HOMO ECONOMICUS, HE DEAD:

In an essay from 2003 - The Problem of Thinking Too Much - the statistician Persi Diaconis recounts being unable to make his mind up about a move from Stanford University to Harvard. After much discussion, a colleague says: "You're one of our leading decision theorists - maybe you should make a list of the costs and benefits and calculate your expected utility." To which Diaconis replies: "Come on, Sandy, this is serious." Even statistical decision theorists do not make serious choices by consulting cold, textbook models. Like the rest of us, they resort to a knottier combination of deliberation, gut feel and blind hope. For choices, so too for beliefs, which, when met with evidence, are pushed and pulled by processes that are equally mysterious.

The Australian philosopher Eleanor Gordon-Smith's first book, Stop Being Reasonable, explores how we really go about changing our minds. Her approach is to probe six real-life stories of people who have had to radically rethink in high-stakes situations. Like Dylan, who, in a flash of insight, realises the apocalyptic cult that he was born into is bogus. Or upper-crust Alex, who appears on a reality TV show in which he has to fake it as a London bouncer and ends up with an unrecognisably new identity. Each story functions as "a miniature of a much larger complex sprawl", and collectively they give a sense of the richness and strangeness of human reason.

The book came out of an item that Gordon-Smith produced for the radio programme This American Life. Her idea was to wander around a nightlife district of Sydney, wait for the predictable catcalls to start and then try to dissuade her catcallers from engaging in this type of behaviour again. But despite her orderly arguments, the catcallers left the conversations still convinced that it was "OK to grab, yell at, or follow women". Gordon-Smith's takeaway from the experience was that people are often unmoved by dispassionate logic, peer-reviewed research and statistics, but in fact are swayed by ego, emotion, self-interest and identity. 

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