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
are one of those people who just discovered psychology and want to learn more about it,
I want to give you my list of 7 essential psychology books. They’re all written for
big audiences, so you don’t need a degree in psychology to understand. You just need
to love this subject. // #7: 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 perspective of other groups. All of this happens because
our psychology is driven by emotions. Our thoughts defend what we are feelings, 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 he talks
about politics but he never becomes 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. #6: Phantoms
in the brain. I LOVE all of Oliver Sacks’s texts on neuroscience, but I want to give
a shout out to V. S. Ramachandran and Sandra Blakeslee’s underappreciated Phantoms in
the Brain. This book makes clinical neuroscience easy to understand. Each chapter covers a
different disorder, like phantom limb syndrome, where you still feel a limb that’s been
lost, and Capgras Delusion, when you feel like someone you know has been replaced by
an imposter. But they don’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.
#5: 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 any textbook I’ve read in grad school. She shows you
in brutal honesty the numbing effect of depression, the dangerous highs of mania, and what it’s
like to go to therapy and receive medication. Marbles should be required reading for anyone
going into the mental health field. #4: 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. #3: The Spirit catches you and you fall
down. Reporter Anne Fadiman tells the story about a miscommunication between a Hmong refugee
family and their healthcare team in California and the devastating impact it had on a little
girl. It gets you thinking about a lot of issues about culture, like how differently
we see the world depending on the way we were brought up or how much get lost in the translation
of languages. The book has become required reading for many healthcare professionals
who promote the idea of “cultural competence”. My lesson from the book is you can never be
“competent” on someone else’s culture, you can’t assume that you understand why
someone is doing what they’re doing. Instead, you have to always respond to the culture
of the other person, to find a way of understanding how they came to be who they are in their
own words. #2: Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard. I love that the authors,
psychologist Chip Heath and writer Dan Heath, are brothers and partnered to write this book.
In it, they summarize most of what we know about changing the behavior of 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 setup their environment so that change
is easy. Most of us only give the rationale for change...even though emotions and the
environment are THE KEYS to changing behavior. Critics say Switch is too simplistic and too
business focus, but that’s what I like about it because it’s so the opposite of most
psychological writing on behavioral change. #1: The Story of Psychology. The late Morton
Hunt, originally a psychologist who became a beloved writer, brings to life every major
figure in the world of psychology. Well, mostly western white male psychology. It explores
how discoveries were made, why certain perspectives were born, how they faded away, and the personal
politics that influenced the entire field. The book is thick, about 900 pages, but if
you love psychology this is a must have on your bookshelf. If you can read these 7 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 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.