Irrationality Buchzusammenfassung - das Wichtigste aus Irrationality

Einleitung anhören

00:00

Zusammenfassung von Irrationality

Name: Irrationality
Rating: 4.3 (70 reviews)
Author: Stuart Sutherland

Stuart Sutherland

The Enemy Within

4.3 (70 Bewertungen)

23 Min.

Kurz zusammengefasst

Irrationality by Stuart Sutherland explores how human behavior defies rationality despite our belief that we are objective. It reveals how cognitive biases, emotions, and social pressures influence our decisions, leading to flawed thinking and irrational behavior.

Themen

Effektivität

Inhaltsübersicht

Irrationality
in 10 Kernaussagen verstehen

Audio & Text in der Blinkist App

Kernaussage 1 von 10

What’s in it for me? Find out about your own irrationality.

Human beings are rational beings. Since the Enlightenment in eighteenth-century Europe, this simple fact has been a central assumption of scholars and thinkers and continues to be something we are taught from an early age.

But are we really as rational as we think?

Well, we’re actually far less rational in our daily behavior than we might suspect. Whether it’s when we judge other people by their looks, when we feel we should follow our intuition or when we refuse to change our minds even though it flies in the face of reason, irrationality is part of our daily routine, and it often goes completely unnoticed.

These blinks will show you what irrationality entails, how we are irrational in many situations and what we can do to become more rational.

You’ll also learn

why we think good-looking people are intelligent;
how peer pressure can derail rational thinking; and
why eighteenth-century people thought that turmeric cured jaundice.

Irrationality is more common than people think, and it’s the result of ignoring knowledge.

We tend to think that human beings are deeply rational beings, and the basis for this idea can be traced back thousands of years. From Aristotle’s claim that man is a “rational animal,” to Descartes’ famous statement, “I think, therefore I am,” to Kant’s “have the courage to use your own reason,” a common belief throughout history has been that humans are fundamentally rational.

But this might not be true after all.

When we meet a new person, we often judge them in an instant, based solely on their looks. This is both exceedingly common and totally irrational, as people often turn out to behave very differently than they appear.

So, clearly we’re prone to irrationality – but what does that word actually mean?

In a nutshell, irrationality means deliberately forming conclusions that aren’t based on knowledge. So, it might be rational for a young boy to climb a tree to try to touch the moon. But the same action would be absolutely irrational if performed by an adult astronomer who knows how far away the moon is.

Basically, the breadth of our knowledge plays a role in determining the rationality of our actions. But, while rational thinking is based on knowledge, rational conclusions can also be false. For example, people long believed that all swans were white; this was a completely rational assumption until the Australian continent was discovered, where black swans are common.

This is an example of how insufficient or false knowledge can produce false conclusions, despite rational thinking. But false rationality is not to be confused with irrationality. Irrational thinking differs in the sense that it’s deliberate.

Inadvertently forgetting to carry the one when doing math will produce an error – but it wouldn’t be the result of irrationality. Irrationality would be to ignore knowledge despite its ample presence, such as by thinking someone is unsuited for a job despite her résumé being a perfect fit for the requirements.

So, making an irrational decision requires deliberate action. But why do humans do this?

Irrationality affects individuals and organizations alike.

People make irrational decisions for a variety of reasons, and this tendency plagues both individuals and major organizations. In the case of individuals, people tend to distort their sense of reality in order to maintain irrational behavior and thoughts.

After making a decision, we often glorify our choice because we don’t want to admit the possibility of being wrong. Likewise, we tend to lower our opinion of the option we didn’t choose.

When and how we receive information is a major factor in our irrationality.

As you might know, you’re much more likely to be killed in a car accident than by a shark attack while swimming in the ocean. Even so, the 1975 movie premiere of Jaws, a film about a man-eating shark, caused a sharp drop in sea swimmers in California.

The frightened Californians were succumbing to something known as the availability error, wherein people irrationally ignore known facts and pay attention to information that makes the biggest impression on them, or that comes to mind most easily. In other words, what’s most directly “available.”

Doing what is socially expected and publicly announcing decisions can lead to irrational behavior.

Conforming to social norms is often one of the most rational things you can do. For instance, it’s rational to conform to driving on the correct side of the street to avoid a car accident. But conforming to social norms can also produce irrational behavior.

For example, the psychologist Solomon Asch demonstrated that subjects make irrational choices simply to conform to what society expects. He did so by showing his test subjects two cards: the first one had one line on it and the second had the same line as well as two others, one considerably longer and the other shorter than the first line.

Giving rewards is irrational and being deprived of choice spurs irrational behavior.

We all love rewards, and it might seem like giving them is a rational form of encouragement. But the exact opposite is true: while verbal praise might be a good motivator, since it can be internalized by the recipient and keep encouraging them for times to come, physical rewards are actually quite discouraging. In fact, rewards don’t actually make people perform better at all, and giving them is thus totally irrational.

In one experiment with students, the participants were asked to write headlines for their college newspaper. One group was paid while the other was not. In the end, the unpaid students wrote more headlines, showing that the incentive of a monetary reward produces worse performances.

Denying information to maintain beliefs, as well as our emotions, can make us act irrationally.

It’s common for logic to be juxtaposed with emotions, and it’s thus of little surprise that the latter are strongly tied to irrational behavior. For instance, we might love our partner so much that we believe she’s the greatest person on the planet, or might avoid doctors because we’re terrified of finding out we’re sick. In short, emotions make us behave irrationally because they distort our worldview.

But emotions are different than feelings. We might feel cold or tired; on the other hand, emotions are a combination of certain feelings with our tendency to act and think in certain ways.

Irrationality prevents us from properly assessing correlations and cause-and-effect relationships.

It wasn’t long ago that scientists couldn’t show a correlation between smoking and lung cancer. In fact, the connection between the two went unnoticed for centuries before the scientists Richard Doll and Richard Peto released certain statistics in the 1970s.

So, why did people fail to make this connection?

Overconfidence and intuition lead to irrational decisions.

Whether the task at hand is properly assessing the size of a parking space, the time needed to boil an egg or the strengths of a prospective hire, our intuition can often prove incorrect. We tend to be overly confident in our judgments and our own gut feelings.

For instance, one study found that people who were 100 percent sure of their ability to spell certain words, actually only spelled 80 percent of them correctly. Another survey found that 95 percent of British drivers believed they were better than the average motorist, while most people think they’ll live longer than the average person.

Knowledge of statistics improves rationality.

So, you’ve seen how people are irrational in a variety of ways; but is rationality really so desirable?

Well, the truth is, being rational isn’t as important in the personal realm since your personal choices, like whether to have pasta or rice for dinner, aren’t especially important. And when they are more important, like when choosing a career, there are so many unknown factors that rationality only marginally increases the likelihood of a successful outcome.

Avoid irrationality by paying attention to the way questions are phrased and writing out pros and cons when making decisions.

While an understanding of statistics might help you make more rational decisions, especially when it comes to serious and complicated issues, it’s impractical to spend loads of time making calculations. So, here are some simpler ways to avoid irrationality.

One way is to know that the way a question is phrased can irrationally influence your response. For example, in one study, certain subjects were asked whether they’d rather save 200 people from an imaginary lethal disease, or attempt to save 600 people with a 33 percent likelihood of success. Another group was asked to choose between the risk of letting 600 people die with a probability of 67 percent that they would die, or letting 400 people die for sure.

Du möchtest die gesamte Zusammenfassung von Irrationality sehen?

Kernaussagen in Irrationality

Mehr Wissen in weniger Zeit

Sachbücher auf den Punkt gebracht

Kernaussagen aus Sachbüchern in ca. 15 Minuten pro Titel lesen & anhören mit den „Blinks”

Zeitsparende Empfehlungen

Titel, die dein Leben bereichern, passend zu deinen Interessen und Zielen

Podcasts in Kurzform ^Neu

Kernaussagen wichtiger Podcasts im Kurzformat mit den neuen „Shortcasts”

Worum geht es in Irrationality?

Irrationality (1991) is a guide to illogical decisions, unreasonable actions and irrational behavior as a whole. These blinks reveal how people tend to be more irrational than rational, examines several reasons why and offers solutions as to how we can become a little more logical in our decision making.

Bestes Zitat aus Irrationality

Everybody is irrational some of the time, and the more complex the decisions to be taken, the more irrational they are.

—Stuart Sutherland

Wer Irrationality lesen sollte

People who think of themselves as entirely rational beings
Anyone who struggles to make decisions, especially rational ones

Über den Autor

Stuart Sutherland was a renowned psychologist and writer who taught at Oxford University and the University of Sussex. He is best known for his book Irrationality and a personal account of his struggle with manic depression, titled Breakdown.

Kategorien mit Irrationality

Psychologie

Ähnliche Zusammenfassungen wie Irrationality

Blink

Malcolm Gladwell

The Power of Thinking Without Thinking

14 min

4.1

The Invisible Gorilla

Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons

And Other Ways Our Intuition Deceives Us

14 min

3.9

Thinking, Fast and Slow

Daniel Kahneman

Intuition or deliberation? Where you can (and can't) trust your brain

28 min

4.5

13 Things Mentally Strong People Don't Do

Amy Morin

Take Back Your Power, Embrace Change, Face Your Fears and Train Your Brain for Happiness and Success

Why Your Memory Is Mostly Fiction, Why You Have Too Many Friends on Facebook, and 46 Other Ways You’re Deluding Yourself

A Practical Guide to Overcome Negativity and Better Manage Your Feelings

17 min

4.3

Own Your Past Change Your Future

John Delony

A Not-So-Complicated Approach to Relationships, Mental Health & Wellness

The secret methods to getting what you want

The Hidden Sources of Love, Character, and Achievement

23 min

4.2

The Knowledge Illusion

Steven Sloman & Philip Fernbach

Why We Never Think Alone

Conversations with the World’s Most Creative People

21 min

3.6

Leading an Inspired Life

Jim Rohn

Timeless Wisdom and Practical Strategies to Find True Fulfillment

The Fine Art Of Small Talk

Debra Fine

How To Start a Conversation, Keep It Going, Build Networking Skills – and Leave a Positive Impression!

19 min

4.1

Predictably Irrational

Dan Ariely

The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions

21 min

4.5

Financial Intelligence

Karen Berman & Joe Knigh with John Case

A Manager's Guide to Knowing What the Numbers Really Mean

How to Excel When Everything Is Changing - Including You

15 min

4.5

Emotional Intelligence Habits

Travis Bradberry

Change Your Habits, Change Your Life

18 min

4.1

What They Teach You at Harvard Business School

Philip Delves Broughton

My Two Years Inside The Cauldron of Capitalism

10 min

3.7

Discipline Equals Freedom

The World’s First Tech Entrepreneur

9 min

4.1

The Road to Character

David Brooks

Learn how to make yourself whole

12 min

3.8

Be Useful

Arnold Schwarzenegger

Seven Tools for Life

19 min

4.3

The Art of Simple Living

Shunmyo Masuno

100 Daily Practices from a Japanese Zen Monk for a Lifetime of Calm and Joy

The Small Changes That Change Everything

Developing Mental Agility and Resilience to Thrive in Uncertainty

Understanding How Good People Turn Evil

The New Brain Science of Contentment, Calm, and Confidence

The Psychology of Human Relationships

17 min

3.6

That Little Voice in Your Head

Mo Gawdat

Adjust the Code That Runs Your Brain

A guide to surviving your breakup with your self-respect in tow

Discover your inner parent and your inner child

A Novel about the History of Philosophy

An explanation of Jung's theories about archetypes and the unconscious

27 min

4.5

Emotional Intelligence

The Wealth of Nations

Adam Smith

The most influential economic book of all time

What you Thought Was a Diagnosis May Be Your Greatest Strength

11 min

3.2

Never Split the Difference

Chris Voss and Tahl Raz

Negotiating As If Your Life Depended On It

19 min

4.5

You Are Not Your Brain

Jeffrey M. Schwartz and Rebecca Gladding

The Four-Step Solution for Changing Bad Habits, Ending Unhealthy Thinking, and Taking Control of Your Life

18 min

4.5

The Origin of Everyday Moods

Robert E. Thayer

Managing Energy, Tension, and Stress

29 min

4.4

Willpower Doesn't Work

Benjamin Hardy

Discover the Hidden Keys to Success

An uncommon guide to rapid fat-loss, incredible sex and becoming superhuman

19 min

3.4

The Demon-Haunted World

Carl Sagan

Science as a Candle in the Dark

A revolutionary approach to get the most out of working in a group

20 min

4.5

The Art of Manifesting

Carolyn Boyes

Tap into the power of the universe to live your best life

A Brief History of Humankind

Zen and the Rediscovery of the Obvious

How Seeing the World through the Lens of Personality Changes Everything

22 min

4.3

Boundaries for Leaders

Henry Cloud

Take Charge of Your Business, Your Team, and Your Life

19 min

3.5

❤️ für Blinkist️️️

Ines S.

Ich bin begeistert. Ich liebe Bücher aber durch zwei kleine Kinder komme ich einfach nicht zum Lesen. Und ja, viele Bücher haben viel bla bla und die Quintessenz ist eigentlich ein Bruchteil.

Genau dafür ist Blinkist total genial! Es wird auf das Wesentliche reduziert, die Blinks sind gut verständlich, gut zusammengefasst und auch hörbar! Das ist super. 80 Euro für ein ganzes Jahr klingt viel, aber dafür unbegrenzt Zugriff auf 3000 Bücher. Und dieses Wissen und die Zeitersparnis ist unbezahlbar.

Ekaterina S.

Extrem empfehlenswert. Statt sinnlos im Facebook zu scrollen höre ich jetzt täglich zwischen 3-4 "Bücher". Bei manchen wird schnelle klar, dass der Kauf unnötig ist, da schon das wichtigste zusammen gefasst wurde..bei anderen macht es Lust doch das Buch selbständig zu lesen. Wirklich toll

Nils S.

Einer der besten, bequemsten und sinnvollsten Apps die auf ein Handy gehören. Jeden morgen 15-20 Minuten für die eigene Weiterbildung/Entwicklung oder Wissen.

Julia P.

Viele tolle Bücher, auf deren Kernaussagen reduziert- präzise und ansprechend zusammengefasst. Endlich habe ich das Gefühl, Zeit für Bücher zu finden, für die ich sonst keine Zeit habe.