem with a biased n of 5? Hmph.
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Are you kidding me? You're criticizing a well-written book by an amazing researcher describing his findings, by comparing it to pseduo-science journalism?
Actually, this genre has been around for a while. Tipping Point and Blink are the more well know works in the genre. Ironically, Dan Arielly is world class scientist and Malcolm Gladwell (the author of Tipping Point and Blink) is merely a journalist trying his hand at science. If anything, you got your criticism backward.
I totally agree. It feels more like a "I want to sell lots of copies" self-help book than scientific research to me. The use of many examples that suggest that women like making cakes and men like cars are also quite disturbing. Currently halfway and dont think I will continue reading it.
