7 Essential Psychology Books.mp4

For many of you in the psych show community, this channel is your first exposure to psychology. This is awesome because it's the whole reason why I started this channel. I wanted to make psychology easily accessible to everyone, everywhere. But I also feel guilty because while our videos are easy to watch, they never go in depth into any subject. So if you're one of those people who just discovered psychology and want to learn more about it, I want to give you my list of seven essential psychology books. They're all written for big audiences, so you don't need a degree in psychology to understand them. You just need to love the subject. Number seven, the righteous mind. Why good people are divided by politics and religion. Psychologist Jonathan Haidt describes how morals bring people together and then blind them to the perspectives of other groups. All of this happens because our psychology is driven by emotions. Our thoughts defend what we are feeling, just like a lawyer defending their client. When we feel threatened by someone else's beliefs, we're able to come up with all sorts of reasons why they are wrong and we are right. Reasons that usually don't make any sense, but feel true. What I love most about Haidt is how he talks about politics without becoming partisan. He actually calls out the liberal bias within psychology and describes how important it is for all groups of people to have a mix of liberal and conservative perspectives. This is a must read for anyone who wants to understand the political polarization that is spreading across the world. Here's some other books that you might like, but you don't have to take my word for it. Number six, phantoms in the brain. I love all of Oliver Sacks' texts on neuroscience, but I want to give a shout out to V.S. Ramachandran and Sandra Blakes-Lee's Underappreciated Phantoms in the Brain. This book makes clinical neuroscience easy to understand. Each chapter covers a different disorder, like phantom limb syndrome, when you feel like a limb that you've lost is still there, and Capgras delusion, when you feel like someone you know has been replaced by an imposter. The book doesn't read like a textbook. It feels like you're reading a mystery novel. I love how the authors walk us through Ramachandran's thought process and how simple some of his solutions are, like how a mirror can heal phantom limb pain. Number five, marbles. Mania, depression, Michelangelo, and me, a graphic memoir. This is one of the best memoirs I've read about mental illness. Cartoonist Ellen Forney describes what bipolar depression is like better than anything else I've read in grad school. She shows you in brutal honesty how numbing depression can be, the dangerous highs of mania, and what it's like to go through therapy and receive medication. Marbles should be required reading for anyone going into the mental health field. Number four, Remembering Satan, a tragic case of recovered memory. Remembering Satan is a tough book to read. Pulitzer Prize winning author Lawrence Wright explores a real life case of alleged child abuse in a satanic cult. That's heavy stuff. But as the story unfolds, you discover how much memories can be manipulated, how unreliable eyewitness testimony is, and how much the justice system can succumb to group pressure. Remembering Satan will leave you questioning what exactly is real if our memories are so fragile. It's a tough read, but an important one. Number three, The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down. Reporter Ann Fadiman tells a story about a miscommunication between a Hmong refugee family and their healthcare team in California, and the devastating impact it all has on a little girl. It gets you thinking about a lot of issues related to culture, like how differently we see the world depending on the way we are brought up, or how much gets lost in the translation of languages. The book has become a required reading for many healthcare professionals who promote the idea of cultural competence. My takeaway from the book is you can never be truly culturally competent. You can't assume you understand why someone is doing what they're doing. Instead, you always have to be culturally responsive. Find a way of understanding how someone else came to be who they are in their own words. Number two, Switch. How to Change Things When Change is Hard. I love how the authors, psychologist Chip Heath and writer Dan Heath, are brothers and came together to write this book. In it, they summarize most of what we know about changing the behavior of individuals, groups, organizations, and communities in a simple, easy to understand idea. To change what someone is doing, you have to give them a reason, get them emotional, and set up their environment so that change is easy. Most of us usually just give the rationale for change, even though as it's highlighted in the book, emotions in the environment are the keys to changing behavior. Critics say Switch is too simplistic and too business focused. That's what I love about it because it's the opposite of so many psychological books on behavior change. Number one, The Story of Psychology. The late Morton Hunt, originally a psychologist who later became a beloved writer, brings to life every major figure in the world of psychology. Well, every major, mostly white, male figure in psychology. It explores how discoveries were made, why certain perspectives were born and how they faded away, and the personal politics that influence the entire field. The book is thick, about 90 pages, but if you love psychology, this is a must-have on your bookshelf. If you can read these seven books, you'll know the basics of what psychology is and how it impacts your daily life. But there's a lot of great stuff I left off on this list and topics I didn't cover at all. So let's discuss. What are your favorite psychology books? Let me know in the comments below.