Summary and Analysis: Sway ' Chapter 4

According to Rom and Ori Brafman people are influenced by a power inside of them that no one understands this power causes people to act irrationally. This power that they talk about is called sway. When I first heard the word sway, I thought of when you sway someone towards believing something or doing something. When reading the book Sway by the brothers Rom and Ori Brafman I realize that sometimes people are swayed by more than just another person but in alternate ways, using observation and impatience to sometimes react and assume different outcomes. One of the many different forms of sway is diagnosis bias. This type of sway is one of the most common types because of the natural human nature to judge someone before you actually know them. This happens more when you hear or read something about someone rather than seeing the person physically. When Rom and Ori wrote this chapter you could tell that they made sure that the used valid enough examples and language that would help heighten your belief in the sway of diagnosis bias or even sway at all.

                The brothers wrote about the NBA Draft and how players were chosen and how some players are over looked because of their draft pick. This is the first story that caught my interest because I would think that once someone makes it to the major leagues I would have more to do with what they are doing now. One of the main players he spoke about was Michael Jordan and the Blazers decision not to choose him in the draft. The Blazers had one of the top choices and over looked because of his standings. They did not know he would be one of the greatest by what was on paper, they had assumed wrong. Now they know that they would have made a great choice if they chose him but this shows diagnosis bias because they diagnosed that he wouldn’t have been as good he was because he did not have everyone thinking that he will be that great. They were bias because they assumed that only people who were high draft picks would be a lot better than the ones that are lower when necessarily that’s not true. In basketball you could work the hardest in the league but if you were not a top draft pick people may not see that because they only tend to look at people who have higher draft picks.

                An additional story that the brother intertwined into the draft story is a segment about when a substitute teacher comes in. For the example the class was given description papers but the kicker was not everyone had the same paper. Some students had a paper saying that he would be nice and warm and friendly, while the others got a paper saying he would be cold and mean. When they were asked to evaluate his personality, the people who got the paper what said he would be nice said he was nice and the people who got the paper said he was cold. Once I had read this I realized that I have done that before. I have read that a person acts a particular way but when I meet the person I already had an idea of what I thought the person would be like and it blocked my judgment on the person’s actual personality. I judged them on what I had read or heard and not just getting to know them. When you do this you pass judgment on someone you already knew and probably should have just waited to meet. For instance, in college when you look up a teacher on ratemyprofessor.com you find that some people have nice things to say and some people have mean things to say. So before you even get to class you have already started to judge the way the teacher will be before you are able to formulate your own opinion.

                Through Rom and Ori’s writing you could see that when they wrote this chapter they wanted the people to have examples and people that they could relate to. They used language and sentences that helped the reader want to read the chapter more in depth. Their sentence structure also helped with their writing because without the short precise sentences that they used it could have been a chapter that was difficult to keep up with. In this case the chapter was not something difficult to understand although some of the stories were intertwined and that made the chapter easy to remember because they showed how they were alike although they were different situations. I feel that this chapter was the best written chapter because of its fluency. Something that made the reading easier also was that you basically could relate to every situation in this chapter. They did a good job playing on what people know and who they know in the way that it made the stories feel so much more real and you became more interested in know what kind of sway they were going to talk about now.