2.5 stars

Tali Sharot is a professor of cognitive neuroscience working at the Affective Brain Lab at University College London.  This book is a lay person's introduction to a number of key cognitive concepts that affect how individuals are influenced.  It is intended to provide information useful in increasing the ability to influence others, though, despite its plain spoken language and frequent conversion of research findings into stories, it is hardly a self-improvement or how to book.  Sharot presents the relevant findings and sometimes gives a few examples of how they are used to influence others, but the work of consolidating this learning into an approach to influence is largely left to the reader.  This approach recognizes that general concepts are ultimately more useful than specific advice and preserves the scientific sheen of the book, though it does mean that application of the concepts requires real work.

I enjoyed this book and thought it had a lot of great ideas, but would have loved more real life examples and information how to put this to personal use that brought together each separate idea talked about in each chapter.

Overall, a lot of very readable science backed with easy-to-understand examples.

I’ve been reading a lot of nonfiction on psychology and neuroscience and felt that this repeated nothing new.