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Psychology

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Sam Harris - Death and the Present Moment. Change your Mind Change your Brain: The Inner Conditions... Transform Your Mind, Change Your Brain. Amy Cuddy: Your body language shapes who you are. Ego Depletion. The Misconception: Willpower is just a metaphor.

The Truth: Willpower is a finite resource. Forever Alone by Lysgaard(Source: Lysgaard) In 2005, a team of psychologists made a group of college students feel like scum. The researchers invited the undergraduates into their lab and asked the students to just hang out for a while and get to know each other. The setting was designed to simulate a casual meet-and-greet atmosphere, you know, like a reception or an office Christmas party – the sort of thing that never really feels all that casual? The students divided into same-sex clusters of about six people each and chatted for 20 minutes using conversation starters provided by the researchers. They asked things like “Where are you from?” The researchers – Roy F. The scientists individually told the members of one group of randomly selected people, “everyone chose you as someone they’d like to work with.”

This was the actual experiment – measuring cookie consumption based on social acceptance. Behavioural Economics / Finance. Rationality for Mortals: Gerd Gigerenzer. When less means more. Think Twice: Harnessing the Power of Counterintuition. There are now many good books available on why we make errors in judgment and decision making. This book represents Michael Mauboussin's contribution to this genre, and I think he has done a good job in pulling together a lot of information from a diverse range of credible sources. The information he presents has broad application, though he has a slight emphasis on business and investing applications (his own area of specialization). The book is also a fairly easy and quick read.

Perhaps the best way to describe the content of the book is to summarize the key points, roughly in the order they appear in the book: (1) "Think twice" to avoid errors in judgment and decision making, especially in situations where stakes are high. (2) Learn from the experiences of others in similar situations (making use of statistics when possible), rather than relying only on your own perspective, and don't be excessively optimistic about expecting to beat the odds. Pathologies of Rational Choice Theory - Green, Donald; Shapiro, Ian. Donald Green and Ian Shapiro This is the first comprehensive critical evaluation of the use of rational choice theory in political science. Writing in an accessible and nontechnical style, Donald P. Green and Ian Shapiro assess rational choice theory where it is reputed to be most successful: the study of collective action, the behavior of political parties and politicians, and such phenomena as voting cycles and Prisoner's Dilemmas.

In their hard-hitting critique, Green and Shapiro demonstrate that the much heralded achievements of rational choice theory are in fact deeply suspect and that fundamental rethinking is needed if rational choice theorists are to contribute to the understanding of politics. In their final chapters, they anticipate and respond to a variety of possible rational choice responses to their arguments, thereby initiating a dialogue that is bound to continue for some time.

Donald P. The Robot's Rebellion: Finding Meaning in the Age of Darwin, Stanovich. PrefaceAcknowledgmentsChapter 1. Staring into the Darwinian AbyssWhy Jerry Falwell Is RightThe Replicators and the VehiclesWhat Kind of Robot Is a Person? Whose Goals Are Served by Our Behavior? All Vehicles Overboard! Your Genes Care More about You than You Should Care about Them! Escaping the Clutches of the GenesThe Pivotal Insight: Putting People First Chapter 2. Chapter 3. Chapter 4. Chapter 5. Chapter 6. Chapter 7. Chapter 8. NotesReferencesAuthor IndexSubject Index. The Willpower Trick | Wired Science  January is the month of broken resolutions. The gyms are packed for a week, Jenny Craig is full of new recruits and houses are cleaned for the first time in ages. We pledge to finally become the person we want to be: svelte, neat and punctual. Alas, it doesn’t take long before the stairmasters are once again sitting empty and those same dirty T-shirts are piling up at the back of the closet.

We start binging on pizza and beer — sorry, Jenny — and forget about that pledge to become a kinder, gentler person. Human habits, in other words, are stubborn things, which helps explain why 88 percent of all resolutions end in failure, according to a 2007 survey of over 3,000 people conducted by the British psychologist Richard Wiseman. The reason our resolutions end in such dismal fashion returns us to the single most important fact about human willpower — it’s incredibly feeble. Consider this experiment, led by Baba Shiv, a behavioral economist at Stanford University.

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How to Dispel Your Illusions by Freeman Dyson. Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 499 pp., $30.00 In 1955, when Daniel Kahneman was twenty-one years old, he was a lieutenant in the Israeli Defense Forces. He was given the job of setting up a new interview system for the entire army. The purpose was to evaluate each freshly drafted recruit and put him or her into the appropriate slot in the war machine. Kahneman had a bachelor’s degree in psychology and had read a book, Clinical vs.

A famous example confirming Meehl’s conclusion is the “Apgar score,” invented by the anesthesiologist Virginia Apgar in 1953 to guide the treatment of newborn babies. Having read the Meehl book, Kahneman knew how to improve the Israeli army interviewing system. Reflecting fifty years later on his experience in the Israeli army, Kahneman remarks in Thinking, Fast and Slow that it was not unusual in those days for young people to be given big responsibilities. Cognitive illusions are the main theme of his book. The story of the self. Memory is our past and future. To know who you are as a person, you need to have some idea of who you have been. And, for better or worse, your remembered life story is a pretty good guide to what you will do tomorrow.

"Our memory is our coherence," wrote the surrealist Spanish-born film-maker, Luis Buñuel, "our reason, our feeling, even our action. " Lose your memory and you lose a basic connection with who you are. It's no surprise, then, that there is fascination with this quintessentially human ability. This is quite a trick, psychologically speaking, and it has made cognitive scientists determined to find out how it is done. When you ask people about their memories, they often talk as though they were material possessions, enduring representations of the past to be carefully guarded and deeply cherished.

We know this from many different sources of evidence. Even highly emotional memories are susceptible to distortion. What accounts for this unreliability? Antonio Damasio: The quest to understand consciousness. How the Mind Works | Video channel on TED.com.