Can Books Help Us Understand Human Psychology? Read these 5 Best Psychology Books to know More

                               

 

One of psychology's main objectives is to describe, explain, predict, and enhance human behavior. Some psychologists achieve this by adding to our fundamental knowledge of human thought, emotion, and behavior. Others engage in practical work to address issues that affect daily life in the real world. And yes books are always the ones we can rely upon even if it’s to understand human nature. 

 

Phantoms in the Brain: Probing the Mysteries of the Human Mind

V.S. Ramachandran and Sandra Blakeslee

Internationally renowned neuroscientist V.S. Ramachandran is known for providing solutions to the complex and peculiar questions about human nature that few researchers have dared to tackle. Only the astounding simplicity of his experiments, which employed low-tech items like cotton swabs, glasses of water, and dime-store mirrors, can equal his audacious conclusions about the brain. 

Dr. Ramachandran describes in Phantoms in the Brain how his work with patients who have bizarre neurological disorders has revealed new insights into the deep architecture of the brain. He also discusses what these discoveries tell us about who we are, how we construct our body image, why we laugh or become depressed, why we may believe in God, how we make decisions, deceive ourselves, and dream, and perhaps even why we're so intelligent at philosophy, music, and art.

How the Mind Works- Steven Pinker

One of the foremost cognitive scientists in the world, Steven Pinker, achieves for the rest of the mind what he did for language in his 1994 book The Language Instinct. He describes what the mind is, how it developed, and how it enables us to perceive, reason, feel, laugh, engage in social interaction, appreciate the arts, and consider the meaning of life. 

No other science writer makes me laugh so much, and Pinker does it with the wit that led Mark Ridley to write in the New York Times Book Review, "[Pinker] deserves the superlatives that are b Pinker questions popular beliefs including that parents socialize their children, that powerful emotions are irrational, and that nature is good and contemporary civilization is wicked while rehabilitating certain outmoded beliefs like that the mind is a computer and that natural selection formed human nature. 

Los Angeles Times Book Prize Winner A 1997 Best Book of Publishers Weekly and a Notable Book of the Year of the New York Times front-page reviews in the Boston Globe Book Section, the San Diego Union Book Review, and the Washington Post Book World. Featured in Time magazine, the New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, Nature, Science, and Science Times. Stowed on him." The book's arguments are just as brash as its title.

50 Great Myths of Popular Psychology: Shattering Widespread

The book "50 Great Myths of Popular Psychology" makes use of well-known myths to teach readers how to tell science from pseudoscience. This book examines how to discriminate between genuine and fictitious assertions in popular psychology by using well-known myths as a vehicle. It tackles concepts like "opposites attract," "people employ just 10% of their minds," and "handwriting reveals your personality" that readers will identify with but are frequently misunderstood. 

It offers a "myth-busting kit" for assessing claims made by folk psychologists in daily life. It imparts valuable critical thinking abilities through in-depth analyses of each myth. The reader can investigate more than 200 additional psychological myths in it. A list of helpful websites for researching psychological myths is included in the appendix. It includes a postscript with amazing psychological discoveries that appear to be myths but are real. Additionally, it has an interesting and approachable writing style that is appealing to both lay readers and students.

Thinking, Fast and Slow – Daniel Kahneman

The focus of "Thinking, Fast and Slow" is on how intuition and slow thinking influence our judgment and how to use both systems to our advantage. Kahneman explains how to think and prevent errors in situations where the stakes are extremely high using behavioral economics ideas.

This book is worth reading if you tend to make snap judgments that you occasionally regret or feel too exhausted to spend much time analyzing the pros and disadvantages of different options.

Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely

In Predictably Irrational, behavioral economist Dan Ariely challenges the widely held belief that human behavior is inherently logical and argues that we are much less rational than conventional economic theory predicts. Ariely contends that human actions are not arbitrary. Predictably Irrational presents a challenge to the conventional rational choice theory by describing the various ways in which our decision-making is impacted. We think we make wise, logical decisions, or at the very least, we think we influence the decisions we do. Ariely challenges this idea and demonstrates how our choices are not always as logical as we believe.

The book addresses a wide range of factors that unconsciously influence our decision-making in its 15 chapters. Context, perceived demand, pricing, emotion, anchoring, stereotypes, the decoy effect, and the endowment effect are some of these settings and mental models. Although the theories and components covered in Predictably Irrational can be applied to any kind of circumstance, Ariely opts to largely use economic decisions as examples. This in turn gave insight into how companies exploit these weaknesses in human nature to affect the decisions that customers make.

Written By-Aasis

Edited by - Kritika Sharma