craving for synthesis in what is already possessed. When I finally got to the

psychology texts, I was reminded of the observation of Jacob Viner, the great

economist, that many an academic is like the truffle hound, an animal so trained

and bred for one narrow purpose that it is no good at anything else. I was also

appalled by hundreds of pages of extremely nonscientific musing about

comparative weights of nature and nurture in human outcomes. And I found that

introductory psychology texts, by and large, didn’t deal appropriately with a

fundamental issue: Psychological tendencies tend to be both numerous and

inseparably intertwined, now and forever, as they interplay in life. Yet the

complex parsing out of effects from intertwined tendencies was usually avoided

by the writers of the elementary texts. Possibly the authors did not wish,

through complexity, to repel entry of new devotees to their discipline. And,

possibly, the cause of their inadequacy was the one given by Samuel Johnson in

response to a woman who inquired as to what accounted for his dictionary’s

misdefinition of the word “pastern.” “Pure ignorance,” Johnson replied. And,

finally, the text writers showed little interest in describing standard

antidotes to standard psychology-driven folly, and they thus avoided most

discussion of exactly what most interested me.

 

But academic psychology has some very important merits alongside its defects. I

learned this eventually, in the course of general reading, from a book,

Influence, aimed at a popular audience, by a distinguished psychology professor,

Robert Cialdini, at Arizona State, a very big university. Cialdini had made

himself into a super-tenured “Regents’ Professor” at a very young age by

devising, describing, and explaining a vast group of clever experiments in which