Social Psychology Special Issue

Book reviews
Eyes Wide Open: How to make smart decisions in
a confusing world
Noreena Hertz
William Collins Publishers, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-00756-473-6
344 pages; Paperback; £8.99
Reviewed by Laura Oxley
The premise of this book potentially has
universal appeal. After all, everyone wants to
think that they are making the right decisions
in all areas of life, so a book offering
hints and tips on how to improve our decision
making is one that many of us would be
interested in reading. The author presents
the chapters as a series of steps, leading the
way towards better decision making. The
book is written in an engaging manner with
interesting facts and statistics dotted
throughout. For example, did you know that
we each make around 10,000 decisions every
day, and that around 227 of these are about
food? (p.3)
Much of the book deals with the different
ways in which we acquire information in the
modern age. The author suggests that we are
‘in the midst of an information revolution’
(p.132) with the traditional ways of acquiring
information, such as from published books
and newspapers, being challenged by the
impact of technology. As many people now
have constant access to the Internet we tend
to gather much of our news from social
media networks such as Facebook and
Twitter without any ‘filtering’ by conventional
media outlets. Without this ‘filtering’,
where the media outlets, such as news
programmes or newspapers, decide what it is
important to draw our attention to at what
time, there is a much higher volume of information
to consider and much of this is likely
to be unverified. Our ability to wade through
a vast amount of readily available information
and select the specific parts that are
relevant to us, as well as being able to evaluate
the reliability of the source, takes
certain skills which are not only applicable in
professional and personal life, but particularly
as a PhD student conducting research.
We may think that these skills are
common sense but it is important to keep
your eyes wide open, as the title of the book
suggests, when relying on online sources.
The author gives the example of Amina
Abdallah Arraf al Omari, a Syrian-American
blogger living in Damascus, whose profile
was featured in The Guardian and whose story
was reported on by the BBC. However, all
was not as it seemed. Without giving the
exact details away, it turned out that Amina’s
story was not true, yet experienced journalists
had believed the source to be reliable.
This draws our attention to how important it
is to think critically about the sources that we
use.
I feel that the most interesting element of
this book is a discussion about the psychological
factors that can impact on our ability
to make decisions. These range from obvious
58 PsyPAG Quarterly