Irrationality

Sutherland Stuart

Sujets

• Sociologie, société et politique
• Social

Informations

• Publié par: Pinter & Martin Limited
• Date de parution: 01 janvier 0001
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781780660288
• Langue: English

Extrait

IRRATIONALITY
Stuart Sutherland , born in 1928, was Professor of Psychology at the University of Sussex where he founded the Laboratory of Experimental Psychology. A prolific columnist and contributor to the Observer, the New York Times and the Daily Telegraph, he is best known for his iconoclastic book Irrationality, which was first published in 1992, and Breakdown, his candid and movingly personal account of his manic depression. He died in 1998.
Ben Goldacre is a best-selling author, broadcaster, medical doctor and academic who specialises in unpicking dodgy scientific claims from drug companies, newspapers, government reports, PR people and quacks. His books Bad Science and Bad Pharma are published by Fourth Estate.
James Ball is data editor of The Guardian and a visiting lecturer at City University, London. He previously worked for WikiLeaks and the Bureau of Investigative Journalism. He is the co-author of WikiLeaks: News in the Networked Era and The Infographic History of the World . He lives and works in London.
STUART SUTHERLAND

IRRATIONALITY
THE ENEMY WITHIN

foreword BEN GOLDACRE afterword JAMES BALL
Irrationality: The Enemy Within

First published by Constable and Company 1992 This edition published by Pinter & Martin Ltd 2013

Copyright the estate of Stuart Sutherland 1992, 2013 Foreword copyright Ben Goldacre 2013 Afterword copyright James Ball 2013

Stuart Sutherland has asserted his moral right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988

All rights reserved

ISBN 978-1-78066-025-7

also available as ebook

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade and otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher s prior consent in any form or binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

Set in Minion

Printed and bound in the UK by Martins the Printers, Berwick-upon-Tweed

Pinter & Martin Ltd 6 Effra Parade London SW2 1PS

www.pinterandmartin.com
Contents
Foreword by Ben Goldacre
Preface by Stuart Sutherland
Acknowledgements
1 Introduction
2 The Wrong Impression
3 Obedience
4 Conformity
5 In-groups and Out-groups
6 Organisational Folly
7 Misplaced Consistency
8 Misuse of Rewards and Punishments
9 Drive and Emotion
10 Ignoring the Evidence
11 Distorting the Evidence
12 Making the Wrong Connections
13 Mistaken Connections in Medicine
14 Mistaking the Cause
15 Misinterpreting the Evidence
16 Inconsistent Decisions and Bad Bets
17 Overconfidence
18 Risks
19 False Inferences
20 The Failure of Intuition
21 Utility
22 The Paranormal
23 Causes, Cures and Costs

Afterword by James Ball
Further Acknowledgements and Bibliography
Notes
Index
Foreword
Before Pinter & Martin reissued this book, copies of Irrationality were changing hands for 100. My own was held together with two rubber bands, and passed through civil servants, doctors, ex-girlfriends, lobbyists, organic farmers, management consultants, and a banker. Friends of friends would ring my landline and ask to borrow it. This was before the internet, when knowledge was scarce, an era when you had to track down the thing in order to access the ideas.
Today, the facts in this book are all over Wikipedia, self-help manuals, and quirky internet demonstrations of our wacky irrational ways. But however much fun it is to hoover up facts chaotically online - and for me, to be clear, that s like crack - it s even more fun to have an expert walk you thoughtfully through their field.
Stuart Sutherland was 65 when he wrote this book, at the end of a shining career in psychology research. Because of that, every turn is filled with the nuances of someone who knows where the ideas have come from, and where they re going next. He steers clear of exaggeration, and isn t afraid to explain exactly how the evidence was gathered, and how it fits together.
Sutherland was notoriously direct - some would say rude - but for all that we should care as readers, I prefer to think of him as unfiltered. His account of depression in Breakdown was raw and visceral beyond what some could tolerate, and Irrationality follows a similarly uncompromising path. It delivers simple and direct blows to our own intellectual vanity, but it also takes on more experts in positions of power than some would dare.
It s tempting to imagine that knowledge is power, that we will all become invincible if we simply read this book, and understand the flaws in our thinking apparatus. But this is not self-help, and real life is a bit more complicated than that. Irrationality is a book about ideas, rather than glib answers, and Sutherland holds back from cheesy promises about improving your business effectiveness. Instead, with academic glee, he leaps down from the ivory tower, and pulls your assumptions about your own thinking apart.
If it wasn t so much fun, it would all be very unnerving.
Ben Goldacre London, June 2013
Preface
Pace Aristotle, it can be argued that irrational behaviour is the norm not the exception. In order to demonstrate this, I have provided many startling examples of irrationality in everyday life and in the activities of the professions. It turns out that the decisions of doctors, generals, engineers, judges, businessmen and others are no more rational than those made by you or me though their effects are often more calamitous.
However, the real proof of the prevalence of irrationality comes from the massive amount of research on the topic undertaken over the last thirty years by psychologists. Their discoveries - unlike those of cosmologists - are as yet scarcely known to the general public. Although I have not myself worked directly on the topic, I became fascinated by the ingenuity of their experiments and by the light they throw on the workings of the mind. This book integrates the many factors that have been shown to cause irrational behaviour, including social and emotional biases as well as the many quirks of thought produced by such failings as not taking account of negative cases or being too swayed by what first comes to mind. Many of the experimental findings are so surprising that the reader s credulity may well be strained: almost all of them have, however, been replicated many times. To stave off the sceptical reader, there is a rather daunting list of sources, which needs to be consulted only by those lacking faith in my veracity or desiring to pursue specific issues in more detail.
I have tried to make clear to the layman work that is often hard to follow in the technical journals; for the most part I have avoided mathematical and statistical concepts, but of necessity a few elementary ones are introduced and explained towards the end of the book.
This is not a Do-it-Yourself book on how to think, but I have ventured to place a few hints at the ends of chapters. Readers may learn to avoid some of the many snares that beset their thought processes - always provided they are already sufficiently rational to want to be more so, a desirable aim if there is any truth in Oscar Wilde s remark, There is no sin except stupidity. If Oscar Wilde is right, irrationality is too important a subject to be taken seriously, a dictum that I have occasionally obeyed. Although I do not consider myself any more rational than anyone else, I beg readers not to inform me of any errors they detect in this book: it was hard enough synthesising the voluminous literature on irrationality without being told that the end product is itself irrational.
In deciding what generic pronoun to use I faced a dilemma. The use of masculine pronouns might offend feminists, but since in almost all cases the pronoun refers to someone acting irrationally, I decided it was safer to use the generic masculine: the reader is welcome to infer that I consider women more rational than men. Finally, I salute all those whose work I have pillaged: they are acknowledged in the notes at the end of the book.
Stuart Sutherland Sussex University August 1992
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to Nicholas Bagnall, Colin Fisher and Phil Johnson-Laird for helpful comments on drafts of the manuscript. I am deeply indebted to Julia Purcell both for her comments and for her encouragement. I thank my daughters Gay and Julia Sutherland for help in preparing the index and notes. I am especially grateful to my secretary, Ann Doidge, for her speed, accuracy and patience in placing successive drafts on a word processor and for her ability to read my handwriting, which is more than I can do myself. I also thank Cambridge University Press and David Eddy for giving me permission to reproduce Tables 3 and 4 .
1 Introduction
Taken all in all, rationality has had a good press. Hamlet declared, What a piece of work is a man! How noble in reason! Thomas Huxley, a fervent exponent of rationality, went much further: If some great Power would agree to make me always think what is true and do what is right, on condition of being turned into a sort of clock, and wound up every morning before I got out of bed, I should instantly close with the offer. Whether or not rationality is as desirable a gift as Huxley believed, it is certain that people exhibit it only sporadically, if at all. Consider, for example, how you would answer the following questions.
Which is more likely - that a mother with blue eyes has a daughter with blue eyes or that a daughter with blue eyes has a mother with blue eyes? Are there more words beginning with the letter k than with k as a third letter? Is an interview a useful selection procedure? Smoking increases the risk of lung cancer by a factor of ten and of fatal heart disease by a fact