In 1968 I took an introductory psychology course and felt that I got an idea of what the subject was all about. I went on and studied other things and didn’t follow the developments happening there. Then in the last ten years, I found the field of psychology again and have had more time to read about what the new research has been telling us, including how we make decisions and how our brains work. I have enjoyed being able to read the authors listed below and have widened my understanding of how human beings work.
I am a retired teacher and first took pedagogy in the mid 1980s. In 2014, I took a short pedagogy course, designed for teaching mathematics, mostly at elementary or junior high levels. What I enjoyed most, was reading about everything that was new in pedagogy. I found out that quite a bit of research had been done in the previous ten years, and things had been discovered that were unknown when I took pedagogy in the 1980s. So this encouraged me to read more about psychology.
In the field of psychology, new methods of “seeing” how the brain works have been found. A lot of research has been done and I’m finding it interesting to read about the results of this research. I hope that new teachers will get the benefit of this new research, both in pedagogy and psychology, and be able to help children learn better. I also hope that the research will continue, both in psychology and pedagogy as there is still a lot more that can be learned. One main reflection I have is that the more science finds out about how humans work, the more complex the systems become.
Here is a list of some of the books that I have read and, in my opinion, the key ideas in each book.
Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow, 2011 – Over many years, Kahnemann and Amos Tversky looked at how people made decisions. They figured out that we think in two different ways. We often use heuristics or habit to make quick decisions that require little thinking effort. We use this type of thinking when driving a car and to do things automatically. This way of thinking can often lead to errors, but it is still useful and saves us a lot of effort. When learning new things, we think slowly, but this requires much more effort. For example, when learning to drive one has to think a lot about how to keep track of both what others are doing and what one is doing oneself with hands and feet. In addition these two men realized that we most often will try to avoid a loss, rather than make a gain. I recommend this book highly.
Rolf Dobelli, The Art of Thinking Clearly: Better Thinking, Better Decision, 2011 – Here is a list of the most common heuristics. Dobelli lists 99 of them and gives examples of how these biases mislead us. He also shows us how they are interrelated. This book is quick to read and a good reminder of how we don’t always think correctly. He also tries to show us how to avoid getting caught in heuristic traps.
Gerd Gigerenzer, Risk Savvy: How to Make Good Decisions, 2013 and Gut Feelings: The Intelligence of the Unconscious, 2007 – I found this author very interesting to read. Our gut feelings are how we use heuristics to make decisions more quickly, instead of reasoning through everything in detail. He also points out that checklists can be crucial in situations where it is easy to hop over a critical step. These two books will help you understand more about how we think, or don’t, and how to be better at making decisions.
Andrew Shtulman, Scienceblind: Why Our Intuitive Theories About the World are So Often Wrong, 2017 – Shtulman has several examples of how people think wrongly about things that have been proven by science. We develop a view of the world as children and even well-educated people will have the wrong view of the world as adults. It can be very difficult for people to change the way they learned to see the world as children. It also explains why it can be so hard to convince others of things one feels sure that science has proved. I found this book very interesting to read and made me think about my own views of the way the world works.
Carol S. Dweck, Mindset, How You Can Fulfil Your Potential, 2006 – I found this author difficult to read as she used the word “I” a bit too much. However, her main idea is important. The way we think about our abilities, whether they are set for life or whether we have the potential to grow, in other words, our mindset, influences how well we get on in life. Having a growth mindset allows a person to learn new things and take on new challenges.
Cordelia Fine, A Mind of Its Own: How Your Brain Distorts and Deceives, 2005, David Eagleman, Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain, 2011 and Dean Burnett, The Idiot Brain: A Neuroscientist Explains What Your Head is Really Up To, 2016 – These three books show how the brain seems to work, independent of the person that is housing it. It can be a bit disturbing to find out that you aren’t really in charge of what the brain does. But I think it is important to realize what our brain is doing for us, both the things we expect it to do, such as keep our heart beating and our lungs breathing, and also making decisions on what we see from the impulses that come in through our eyes.
There are a lot more books available on these topics, but these are the ones that I have read recently and found worthwhile reading. I think it is useful for us to be more aware of how we think, how we make our decisions and perhaps how we can use our knowledge to do better in our lives and help others.