Primrose Road

Sway: The Irresistible Pull of Irrational Behavior is a quick read, shelved with Who Moved My Cheese-style books, but far more insightful (and interesting).

The book describes experiments in economics, psychology, sociology, and biology that have attempted to explain why people make obviously bad decisions, and tells the stories of some of these radically bad decisions, including those that led to the Tenerife airplane disaster and Challenger explosion. Some of the research it describes also has implications for educational psychology: while reward systems work in terms of specific goals, they're much more complicated and problematic than we may think, actually suppressing "altruistic" mechanisms in the brain.

One amusing fact presented in the book: On the American "Who Wants To Be A Millionare?", audiences always try help the contestant when polled for the "ask the audience" lifeline, voting for the answer they genuinely believe to be correct; on the French and British versions of the show, audiences tend to help those contestants who they feel are "deserving" of the million-dollar prize but try to sabotage (i.e. purposefully voting for the wrong answer) those contestants who they feel aren't deserving of the prize (for example, one man in France who didn't know that the moon revolved around the Earth); finally, on the Russian "Millionaire," audiences almost always "deliberately misled both smart and less smart contestants alike."

"Millionaire" provides for the authors a jumping-off point for describing different cultures' notions of "fairness," and how perhaps the most economically rational notions of fairness come from an isolated tribe in the Peruvian Amazon. The book may go too far into the hackneyed territory of "negotiation skills" in the last chapter, but the stories it tells and research it describes offer some great insight into why people may be evolutionarily biased towards the irrational.