Sidetracked

We like to see ourselves as rational beings. We thus generally imagine that we make our decisions according to what we planned to do, based on the criteria we have established for ourselves, etc. However, experience shows that we actually behave quite differently from this idealized vision. Francesca Gino reminds us that we are still very much social mammals! In this book, she reviews the many factors which regularly drive us to make decisions remote from our initial plans, without our even being aware of it. In particular, she distinguishes three sets of forces likely to sidetrack us from our goals:

- Forces linked to ourselves: impact of our emotions on our behavior and judgment, etc.

- Forces linked to interpersonal relations: herd instinct, instinctive rivalry mechanisms, etc.

- Forces induced by the environment: information overload, etc.

This book gathers a rich store of experiments conducted by cognitive and behavioral scientists and is full of interesting findings on why our behavior often seems to be nonsensical, but is actually predictable when we understand the underpinnings.