Thursday, December 21, 2017

Top ten books about the unconscious

John Bargh is a social psychologist and one of the world’s leading experts on the unconscious mind. His research has appeared in over 170 publications, as well as in Blink by Malcolm Gladwell. In 2014, he received the Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award from the American Psychological Association. He is currently the James Rowland Angell Professor of Psychology at Yale University and director of the ACME (Automaticity in Cognition, Motivation, and Evaluation) laboratory. Before You Know It: The Unconscious Reasons We Do What We Do is his first book.

One of Bargh's top ten books on the variety of unconscious influences in everyday life, as shared at the Guardian:
Face Value by Alexander Todorov (2017)

The power of a person’s face over our impressions of their personality is a case in point. We feel so sure that we know someone’s personality from just their face, but we are wrong. We mistake the features of their resting face for a temporary emotional expression instead. Take Grumpy Cat, for instance, who isn’t really grumpy – it’s just the way her face was made. In Todorov’s most dramatic demonstrations, ratings of the trustworthiness and competence of political candidates based on their photographs alone predicted the outcome of elections in the US with better than 70% accuracy.
Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

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