My former colleague from the BBC Trust, Michael Hedley, has written an interesting review of Honest Signals by Alex (Sandy) Pentland for the forthcoming issue of The Business Economist. Pentland co-directs the Digital Life Consortium at MIT. I can't post the whole of Michael's review here, but here's an extract for people interested in this book about the ways we could use social networks for improved decision-making:

Pentland does present a persuasive and digestible logic on the power of unconscious reasoning, similar in some ways to Malcolm Gladwell’s more populist Blink, although critically the evidence seems to thin as group sizes increase. Rather vainly I welcome the idea that our innate reasoning may be more powerful than we realise. It is possible that we have become over-reliant on analysis post-Enlightenment. However, I would still be very reluctant to abandon rational schools of thought, particularly for critical decisions. Instead I think this work highlights how rational decision making could be enhanced, and it is warming to note that this means working together.