How was a Harvard Business School professor able to convince a student to pay 208 dollars for a twenty-dollar bill?

What caused the head of safety at KLM Airlines to disregard his training and the rules of aviation, leading to the deadliest airline crash in history?

In Sway, renowned organizational thinker Ori Brafman and his brother, psychologist Rom Brafman, explain what these phenomena have in common by revealing the hidden psychological forces that drive irrational behavior.

Drawing on the latest research from social psychology, behavioral economics, and organizational behavior, the Brafmans reveal the ongoing dynamic forces that affect nearly every aspect of our personal and business lives, including:

• Loss aversion: our tendency to go to great lengths to avoid perceived losses
• The diagnosis bias: our inability to reevaluate our initial diagnosis of a person or situation
• Commitment: our reluctance to change the course of a plan or decision, even when it's not working

(But you should still buy the book.)

Why is it so difficult to sell a plummeting stock or end a doomed relationship? Why do we listen to advice just because it came from someone “important”? Why are we more likely to fall in love when there’s danger involved? In Sway, renowned organizational thinker Ori Brafman and his brother, psychologist Rom Brafman, answer all these questions and more.

Drawing on cutting-edge research from the fields of social psychology, behavioral economics, and organizational behavior, Sway reveals dynamic forces that influence every aspect of our personal and business lives, including loss aversion (our tendency to go to great lengths to avoid perceived losses), the diagnosis bias (our inability to reevaluate our initial diagnosis of a person or situation), and the “chameleon effect” (our tendency to take on characteristics that have been arbitrarily assigned to us).

Sway introduces us to the Harvard Business School professor who got his students to pay $204 for a $20 bill, the head of airline safety whose disregard for his years of training led to the transformation of an entire industry, and the football coach who turned conventional strategy on its head to lead his team to victory. We also learn the curse of the NBA draft, discover why interviews are a terrible way to gauge future job performance, and go inside a session with the Supreme Court to see how the world’s most powerful justices avoid the dangers of group dynamics.

Every once in a while, a book comes along that not only challenges our views of the world but changes the way we think. In Sway, Ori and Rom Brafman not only uncover rational explanations for a wide variety of irrational behaviors but also point readers toward ways to avoid succumbing to their pull.

Psychologist Rom Brafman has won awards for his courses on psychology and personality. He has a private practice in Palo Alto, California.