Sway: The Irresistible Pull of Irrational Behavior

This book review was contributed by Lena Phoenix:

I was not at all in the mood for another non-fiction book about human behavior when my husband asked if I wanted to read Sway: The Irresistible Pull of Irrational Behavior before he returned it to the library. I half-heartedly decided to scan a few pages before saying no, but I was quickly sucked in to a fictionalized re-creation of the last few hours in the cockpit of the KLM flight responsible for the 1977 Tenerife crash that claimed the lives of 583 people.

Though this book looks at research from social psychology, behavioral economics, and organizational behavior in order to explain why humans often make highly irrational choices, it does so in a compulsively readable fashion. The authors are good storytellers who know how to engage the reader as they explain surprising findings from a whole host of diverse research.

Though I was already familiar with how fear of loss and commitment to a position can have devastating effects on investors, I enjoyed reading about how these in-built habits played out on the football field and on anthropological digs. People responsible for hiring others will benefit from the chapter explaining the flaws of the “first-date” style interview, and pretty much everyone would do well to read the stunning findings on how negative attitudes about aging can affect one’s health.

The chapter in which the authors discuss how our innate capacity for altruism can be undermined by financial incentives is also fascinating, as is the authors’ discussion with Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer on the impact of a lone dissenting voice on our highest court.

In the epilogue, the authors summarize their main points and offer a few hints on how to avoid being negatively impacted by some of the factors most likely to sway us to make questionable choices. Though I’m not certain how easy it will actually be to overcome the multiple evolutionary habits that cause us to make irrational choices, it was still terribly fun to read.