Psychology

Thursday

Rory Sutherland

Why does anyone drink wine?

You will be scandalised by the suggestion, of course, especially those of you who spend several hours every week drinking it, reading about it or discussing it. But most wine is actually rubbish. I’ll let you off the hook if you drink wine only with food. But wine drunk on its own is often a terrible drink, usually consumed for appearances’ sake, or because the drinker lacks the confidence to complain, or for want of any alternative source of alcohol. Our judgment of wine is also notoriously flaky — influenced as much by the appearance and weight of the bottle as by its contents. One winemaker sent the same wine to a competition under three different labels. One was rejected by the judges as ‘undrinkable’; another won a double gold medal.

Thursday

David Blackburn

Amateur fantasies and professional realities

As was to be expected, it rained. Drizzle was in the air at times yesterday when the Authors XI turned out to mark 150 years of The Wisden Cricketers’ Almanack (the latest edition of which the Spectator reviewed here). Sebastian Faulks, Ed Smith and Kamila Shamsie were among the players, all of whom were dressed in Victorian garb and wore joyous grins. The Author’s XI has a book out; an account of their tour recent of England. It is a gently beguiling book, revealing something of life, the writers and, of course, cricket. It’s a perfect match. As Sebastian Faulks puts it in the foreword: ‘Amateur cricketers tend to be vain, anecdotal, passionate, knowledgeable, neurotic and given to fantasy. So do writers.

Thursday

Rory Sutherland

The Wiki Man: If you want to diet, I’m afraid you really do need one weird rule

‘Never play cards with a man called Doc. Never eat at a place called Mom’s. And never sleep with a woman whose -troubles are worse than your own.’ These were Nelson Algren’s Three Rules of Life. You may have noticed a few more ‘rules of life’ appearing recently. After years of our being advised to drink some forgettable number of units of alcohol every week, a new rule seems to have emerged: ‘Don’t worry much about how much you drink but do abstain from alcohol completely for at least two days in seven.’ The hottest diet of the moment, sometimes called the 5:2 Diet, lets you eat freely except for two days of fasting each week. Other diets focus on total abstinence from carbohydrates, especially sugar.

Thursday

Wynn Wheldon

What dogs know about us

In Aesop’s fable of the Dog and the Wolf, the latter declares that it is better to starve free than be a fat slave, but the fact is that, without man, there would be no dog at all. When people eventually began to form permanent settlements, a new food source appeared: waste. Wolf packs, less fearful of man than others, less aggressive too, took advantage, and turned themselves into dogs. Natural selection works in mysterious ways. Years ago, before the gender police were on the prowl, this book’s top title would have been Man’s Best Friend, for the ‘genius’ that it describes is the dog’s talent for inter- action with humans. Neither a teaching manual nor an anthology of heroic dog stories, this is a work of scholarship. It has 67 pages of notes.

Wednesday

Daisy Dunn

Crime and Guilt, by Ferdinand Von Schirach

Tis the season for shopping mall scuffles. A man with a red face prized the last Magimix (steel, 600 rotations per minute) from my hands yesterday, citing ‘the stress of January sales’. I got an apology, but not the blender. What is it that makes us so quick to flip? In a far bleaker arena, this is a question that plagues Ferdinand von Schirach, the criminal defence lawyer whose most recent novel, The Collini Case, I reviewed here last year. Von Schirach’s earlier books, Crime and Guilt – both bestsellers in Germany - are compilations of stories derived from real life offences. Von Schirach has been involved in literally hundreds of criminal cases. In none of those he sets out in Crime was the guilty party ever convicted before a court of law.

Friday

David Blackburn

Interview: Jonathan Haidt on left vs right

Why are Dennis Skinner and George Osborne locked in enmity? The answer, according to Jonathan Haidt, lies beyond the obvious partisan explanation, and reaches back into humanity’s first nature. Haidt is a professor of moral and social psychology at the University of West of West Virginia, who has written a compelling book, The Righteous Mind, which argues that politics is determined by evolutionary biology and what he terms ‘Moral Foundations Theory’. In a little over 300 pages of incisive prose, Haidt presents a theory that explains why politics is always personal. His research shows that our high-minded ideals are mere spontaneous gut-reactions, a primeval hangover from our less evolved forebears.

Friday

David Davis-Mp

The paradox of incentives

Banker bashing has become something of a national pastime, and politicians have been quick to join in. But rather than devoting their energy to avenging past sins, our political leaders might be better off learning the lessons of Dan Ariely’s book, The Upside of Irrationality. In this valuable work, Ariely shows that the incentive of big bonuses can actually damage performance, not improve it. He cites a century-old experiment in which rats were placed in a cage with two pathways. One led to a reward, the other to a device which gave the rats an electric shock. The aim of the experiment was to see how quickly the rats learned which path to take. As an added twist, the scientists varied the size of the electric shock.

Wednesday

Pj Kavanagh

Spirit of place

A Writer’s Britain: Landscape in Literature, by Margaret Drabble This is a book about the inner landscapes of writers, or the ones they inhabited when young, and how these informed their work and affected their readers. In the process of describing these, Margaret Drabble makes lively connections, parallels and distinctions. The languor and melancholy of Tennyson’s poetry, for example, which so surprisingly suited the Victorian mood, derives from the Lincolnshire of his youth — ‘Gray sand banks and pale sunsets — dreary wind/ Dim shores, dense rains, and heavy-clouded sea!