What Were They Thinking? ‘Sway’ has some answers

Why do normally intelligent people make illogical decisions?  It’s a good question that the book ‘Sway’ attempts to answer.

Several examples of sways are illustrated with questionable social science experiments.  A few of the experiments were from an era when controls on harming participants were lax.  Some studies were from other countries where apparently deceit or the harming of subjects is allowed in the interest of science.  For that reason some of the conclusions reached about why sways happen are suspicious.

The verifiable information in the book was scant.  Some things worth knowing:  our brains only allow for greed or altruism at one time, loss aversion is dramatically stronger than the desire for gain, and because of that there is a tendency to over-commit to a losing course in order to avoid certain loss.

There are  worth-while things in this book.  It could have been edited down to a magazine article length, though.