Sway - Irrational Behavior
Do we do irrational things that make no common sense - authors Ori and Rom Brafman propose that we do in their new book, “Sway - The Irresistible Pull of Irrational Behavior”. This relatively short book (an easy Sunday afternoon read) is a further contribution to an increasing number of books on the whole idea of behavioral economics and the like, perhaps most notably written about by Malcolm Gladwell in “Blink”. In fact I felt like I had read the first half of Sway somewhere else as the authors identified “sway” factors such as; loss aversion, value attribution and diagnosis bias - different terms perhaps but the same fundamental ideas as what I have read elsewhere. The last couple of chapters were for me the most helpful on our need for perceived fairness and the impact of pleasure versus altruism.
So, an enjoyable afternoon read - sure, but frankly it was so full of illustrations that I had to work hard to actually pull out the concrete components. Content headings, definition identification and/or summary table would have been useful to help summarize the well-told story. For full disclosure, I was sent this book for free - as I read it I was constantly challenging my perspective knowing that I had been sent a copy by the publisher - I wonder what “sway” that impacts?
