By Ori Brafman and Rom Brafman
Publisher: Doubleday
ISBN – 978-0-38552438-4
Put two identical products in different packaging and with different names and different prices on a store shelf. Have the more expensive one recommended by a well known face, the other advertised only by itself. Which one will sell more? The one endorsed by the celeb… of course you will say. But what if I told you that our everyday lives, our every decision, every move we make is subject to what the authors term “sway”, our tendency to chose the irrational over the rational.
No place is safe from this peculiar human failing. The book opens with a chilling account of the Tenerife ground collision of two 747s and how a particular genre of “sway” played a determining role in the way events unfolded on that fateful day.
Drawing on cutting-edge research from the fields of social psychology, behavioral economics and organizational behavior, Sway reveals the many dynamic forces that influence our personal, business and professional lives. You will read about loss aversion (how we will go to extraordinary lengths to avoid perceived losses), the diagnosis bias (our inability to reevaluate our initial diagnosis of a person or situation) and the chameleon effect (our tendency to take on characteristics that have been arbitrarily assigned to us).
But there is more… Sway introduces the Harvard Business School professor who convinced his students to pay more than 200 bucks for a 20 dollar bill, brings convincing examples from the airline world, the world of football and the NBA and tells us why interviews are a terrible way to gauge future job performance.
This book will change forever the way you think about the way you think.
If you decide to buy the book after reading this review, you just got swayed… but buy it anyway. This is one decision you will not regret.