The Wisest One in the Room: How You Can Benefit from Social Psychology's Most Powerful Insights

The information is generally solid (if sometimes old -- do we need yet another recitation of the Stanley Milgram experiment?), but the smug, know-it-all tone is insufferable. The chummy, collegial air when writing about their colleagues gets annoying pretty fast. It goes without saying that a liberal political bias (that's too weak a word) is replete throughout the book. (I sometimes agree with them, but this stuff is so New York Times-predictable in tone that it quickly becomes boring.) Their hubris in making wholesale political and economic recommendations is laughable. How easy for privileged psychology professors to claim that conventional energy jobs such as mining will be replaced by newer, cleaner jobs. Perhaps they might tell us what the affected workers and their families will do until that happy (but unspecified) day arrives. What they propose regarding teaching children about climate warming amounts to thought control in my opinion.I have a doctorate in the social sciences and teach at a major research university and see this kind of high self-regard for one's opinions on a daily basis. Heck, I used to engage in it myself until I wised up.

The book is concise, coherent, and well written. It is easy to read and provides some useful insights. The authors focus on five components of wisdom they believe can help one to be a wiser person - even become "the wisest person in the room". The theories they present are not new: some of them are based on research published decades ago. However, the novelty of the book is in putting these theories together in a practical context of general wisdom. The chapters about education and climate change and the epilogue about Mandela's South Africa provide some practical evidence of the validity of these theories. Overall, it is a good book and a worth reading.

just started reading and so far have found this book to be as advertized-insightful. This book is well written, very readable, and thought-provoking. As a naive realist, I would recommend this book to anyone looking to become a bit wiser than he or she was before picking up this book.

In the forty years since college I have personally continuously pursued metaphysics and epistemology in search of truth. A topic that so much more difficult than it seems on the surface. This is unquestionably the most accessible and pragmatic summary of perception as humans, and a pragmatic users guide to living on earth. If most people on earth could read and understand this book, it would be the beginning of a whole new world where people could communicate and understand other people, perceive what really is truth, the world around us and start creating a better world.

I read more than half of it before getting bored. I totally agree with everything I read in this book. But the ideas in here are so simple that I have to say, if you've lived on Earth for more than thirty years and still haven't figured this stuff out for yourself, you really aren't paying attention.

Pretty good stuff but they mostly just piggy back off of Daniel Kahneman's "Thinking, Fast and Slow". If you were going to read just one of those books definitely read Kahneman's book, not this one. Still a great read if you're obsessive over human psychology.

Useful, distilled knowledge - mostly social psychology, and how to apply, or at least consider them in daily life - with more than enough proof and examples, which are repeated or paraphrased way too many times throughout the entire book. This made it a rather arduous read at many points. Also, I did not appreciate the bonus chapter on climate change advocacy at the end.

For the most part a very insightful and informative account of how social psychology impact policy-making and decision-making. Marred somewhat by a pronounced left-wing political bias which is ironic in view of much of the content focusing on biases and overcoming them.

Great product for quick reading for university classes. Could benefit from having some more notes and hilighting, but great overall.

The book cover came damaged.

If you only read one book on psychology read his one!

Trata-se de mais um trabalho excepcional dos consagrados Tom Gilovich e Lee Ross. Eles analisam de forma prática alguns dos principais problemas da natureza humana e sua influência na origem de conflitos, propondo, através de reflexões e ricos exemplos, atitudes transformadoras da convivência além de soluções para melhorar a vida no planeta. É uma leitura fácil após a qual certamente sairemos com muitas e melhores perspectivas perante a sociedade.

It’s a good read