David Robson's The Expectation Effect: How Your Mindset Can Change Your World presents a provocative, well-researched and intriguing theory of the human brain as a "prediction machine," which--in favoring subjective beliefs about stress, sleep and aging over objective truths--can affect lives in startling ways. The author persuasively demonstrates that people with a positive attitude about their later years of life, for instance, are less likely to develop hearing loss, frailty and illness (and even Alzheimer's disease) than those who associate aging with senility and disability. "In a very real sense," Robson writes, "we are as young as we feel inside."
Citing examples across the spectrum of human behavior, Robson shares compelling studies and anecdotal evidence to suggest that what people think will happen often turns into a self-fulfilling prophecy. The phenomenon Robson calls the "expectation effect" exerts a powerful influence over mental and physical health--from medical trial participants experiencing the benefits, as well as the troubling side effects, of drug placebos to the ways in which food labeling can change the way the body processes nutrients.
Robson (The Intelligence Trap) is an award-winning science writer in England specializing in the extremes of the human brain, body and behavior and presents behavioral science at its most thrilling. In The Expectation Effect, he more than meets his goals of equipping readers with a critical understanding of how expectations shape lives and providing practical tools for reframing and adjusting mindsets toward positivity and well-being. --Shahina Piyarali, reviewer