Books of the Month
September 2008 -- Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces that Shape Our Decisions, by Dan Ariely (2008). Ariely is a professor of behavioral economics at MIT. He discusses ways in which our everyday decisions are characteristically and systematically irrational (from the standpoint of classical economic theory, at any rate). The book is written for a general audience and is both entertaining and informative. Expect to learn about such matters as anchoring and priming effects, the power of FREE!, the battle between your two brains (actually you have three, but who's counting?), solutions to the perennial problem of procrastination, and more.
October 2008 -- Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking, by Malcolm Gladwell (2005). The book is about our ability to make quick, intuitive, "thin-slice" decisions - when those decisions are actually likely to be better than slow, analytical, "thick-slice" decisions and when those decisions are likely to be worse. It's also about the nature of expertise - why experts and nonexperts are prone to make different kinds of decisions. The book examines, among other things, how the act of trying to explain/justify our values and perceptions can actually distort those values and perceptions. Sometimes we know, but don't know how we know.
November 2008 -- One Nation, Divisible: How Regional Religious Differences Shape American Politics by Mark Silk. This is a fascinating social-psychological (and historical) look at regionalism in America and how it influences our values and our political behavior.
December 2008 -- The Spiritual Life of Children by Robert Coles. A classic work of ethnography and narrative psychology, this work examines the spiritual journeys - and stories - of Christian, Muslim, Jewish, and "skeptical" (agnostic or atheist?) children. It's a fascinating examination of the relationship between culture, cognitive development, and the possibility of a "natural religion of the child".
January 2009 -- The Creative Attitude by Roger Schank. Dr. Schank explores the reasons why creativity is so rare (primarily, our understandable but excessive reliance on script-based thinking) and outlines a systematic method for enhancing personal creativity in the realm of problem-solving. He teaches you how to "pretend you're a foreigner" and how to turn unanswerable questions into answerable ones through a series of question transformations.
February 2009 -- The Big Sort by Bill Bishop. The "Big Sort" is the author's term for his belief that America is becoming more culturally polarized as the result of increasing geographic self-selection into geographical micro-enclaves of like-minded people. He claims that we increasingly inhabit "echo chambers" in which the only people with whom we interact are those who already agree with, and who hence reinforce, our pre-existing views. Interestingly, he argues that most people end up doing this without intending it or even realizing that they are doing so. He cites a vast panoply of compelling evidence in favor of his idea. He also notes implications of this feature of modern American life by way of citing the famous social psychology of the "risky shift" (now better known as the "group polarization effect"). In real-world social settings, Bishop argues, people increasingly tend to seek like-minded others, partly because many more traditional forms of social identity are on the wane (he cites the tremendous erosion in membership, between 1950 and 1980, in local civic groups that cross ideological lines, and the concomitant increases in membership in groups with an explicitly ideological purpose).
March 2009 -- The Spiritual Brain by Mario Beauregard and Denyse O'Leary. Dr. Beauregard outlines a nonmaterialist view of consciousness (rooted largely in a combination of dualist interactionism, dual-aspect monism, and perennialism). As a neuroscientist, he outlines a panoply of evidence from contemporary neuropsychology that he believes materialism cannot successfully explain (intentional brain rewiring of the sort evidenced in cognitive therapy, NDEs and RSMEs, and so forth) and offers a constructive critique of standard materialist evidences (the "God gene", "God module", "God helmet", and the like) drawn largely from evolutionary psychology. The book has an obvious (and straightforwardly expressed) bias, but is well worth a thoughtful read.
April 2009 -- The War of the World by Niall Ferguson. This is a book of history, not psychology, but deals with many topics germane to social and cognitive psychology, focusing on reasons for international and inter-ethnic conflict in the 20th century. It addresses questions related to cultural volatility, social-psychological fault lines, the nature of memetics, and more. The early chapters are a fascinating venture into applied psychology wrapped in the mantle of history.
May 2009 -- Punic Wars and Culture Wars by Ben House. Mr. House is a middle school teacher, but don't let that fool you - he is also one of the most erudite thinkers and most profound writers I've been privileged to encounter in some time (and, in a marked challenge to what's left of my aging self-esteem, he writes better than I do and has read even more books than I have). He discusses the link between philosophy and history, the nature of pedagogy (if you can teach seventh-graders, you can teach anyone), the causes and implications of "historical blindness" in America, and more. His ideas are often eye-poppingly surprising or deliberately iconoclastic, as in his chapter defending the Southern cause in the Civil War. He makes you think twice, a rare commodity in a culture where many people don't even bother to think once.
Suspended during the summer months, but resuming in September 2009.
See here for my list of the 50 books that have most influenced me in my life.