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defenders_iris's review
challenging
informative
medium-paced
1.5
[EDIT: Knocking down to 1.5 for the author casually leaking government secrets to known conspiracy theorists, followed up by "I'm so glad I don't have to make decisions on which truths to report to the public :)" immediately on the next page.]
I summed this book up to my husband as "A self-help pop-psych surface level examination of a phenomenon by a Twitter academic" and frankly I think that's pretty accurate.
His overarching analysis is shallow, which I think comes from a result of distilling various academic concepts to make them more palatable for the audience while stripping them of their nuance. This leads to frequent contradictions, such as one page advising to not engage with mis-believers, while another encourages engagement - and at one point even doubles down and encourages the reader to not ostracize in any way. He also downplays the potential for violence, or the mental toll it takes on the reader to engage with this sort of situation, while frequently bemoaning the negative side effects his own experiences left on him.
This is also my sensibilities talking, but as a religious person, a left-leaning person, and someone who spent way too much time on the internet as a Gen Z teenager, he misses the mark on a lot of things. In the former, there tends to be a scientific atheist undercurrent to the book, and his examples of Democrat conspiracy theories are... uh... did you really want to go with "Donald Trump is a Russian Asset" as your example du jour? In the latter, he recognizes that the Internet has deeply increased the sheer amount of misinformation... with no examples of how to actually identify it.
Some of his advice is good. The psychology sections that focus on how our brains work to piece together things that don't make sense were very enlightening. The chapter on how stress impedes our cognitive abilities is worth the book itself, to be honest, and something I'm going to incorporate in my framework for recognizing my own susceptibility to falsehood. As it is, though, I could have gotten more out of it if the rest was just the Garfield "You are not immune to propaganda" meme.
I summed this book up to my husband as "A self-help pop-psych surface level examination of a phenomenon by a Twitter academic" and frankly I think that's pretty accurate.
His overarching analysis is shallow, which I think comes from a result of distilling various academic concepts to make them more palatable for the audience while stripping them of their nuance. This leads to frequent contradictions, such as one page advising to not engage with mis-believers, while another encourages engagement - and at one point even doubles down and encourages the reader to not ostracize in any way. He also downplays the potential for violence, or the mental toll it takes on the reader to engage with this sort of situation, while frequently bemoaning the negative side effects his own experiences left on him.
This is also my sensibilities talking, but as a religious person, a left-leaning person, and someone who spent way too much time on the internet as a Gen Z teenager, he misses the mark on a lot of things. In the former, there tends to be a scientific atheist undercurrent to the book, and his examples of Democrat conspiracy theories are... uh... did you really want to go with "Donald Trump is a Russian Asset" as your example du jour? In the latter, he recognizes that the Internet has deeply increased the sheer amount of misinformation... with no examples of how to actually identify it.
Some of his advice is good. The psychology sections that focus on how our brains work to piece together things that don't make sense were very enlightening. The chapter on how stress impedes our cognitive abilities is worth the book itself, to be honest, and something I'm going to incorporate in my framework for recognizing my own susceptibility to falsehood. As it is, though, I could have gotten more out of it if the rest was just the Garfield "You are not immune to propaganda" meme.
emilym99's review against another edition
informative
reflective
slow-paced
2.5
Not for me. The content was interesting in theory but overall was not me cup of tea. I listened to the audio book but if I was physically reading it, it would have been a dnf.
asangtani's review against another edition
5.0
I love social psychology in general, but this book is particularly timely with all the misbelief surrounding COVID-19.