Skip to main content

Awe - Dacher Keltner **

Over the years, Dacher Keltner has covered a range of really interesting topics. Take, for instance Born to be Good on 'the science of a meaningful life' from 2010 or The Power Paradox on 'how we gain and lose influence' from 2016. Now he's done it again with Awe, exploring 'the explorative power of everyday wonder'. And just as with the other two, I was drawn in by the concept only to be disappointed by the content - it's a bit like popular science clickbait.

To be honest, I'd forgotten I'd read the previous books when I bought this one, but referring back to the earlier reviews, I'm getting the same feeling all over again. I noted that Born to be Good was 'strung together rather haphazardly' and that The Power Paradox felt like many business books - a good magazine article strung out to make a tissue-thin book. It's deja vu all over again.

Keltner divides the book into four sections. Only the first is directly about 'a science of awe' (though the scientific references continue throughout). From 69 pages in we get onto 'stories of transformative awe', because this is far more about the experience than the science. Then we move on to 'cultural archives of awe', and finally the life lessons bit: 'living a life of awe'. It's absolutely fine that Keltner personalises the process in writing a lot about his family, but it does feel much of the time that the content is observational without any significant depth beneath it.

The basic concept of the importance of awe, combined with some difficulty in describing just what it is, is interesting and arguably important for us as human beings. I do feel that most of us don't experience enough awe in our lives, potentially making our lives feel relatively pointless. We need awe. But the way that Keltner delivers this wisdom sometimes feels more like we're in a Bill and Ted movie, without the humour or the storyline. It's all 'Whoa!' and 'Feel this, man!' This is a sheep in wolf's clothing: a spiritual self-help book dressed up as popular psychology.

The other problem I have with this book is that I can't take seriously any post-replication crisis psychology book that does not mention it at all and does not explore the quality of the studies it references. Keltner has 250 references at the back, but in the text all we ever get is apparent fact such as 'a study showed this' before moving on snappily to the next observation. It's not just that there is no depth - it's all surface - but we are never told anything about the quality of the studies. Was there p-hacking? Did they use small samples? Were the effects significant but with minimal effect? Did they use the low standard of being considered significant if there is a 1 in 20 chance of the effects being seen if the null hypothesis being true? Have they been successfully replicated? Nothing. Nada. Whoa!

Paperback:   
Kindle:  
Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you
Review by Brian Clegg - See all Brian's online articles or subscribe to a weekly email free here
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Antigravity Enigma - Andrew May ****

Antigravity - the ability to overcome the pull of gravity - has been a fantasy for thousands of years and subject to more scientific (if impractical) fictional representation since H. G. Wells came up with cavorite in The First Men in the Moon . But is it plausible scientifically?  Andrew May does a good job of pulling together three ways of looking at our love affair with antigravity (and the related concept of cancelling inertia) - in science fiction, in physics and in pseudoscience and crankery. As May points out, science fiction is an important starting point as the concept was deployed there well before we had a good enough understanding of gravity to make any sensible scientific stabs at the idea (even though, for instance, Michael Faraday did unsuccessfully experiment with a possible interaction between gravity and electromagnetism). We then get onto the science itself, noting the potential impact on any ideas of antigravity that come from the move from a Newtonian view of a...
Post a Comment
Read more

The World as We Know It - Peter Dear ***

History professor Peter Dear gives us a detailed and reasoned coverage of the development of science as a concept from its origins as natural philosophy, covering the years from the eighteenth to the twentieth century. inclusive If that sounds a little dry, frankly, it is. But if you don't mind a very academic approach, it is certainly interesting. Obviously a major theme running through is the move from largely gentleman natural philosophers (with both implications of that word 'gentleman') to professional academic scientists. What started with clubs for relatively well off men with an interest, when universities did not stray far beyond what was included in mathematics (astronomy, for instance), would become a very different beast. The main scientific subjects that Dear covers are physics and biology - we get, for instance, a lot on the gradual move away from a purely mechanical views of physics - the reason Newton's 'action at a distance' gravity caused such ...
Post a Comment
Read more

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