Review: Drunk Tank Pink

Title: Drunk Tank Pink: And Other Unexpected Forces that Shape How We Think, Feel, and Behave

Author: Adam Alter

Genre: Pop Psychology

Trigger Warnings: Institutional racism (mention), sexism (mention)

Back Cover:

Most of us go through life believing that we are in control of the choices we make, that we think and behave almost independently from the world around us, but as Drunk Tank Pink illustrates, the truth is our environment shapes our thoughts and actions in myriad ways without our permission or even our knowledge. Armed with surprising data and endlessly fascinating examples, Adam Alter addresses the subtle but substantial ways in which outside forces influence us–such as color’s influence on mood, our bias in favor of names with which we identify, and how sunny days can induce optimism as well as aggression. Drunk Tank Pink proves that the truth behind our feelings and actions goes much deeper than the choices we take for granted every day.

Review:

I really shouldn’t have read this directly after reading The Extended Mind, because they’re so similar in both tone and content that I’m having a hard time sorting out what information was from each book. The Extended Mind is about using things outside your brain to help you think better, while Drunk Tank Pink is about the way things outside your brain affect your thinking. Different sides of the same coin, basically.

It wasn’t bad information, and in many cases was very interesting. The main ideas covered were nominative determinism, or that your name shapes your destiny, the weather’s profound influence on mood, and how color psychology is influencing you more than you think. According to the book, I’m less likely to be given opportunities because both my first and last name are hard to pronounce and spell, and I likely have such a strong interest in Arabic language and culture because my birth name came from an Arabic root.

That’s one of my big problems with the book – it made these effects out to be absolutely MASSIVE. The bulk of this book is an overview of a bunch of studies on a particular topic (loosely held together with some interpretation and spectacularly bad transitions), and the impression that you get is that if you have a difficult-to-spell name you’ll never succeed, if it’s hot out you’re going to be violent, and if you’re in a pink room you lose all ability to function. I don’t know if the intent was to exaggerate for sensationalism and sales or if that was an unintended effect of less-than-stellar writing, but it seemed like the book was trying to convince me that my environment was really in control and I had no influence on my life.

Drunk Tank Pink was slightly more engaging than The Extended Mind, probably because it spun the studies it discussed into stories instead of just presenting them as studies, but they both cover very similar ideas and both read like an academic literature review rewritten to sell as pop psychology. This book seemed like it was sensationalizing its ideas, though, and I was overall unimpressed.