On Being Certain: Believing You Are Right Even When You're Not

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On Being Certain: Believing You Are Right Even When You're Not
by Robert Burton
from St. Martin's Press

Customer Reviews:

• Avg. Customer Rating: 4.0 / 5.0

• cdc444 got it wrong
  On Being Certain started out moderately interesting but at page 52 I hit a severe snag. When an author gets something I know about so totally wrong (or is being gratuitously nasty) I find I cannot trust what he says about things I don't know so much about. The comment that B.F. Skinner wanted to raise people like veal is so totally absurd I couldn't finish the book and will be returning it to Amazon for a refund.

• Entertaining and Interesting, but...
  I am always slightly annoyed when a book is not about what is is supposed to be about. A few chapters of this book - those towards the end - are on why the feeling of certainty is just that: a feeling. This leads the author to some interesting discussions about how the 'feeling of certianty (a feeling though it is) is something that tends not to be subject to reason, but owes more to emotion. The author also goes into some really interesting thoughts about evolutionary reasons why the feeling of certainty... more info

• On Being Certain
  A fun and informative read. Robert Burton informs,presenting factual and ironic detail of the brain an our behavoral responses to external and internal memory. Recomended for students of psychycolgy, marketing and those interest in broadening their understanding of human behavior.

• It's Not What You Know it's Whether You Really Know It
  I think my title above gets to the substance of Dr. Burton's narrative. How do we know what we know? Dr. Burton posits that the feeling of knowing is a necessary biological function required to allow humans to contemplate thought and take action. In other words, there has to be some reward for a person to think about and know what they are concluding and this reward comes in the feelings of knowing, certainty and correctness. The problem is that the feeling is not always corroborated by the facts. How many... more info

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