Skip to main content

Drunk Tank Pink - Adam Alter ****

Going on the subtitle, which I had to because the title meant nothing to me, I was concerned this would seem to be yet another of the long string of books we've had looking at particular emotions and how the brain produces them. Instead it is far more fascinating because it's observational rather than theoretical. About, for instance, the way that bright pink decor seems to calm people (hence the title - this effect seems not to have reached the UK where I suspect prison governors might resist painting their cells pink), or the way that names influence our perception of people.

 This is a genuinely fascinating book, exploring the many psychological experiments that demonstrate how human behaviour is influenced by factors beyond our control and often beyond our awareness. Adam Alter includes more obvious inputs, like Maslow's hierarchy of need, or the tendency to prefer those who are like ourselves, but also many factors that influence us in subtle and unexpected ways. Whether it's the way the ability to see yourself in a mirror makes you less likely to cheat, or the way that some optical illusions don't work as well with African tribespeople as they do New Yorkers, because the Africans live in a world with few straight lines so aren't fooled by fake perspective effects that the New Yorkers can't resist, there is so much here to find interesting.

 While I think Alter goes too far in his conclusion in saying that after reading this book you'll be in a better place to 'maximize your health wisdom wealth and well-being' - and let's face it, that wording suggests a tongue firmly in the cheek - you will be genuinely amazed the number of times and situations when your perception and behaviour is likely to be subtly altered by influences you aren't even aware of. One remarkable suggestion is that because of a right hand bias, most of us prefer words that are typed with the right  hand on QWERTY keyboard. So apparently we particularly like words like n00b and woohoo (Alter's examples). I don't know about you, but these aren't among my favourite words - and for that matter, it's hard to see how this can influence someone who isn't a touch typist. But it's still great fun.

 My one concern, and the reason that this book has four stars rather than five, is that the author never mentions the reality that much research in psychology is of relatively poor quality. In the manner of a tabloid newspaper jumping from a trial with cells in a lab to say that a substance cures cancer, Alter seems to take all the evidence as if it were fact. Sometimes the effect he describes appears subtle - perhaps a five per cent change - but he never explores statistical significance. And in at least one example, he cites an experiment as if it's meaningful without pointing out it has since been shown that the effect only occurs in the artificial environment of the lab, and isn't repeated when the experiment is undertaken in a real world situation.

 There is even an example of being a little fast and loose with evidence in the book. It shows a series of three photos of the same face, but with the features modified so that they display characteristics typical of black and white faces, and something in between. Alter makes a big deal that people see the faces as darker or lighter, depending on the characteristics even though they're 'identical in tone.' He points out 'If you cover up the facial features with your hand and focus only on the foreheads you'll be able to see that the faces share an identical skin tone.' The trouble is, this is a test of a very subtle reaction, where people will pick up on tiny visual queues - and his observation is selective, a classic error in soft sciences like psychology.

 While it's true that the foreheads all have the same tones, it's not true of the rest of the face. For some reason, on the 'black characteristics' face, there is a shadow across the cheeks that extends all the way to the lips. On the 'white characteristics' face, this shadow is only on the very edge of the face. As a result, around a quarter of the skin area is significantly darker on the 'black' image - plenty enough to make someone see this face as darker skinned. Being selective about your data is a cardinal sin in science and undermines the authority of the book.

 Overall then, Drunk Tank Pink is great fun with lots of fascinating observations of the strange ways that people behave. This is material that has a real impact on the way we understand human behaviour and perhaps how we should react to it. But you need to apply a pinch of salt to the 'scientific' conclusions, as there is definitely an aspect of tabloid science at play.
Paperback:  

Kindle:  
Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you
Review by Brian Clegg
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

It's On You - Nick Chater and George Loewenstein *****

Going on the cover you might think this was a political polemic - and admittedly there's an element of that - but the reason it's so good is quite different. It shows how behavioural economics and social psychology have led us astray by putting the focus way too much on individuals. A particular target is the concept of nudges which (as described in Brainjacking ) have been hugely over-rated. But overall the key problem ties to another psychological concept: framing. Huge kudos to both Nick Chater and George Loewenstein - a behavioural scientist and an economics and psychology professor - for having the guts to take on the flaws in their own earlier work and that of colleagues, because they make clear just how limited and potentially dangerous is the belief that individuals changing their behaviour can solve large-scale problems. The main thesis of the book is that there are two ways to approach the major problems we face - an 'i-frame' where we focus on the individual ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Introducing Artificial Intelligence – Henry Brighton & Howard Selina ****

It is almost impossible to rate these relentlessly hip books – they are pure marmite*. The huge  Introducing  … series (a vast range of books covering everything from Quantum Theory to Islam), previously known as …  for Beginners , puts across the message in a style that owes as much to Terry Gilliam and pop art as it does to popular science. Pretty well every page features large graphics with speech bubbles that are supposed to emphasise the point. Funnily,  Introducing Artificial Intelligence  is both a good and bad example of the series. Let’s get the bad bits out of the way first. The illustrators of these books are very variable, and I didn’t particularly like the pictures here. They did add something – the illustrations in these books always have a lot of information content, rather than being window dressing – but they seemed more detached from the text and rather lacking in the oomph the best versions have. The other real problem is that...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Laws of Thought - Tom Griffiths *****

In giving us a history of attempts to explain our thinking abilities, Tom Griffiths demonstrates an excellent ability to pitch information just right for the informed general reader.  We begin with Aristotelian logic and the way Boole and others transformed it into a kind of arithmetic before a first introduction of computing and theories of language. Griffiths covers a surprising amount of ground - we don't just get, for instance, the obvious figures of Turing, von Neumann and Shannon, but the interaction between the computing pioneers and those concerned with trying to understand the way we think - for example in the work of Jerome Bruner, of whom I confess I'd never heard.  This would prove to be the case with a whole host of people who have made interesting contributions to the understanding of human thought processes. Sometimes their theories were contradictory - this isn't an easy field to successfully observe - but always they were interesting. But for me, at least, ...
Post a Comment
Read more