Psychology Social Science

Why do people dodge responsibility when things fall apart? Why the parade of public figures unable to own up when they screw up? Why the endless marital quarrels over who is right? Why can we see hypocrisy in others but not in ourselves? Are we all liars? Or do we really believe the stories we tell? Backed by years of research and delivered in lively, energetic prose, Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me) offers a fascinating explanation of self-deception.

Drawing upon stories from his own career, Godsey shares how innate psychological flaws in judges, police, lawyers, and juries coupled with a "tough on crime" environment can cause investigations to go awry, leading to the convictions of innocent people. Godsey explores distinct psychological human weaknesses inherent in the criminal justice system - confirmation bias, memory malleability, cognitive dissonance, bureaucratic denial, dehumanization, and others - and illustrates each with stories from his time as a hard-nosed prosecutor, then as an attorney for the Ohio Innocence Project.

Carol Dweck’s multi-million-copy bestseller Mindset transformed our view of individual potential, coining the terms “fixed” and “growth” mindset: in a “fixed” mindset, talent and intelligence are viewed as predetermined traits, while in a “growth” mindset, talent and intelligence can be nurtured. In Cultures of Growth, Dweck’s protégé, Mary Murphy, a social psychologist at both Stanford and Indiana University, shows that mindset transcends individuals.

Americans are a "positive" people—cheerful, optimistic, and upbeat: this is our reputation as well as our self-image. But more than a temperament, being positive, we are told, is the key to success and prosperity. In this utterly original take on the American frame of mind, Barbara Ehrenreich traces the strange career of our sunny outlook from its origins as a marginal nineteenth-century healing technique to its enshrinement as a dominant, almost mandatory, cultural attitude.

Alexandra Horowitz’s brilliant On Looking: Eleven Walks with Expert Eyes shows us how to see the spectacle of the ordinary - to practice, as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle put it, "the observation of trifles". On Looking is structured around a series of eleven walks the author takes, mostly in her Manhattan neighborhood, with experts on a diverse range of subjects, including an urban sociologist, the well-known artist Maira Kalman, a geologist, a physician, and a sound designer. She also walks with a child and a dog to see the world as they perceive it.

Wild Feminine offers a unique, holistic approach to reclaiming the power, spirit, and joy of the female body and to understanding its connection to creative energy flow. By restoring physical and energetic balance in the pelvic bowl, women can learn to care for themselves in a nourishing and respectful manner, heal spiritual fractures, and renew their relationship with the sacred feminine.

Utilizing the linguistic insights of her “witty and brilliant” (Blyth Roberson, author of America the Beautiful?) first book Wordslut and the sociological explorations of her breakout hit Cultish, Amanda Montell now turns her erudite eye to the inner workings of the human mind and its biases in her most personal and electrifying work yet.

An “absorbing, provocative, and far-reaching” (Kirkus Reviews, starred review) look at what power is, who gets it, and what happens when they do, based on over 500 interviews with those who (temporarily, at least) have had the upper hand - from the creator of the Power Corrupts podcast and Washington Post columnist Brian Klaas.

She only wanted to be a mother to her own children - FLDS Cult leader had other plans. Sarah was born in 1979 in the FLDS compound. At 18, Sarah entered into an arranged marriage to Richard S Allred who was the grandson and personal bodyguard to leader Rulon Jeffs, and later Warren Jeffs. Sarah was the first of five wives and was often used to set the example. Sarah's husband was given Warren's prized daughter as his third wife who became Warren's source to control Sarah's family. As the Leadership adjusted, her world turned upside down.

In Bringing up Bébé, journalist and mother Pamela Druckerman investigated a society of good sleepers, gourmet eaters, and mostly calm parents. She set out to learn how the French achieve all this, while telling the story of her own young family in Paris. Bébé Day by Day distills the lessons of Bringing up Bébé into an easy-to-listen-to guide for parents and caregivers.

The rich are not only getting richer, they are becoming more dangerous. Starting in the early 1980s the top one percent broke away from the rest of us to become the most unstable force in the economy. An elite that had once been the flat line on the American income charts - models of financial propriety - suddenly set off on a wild ride of economic binges. Not only do they control more than a third of the country's wealth, their increasing vulnerability to the booms and busts of the stock market wreak havoc on our consumer economy, financial markets, communities, and government finances.

Emerson, the Stoics, and Me has descriptive copy which is not yet available from the Publisher.

The founder of the international Transition Towns movement asks why true creative, positive thinking is in decline, asserts that it's more important now than ever, and suggests ways our communities can revive and reclaim it.

Asian Americans are experiencing a racial reckoning regarding their identity, inspiring them to radically reconsider the cultural frameworks that enabled their assimilation into American culture. As Asian Americans investigate the personal and societal effects of longstanding cultural narratives suggesting they take up as little space as possible, their mental health becomes critically important. Yet despite the fact that over 18 million people of Asian descent live in the United States today—they are the racial group least likely to seek out mental health services.

More people know who Khloe Kardashian is than who Rene Descartes was. Most can't find Delaware on a map, correctly spell the word occurrence, or name the largest ocean on the planet. But how important is it to fill our heads with facts? A few keystrokes can summon almost any information in seconds. Why should we bother learning facts at all? Best-selling author William Poundstone confronts that timely question in Head in the Cloud.

Every day, we make decisions on topics ranging from personal investments to schools for our children to the meals we eat to the causes we champion. Unfortunately, we often choose poorly. The reason, the authors explain, is that, being human, we are all susceptible to various biases that can lead us to blunder. Our mistakes can make us poor and unhealthy. We often make bad decisions about education, personal finance, health care, family, and the environment.

If you’ve ever felt ineffective, invisible, or inarticulate, chances are you weren’t actually any of those things. Those feelings may instead have been the result of a lack of awareness we all seem to have for how our words, actions, and even our mere presence affect other people. In You Have More Influence Than You Think, social psychologist Vanessa Bohns draws from her original research to illustrate why we fail to recognize the influence we have, and how that lack of awareness can lead us to miss opportunities or accidentally misuse our power.

In Making Monsters, David Livingstone Smith offers a poignant meditation on the philosophical and psychological roots of dehumanization. Drawing on harrowing accounts of lynchings, Smith establishes what dehumanization is and what it isn't. When we dehumanize our enemy, we hold two incongruous beliefs at the same time: We believe our enemy is at once subhuman and fully human.

Drawing on rarely consulted archives, Crews shows us a man who blundered tragicomically in his dealings with patients, who never produced a corroborated cure, who promoted cocaine in one decade and was deluded by it in the next, who misunderstood the psychological controversies of the era, and who advanced his career through falsifying case histories and betraying the mentors who had helped him to rise.

Exciting new developments in brain science are continuing the debates on these issues, and the field has now expanded to include biologists, neuroscientists, psychologists, and philosophers. This controversial book clarifies the potentially confusing arguments, and the major theories, while also outlining the amazing pace of discoveries in neuroscience. Covering areas such as the construction of self in the brain, mechanisms of attention, the neural correlates of consciousness, and the physiology of altered states of consciousness, Susan Blackmore highlights our latest findings.