Content tagged with “psychology”

There are 42 item(s) tagged with “psychology” on this site.

Other tags used by these items: business, interpersonal, society, memetics, food, health, addiction, depression, sports, critical-thinking, self-help, information-architecture

Antimemetics: Why Some Ideas Resist Spreading
Section
Deane’s Library
Type
Book Review
Date
July 17, 2025
Words
138

“This is an odd book. It’s quite short, which is good, because had it been much longer, I might have bailed out. I don’t think it quite delivers on the title. It’s supposedly about how good ideas don’t spread, and the author is all over the place trying to explain that. There are some obvious…”

Better, Not Perfect: A Realist’s Guide to Maximum Sustainable Goodness
Section
Deane’s Library
Type
Book Review
Date
August 16, 2023
Words
222

“This book was written by Harvard professor as a paean to Utilitarianism. That’s a philosophy that says every decision we make should be designed to provide the greatest possible value to the most people. Pure utilitarianism would be tough to achieve, and that’s conceded in the book: we try to be…”

The Elephant in the Brain: Hidden Motives in Everyday Life
Section
Deane’s Library
Type
Book Review
Date
May 17, 2020
Words
83

“A good discussion about our hidden motives in all sorts of cognitive arenas like art, religion, politics, etc. We spend most of lives lying to ourselves about why we do things. Their thoughts on healthcare are interesting. Namely, we over-user health care because we take comfort in the idea that…”

The Extended Mind: The Power of Thinking Outside the Brain
Section
Deane’s Library
Type
Book Review
Date
July 31, 2022
Words
260

“This is an interesting look about all the ways we think and process information other than the neurons and synapses in our brains. To be fair, we don’t really think outside the brain, but external stimuli help us process information in ways we don’t often realize. Each chapter covers a way think:…”

Farsighted: How We Make the Decisions That Matter the Most
Section
Deane’s Library
Type
Book Review
Date
October 26, 2018
Words
79

“I love Steven Johnson, but this one was rough. It was…muddled. I’m still having trouble figuring out what his core premise was. He weaved in an out of it, and the book never seemed to have a central pillar to rally around. Then, at the end, he goes into a 20-page examination of the novel…”

The Great Beanie Baby Bubble: Mass Delusion and the Dark Side of Cute
Section
Deane’s Library
Type
Book Review
Date
August 17, 2022
Words
316

“Enormously entertaining book about the Beanie Baby craze of the mid and late 90s. The book goes deep into Ty Warner’s backstory. He’s the founder of the company that bears his first name. He’s a man who spent his entire career in ‘plush,’ which is the industry term for stuffed animals. Warner is an…”

How Minds Change: The Surprising Science of Belief, Opinion, and Persuasion
Section
Deane’s Library
Type
Book Review
Date
August 14, 2025
Words
252

“Here’s the biggest thing I learned from this book: facts do not convince anyone of anything. And you cannot change someone’s mind. They can only change it themselves. Someone once told me the secret to sales: ‘You have to put an idea in someone’s head and make them think they thought of it first.’…”

The Inner Game of Tennis
Section
Deane’s Library
Type
Book Review
Date
May 5, 2025
Words
240

“First off, this book has nothing to do with tennis. Well, maybe five percent to do with tennis. The rest is about the mental side of any skill. It’s mostly about self-doubt, self-criticism, and the urge to micro-manage ourselves into performance. The author talks about ‘Self 1’ and ‘Self 2.’ Self 1…”

The Intelligence Trap: Why Smart People Make Dumb Mistakes
Section
Deane’s Library
Type
Book Review
Date
October 16, 2021
Words
213

“A book about how smart people are sometimes very stupid. Sometimes, we can be so smart and analytical that we outsmart ourselves, lose sight of the forest for the trees, and come full-circle back to stupid. One example is Arthur Conan-Doyle, the nominally brilliant author of Sherlock Holmes. He was…”

Mindset: The New Psychology of Success
Section
Deane’s Library
Type
Book Review
Date
May 5, 2017
Words
133

“The core point of this book is fantastic and wonderful: we are creatures of growth, and if we approach our lives with the mindset that we can change and are not fixed, then it will have a huge impact on our development and potential. That’s it – you could have written that in a blog post. But the…”

Noosphere
Section
Stuff I Looked Up
Type
Explanation
Date
November 24, 2022
Words
150

“This is the collective state of human reason and knowledge. Everything we know, understand, and can reason about as a species is the noosphere. It is constantly expanding as we learn more and more. The name comes from the Greek ‘noos’ which means ‘mind’ or ‘thought.’ The noosphere is an informal…”

Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness
Section
Deane’s Library
Type
Book Review
Date
October 1, 2022
Words
367

“This is a book about behavioral economics – why humans make the choices they do, and how they can be persuaded to make other choices. Well, not ‘persuaded’ so much, but rather – wait for it – nudged . A ‘nudge’ is a change to how a choice is framed or presented that causes people to pick an option…”

Parasocial
Section
Stuff I Looked Up
Type
Explanation
Date
September 8, 2021
Words
321

“A recent word to describe a pseudo-relationship that a viewer feels with a public performer. This is an increasing phenomenon given the unprecedented access that social media has given us to the lives of public figures. There used to be a clear separation between viewer and performer, but that has…”

The Road Back to You: An Enneagram Journey to Self-Discovery
Section
Deane’s Library
Type
Book Review
Date
December 2, 2019
Words
142

“The value of this book depends on how much faith you place in the Enneagram, an ancient method of categorizing personalities into nine different types. The book is wonderfully well-written, but it suffers from two core problems. First, since we’re all one type (with maybe one additionally ‘wing’),…”

Sources of Power: How People Make Decisions
Section
Deane’s Library
Type
Book Review
Date
July 17, 2017
Words
47

“ The result of years of research about decision making. Spoiler: we rarely compare alternative paths of action. Instead, we seize on something we think will work, then evaluate that. If we decide it’s unworkable, then we move on to the next obvious option, and down the list. ”

Thinking, Fast and Slow
Section
Deane’s Library
Type
Book Review
Date
February 6, 2017
Words
32

“ Fascinating, but a bit of a slog to get through. Gets tedious towards the end. Key takeaway: you’re not good at thinking, you’re just good at thinking that you’re good at thinking. ”

Triggers: Creating Behavior That Lasts
Section
Deane’s Library
Type
Book Review
Date
December 28, 2015
Words
147

“This is one of those books which launches with a clear premise and then loses its way. The book is purportedly about ‘triggers,’ things in the environment that get in the way of you changing as a person. Unfortunately, about halfway through, it became a standard-issue self-improvement book, and…”

Wanting: The Power of Mimetic Desire in Everyday Life
Section
Deane’s Library
Type
Book Review
Date
July 31, 2022
Words
438

“This book explains ‘The Romantic Lie,’ which is a theory proposed by Rene Girard. It says that we’re fooling ourselves when we think we want something just because we do – we actually only want things because we’ve been programmed by other’s to want them. This is what’s known as ‘mimetic desire,’…”