Skip to main content

Pavlov's Dog - Adam Hart-Davis ****

This was a book I was not expecting to like. Although books of this format with 50 heavily illustrated things you need to know about something, seem to sell well, they usually irritate me. However, a combination of the topic - 50 experiments that revolutionised psychology - and a slight variant of the format - Adam Hart-Davis was allowed significantly more text than is often the case in this type of book - meant that it was surprisingly effective.

There's plenty here that will be familiar to anyone who has grazed the surface of popular psychology, from Pavlov in the book's title and the infamous Milgram electric shock experiments, up to very late 20th century work (there are just two from the 21st). While it's fun to see familiar old friends, it's the ones that are a novelty that inevitably stand out. Which these are will vary from reader to reader - I lapped up the likes of 'can dogs get depressed?' and 'why can't you tickle yourself (and what's the connection with schizophrenia?)'.

Inevitably with this kind of format, the main drawback is that you really want the experiments to be critically analysed, not just described and accepted. Although Hart-Davis occasionally puts in a critical comment, often the outcome of the experiment is accepted without question - despite doubts about the sample size, relevance of sample (they often used university students, for example, an atypical population) and reproducibility of many classic psychology experiments. One, for example, looked at leadership styles and democracy - but the participants were children, and the format was starkly structured, so it's difficult to draw any conclusions about adult leadership and politics. Similarly, with the Milgram experiment, or later on the video-based Ganzfeld ESP experiment (and I'm sure it applies to many others) there's no mention of concerns about how the experiments were carried out.

Despite the desirability of more depth, Hart-Davis does an excellent job of giving us pithy summaries of the experiments and their conclusions. Arranged in chronological chunks, reflecting the changing attitudes to psychology, the book gives a useful picture of how experimental psychology has developed since the late nineteenth century. As is usual with this kind of book, the illustrations are still irritatingly pointless and a waste of space, but the bite-sized approach makes the book great for commutes and bedtime reading. It's always a good sign if, having read one topic, there's a strong urge to move onto the next one - and I got that here. 

If, like me, you struggled with Hart-Davis's presenting style when he was on TV, don't worry - Pavlov's Dog has a much less mannered writing style. It's light and approachable but with as much content as the format allows. As dogs go, it's best of breed.

Paperback:  
Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you


Review by Brian Clegg

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

The Art of Uncertainty - David Spiegelhalter *****

There's something odd about this chunky book on probability - the title doesn't mention the P word at all. This is because David Spiegelhalter (Professor Sir David to give him his full title) has what some mathematicians would consider a controversial viewpoint. As he puts it 'all probabilities are judgements expressing personal uncertainty.' He strongly (and convincingly) argues that while the mathematical approach to probability is about concrete, factual values, outside of the 'natural' probabilities behind quantum effects, almost all real world probability is a subjective experience, better described by more subjective terms like uncertainty, chance and luck. A classic way to distinguish between those taking the frequentist approach to probability and the Bayesian approach is their attitude to what the probability is of a fair coin coming up heads or tails after the coin has been tossed but before we have looked at it. The frequentist would say it's def

Everything is Predictable - Tom Chivers *****

There's a stereotype of computer users: Mac users are creative and cool, while PC users are businesslike and unimaginative. Less well-known is that the world of statistics has an equivalent division. Bayesians are the Mac users of the stats world, where frequentists are the PC people. This book sets out to show why Bayesians are not just cool, but also mostly right. Tom Chivers does an excellent job of giving us some historical background, then dives into two key aspects of the use of statistics. These are in science, where the standard approach is frequentist and Bayes only creeps into a few specific applications, such as the accuracy of medical tests, and in decision theory where Bayes is dominant. If this all sounds very dry and unexciting, it's quite the reverse. I admit, I love probability and statistics, and I am something of a closet Bayesian*), but Chivers' light and entertaining style means that what could have been the mathematical equivalent of debating angels on

Math for English Majors - Ben Orlin *****

Ben Orlin makes the interesting observation that the majority of people give up on understanding maths at some point, from fractions or algebra all the way through to tensors. At that stage they either give up entirely or operate the maths mechanically without understanding what they are doing. In this light-hearted take, Orlin does a great job of taking on mathematical processes a step at a time, in part making parallels with the structure of language. Many popular maths books shy away from the actual mathematical representations, going instead for verbal approximations. Orlin doesn't do this, but makes use of those linguistic similes and different ways of looking at the processes involved to help understanding. He also includes self-admittedly awful (but entertaining) drawings and stories from his experience as a long-time maths teacher. To make those parallels, Orlin refers to numbers as nouns, operations as verbs (though he points out that there are some flaws in this simile) a