I closed my time at ALA with Dan Ariely’s very interesting and entertaining presentation for the ACRL President’s Program. I’m looking forward to reading beyond his Predictably irrational: The hidden forces that shape our decisions.
July 1, 2008...6:07 pm
Dan Ariely
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July 7, 2008 at 3:20 pm
Merinda,
a recently published book “The Drunkard’s Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives,” by Leonard Mlodinow, Pantheon Books, has relevance for this topic. After presenting some examples the reviewer states “in all these cases, people err by assuming a situation is more random and unconstrained than it really is. More often we make the opposite mistake: overestimating the amount of control we have over life.” The latter I think could be termed irrationality fueled by randomness.
Doug
July 7, 2008 at 3:30 pm
Thanks very much for this pointer to The Drunkard’s Walk, Doug!
July 8, 2008 at 11:14 am
Merinda, not to clog your blog with book recommendations, but here’s something of potential interest: “What Makes Us Human?” Edited by Charles Pasternak (Oneworld, 2007). The contributors investigate curiosity, intentional thought, the deep social mind, and mental time travel among other topics. I haven’t seen the book so don’t know if it really gets into irrational thinking, but that would seem a natural.
Yikes! Am I an old timey reference librarian or what?
Doug
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