QUIRKOLOGY: The Curious Science of Everyday Lives by Richard Wiseman

THE BLACK SWAN: The Impact of the Highly Improbable by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

FICTION ATTEMPTS to describe the human condition in many different ways and – although this is often overlooked – many science publications do the same. These two popular science books are wildly different in approach and style but each, in its own ways, is trying to describe the world we live in; specifically, to examine how human beings, as social animals, interact with the modern environment.

Richard Wiseman knows a thing or two about quirky science. He is an award-winning professor in the public understanding of psychology who has spent his career doing large-scale experiments, often through the media, looking into the odder facets of human behaviour.

This book is, essentially, a roundup of some of the stranger experiments that he and other behavioural scientists have performed over the years. It is written in an energetic and entertaining style, with a healthy dose of self-deprecation and scepticism, and clearly has the mass market in mind.

Many of the early chapters involve a certain amount of debunking of superstitions and nonrational beliefs. Astrology and the supernatural come in for a hard time as Wiseman shows, through various experiments, that there’s precious little evidence for either. More than that, he has at his finger-tips a range of results that explain why we are inclined to believe in such things.

Wiseman also tackles such topics as decision-making, lying, humour and honesty, all with a light touch and a wry humour. Occasionally, the conclusions from his experiments are a little woolly scientifically (as is often the case when analysing psychological experiments performed outside lab conditions), but Wiseman makes up for this with a string of truly fascinating results.

Indeed, the biggest strength of Quirkology is that it is packed with vignettes that are perfect for dinner parties or pub conversations. Did you know that words containing the letter “K” are more likely to make people laugh? Or that people would rather wear a sweater dropped in dog faeces and not washed, than a clean one that used to belong to a serial killer? Similarly, if you want to find out why certain chat-up lines or personal ads work better than others, or what the funniest joke in the world is (actually, it’s not all that funny), then this is the book for you.

Quirkology and The Black Swan share little common ground, but there is one area where they do overlap. At one point, Wiseman shows that you can make your own luck – up to a point. People born in the summer are generally luckier, it turns out. Such people are more optimistic and open to opportunities than those born in the winter months. As a result, summer people are more likely to find themselves exposed to fortuitous circumstance. This idea – that you will fare better in life if you open yourself to potentially beneficial events – is one of the central conclusions of Nassim Nicholas Taleb in The Black Swan.

If Quirkology is a piece of amiable banter, The Black Swan is an angry tirade. Taleb is an essayist, philosopher, mathematician and Wall Street trader, as well as a Dean’s Professor in the Sciences of Uncertainty at the University of Massachusetts. He is also the man who coined the idea of “known unknowns” that Donald Rumsfeld picked up on, rather disastrously.

The Black Swan is an odd, often compelling, mix of philosophical tract, polemical diatribe, narrative and a whole lot more besides. The black swan of the title is a highly improbable event that is unpredictable, has massive impact and is usually explained away after the fact as being more predictable than it really was. The term “black swan” comes from the fact that, before Australia was discovered, all swans were assumed to be white. When a black swan was seen Down Under, our previous assumptions about swan colour were proven to be useless. So, just because we have not observed something happen in the past this does not mean that it might not happen tomorrow.

An obvious example of a black swan is 9/11, as are stock market crashes and most wars. Black swans are not universally bad, however – the success of J. K. Rowling was one, as were the growth of the internet and the rise of Google.

Taleb’s main thrust is that some future events are essentially unpredictable and yet we singularly fail to realise or accept this fact. Economists (who come in for scathing criticism from Taleb throughout the book) continue to issue predictions on future markets; governments make glib statements about the chances of terrorism, the likelihood of wars and the planning of budgets; and all these pronouncements are fundamentally flawed.

What’s more, Taleb suggests that our inability to recognise such events when they come, as well as to try to rationalise them afterwards, is hard-wired into our brains. The need to simplify and categorise information is a necessary part of the human psyche, and leads us constantly to fool ourselves about possible future risks.

If all this sounds fairly heavy-duty that’s because it is. Taleb does not shirk from complex matters. Here he deals with everything from the philosophy of probability to the self-delusional nature of the human mind, from the mathematics of luck to the ridiculousness of economic forecasting. Although a dense and difficult read at times, The Black Swan is intensely thought provoking, as is Quirkology in its own light-hearted way. The human condition never seemed so strange.

QUIRKOLOGY: The Curious Science of Everyday Lives by Richard Wiseman

Macmillan, £14.99; 320pp

Buy the book here for the offer price of £13.49 (free p&p)

THE BLACK SWAN: The Impact of the Highly Improbable by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Allen Lane, £20; 400pp

Buy the book here for the offer price of £18 (free p&p)

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