Common Read 2017: Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me): Books and Related Materials

When "man is the measure of all things," woman is forever trying to measure up. In this enlightening book, Carol Tavris unmasks the widespread but invisible custom -- pervasive in the social sciences, medicine, law, and history -- of treating men as the normal standard, women as abnormal. Tavris expands our vision of normalcy by illuminating the similarities between women and men and showing that the real differences lie not in gender, but in power, resources, and life experiences.

On the Take offers an unsettling look at the pervasive payoffs that physicians take from big drug companies and other medical suppliers, arguing that the billion-dollar onslaught of industry money has deflected many physicians' moral compasses and directly impacted the everyday care we receive from the doctors and trusted institutions.

They are tiny. They are tall. They are gray. They are green. They survey our world with enormous glowing eyes. To conduct their shocking experiments, they creep in at night to carry humans off to their spaceships. Yet there is no evidence that they exist at all. So how could anyone believe he or she was abducted by aliens? Or want to believe it? To answer these questions, psychologist Susan Clancy interviewed and evaluated "abductees"--old and young, male and female, religious and agnostic. She listened closely to their stories--how they struggled to explain something strange in their remembered experience, how abduction seemed plausible, and how, having suspected abduction, they began to recollect it, aided by suggestion and hypnosis. Clancy argues that abductees are sane and intelligent people who have unwittingly created vivid false memories from a toxic mix of nightmares, culturally available texts, and a powerful drive for meaning that science is unable to satisfy. For them, otherworldly terror can become a transforming, even inspiring experience. This book is not only a subtle exploration of the workings of memory, but a sensitive inquiry into the nature of belief.

Weapons of influence -- Reciprocation: The old give and take, and take -- Commitment and consistency: Hobgoblins of the mind -- Social proof: Truths are us -- Liking: The friendly thief -- Authority: Directed deference -- Scarcity: The rule of the few -- Instant influence: Primitive consent for an automatic age.
Dr. Robert Cialdini explains the psychology of why people say "yes" -- and how to apply these understandings. You'll learn the six universal principles, how to use them to become a skilled persuader -- and how to defend yourself against them.

Written from a cross-disciplinary perspective, the essays in this collection are divided into four sections: the causes of wrongful convictions, the social characteristics of the wrongfully convicted, case studies and personal histories, and suggestions for change in the criminal justice system.

True Witness describes the latest battles in a one-hundred-year war between scientists studying the shortcomings of human memory and a legal system that relies on eyewitness testimony as a central tool of identifying and convicting suspects - too often wrongly. As researchers have struggled to solve the mystery of "How do eyewitness mistakes happen?" they have met resistance from prosecutors and courts more concerned with convictions than justice."

Leon Festinger's theory of cognitive dissonance has been widely recognized for its important and influential concepts in areas of motivation and social psychology. The theory of dissonance is here applied to the problem of why partial reward, delay of reward , and effort expenditure during training result in increased resistance to extinction.

Why are lovers quicker to forgive their partners for infidelity than for leaving dirty dishes in the sink? Why do patients remember long medical procedures as less painful than short ones? Why do home sellers demand prices they wouldn't dream of paying if they were home buyers? Why does the line at the grocery store always slow down when we join it? In this book, Harvard psychologist Gilbert describes the foibles of imagination and illusions of foresight that cause each of us to misconceive our tomorrows and misestimate our satisfactions. Using the latest research in psychology, cognitive neuroscience, philosophy, and behavioral economics, Gilbert reveals what we have discovered about the uniquely human ability to imagine the future, our capacity to predict how much we will like it when we get there, and why we seem to know so little about the hearts and minds of the people we are about to become.--From publisher description.

Unfulfilled prophecies and disappointed messiahs.--Teaching and prophecies from outer space.--Spreading the word on earth.--The long wait for orders.--Four days of very imminent salvation.--An unfulfilled prophecy and an elated prophet.--Reactions to disconfirmation.--Alone and dry.--Epilogue.--Methodological appendix.--Notes to chapter 1.--Index.

The United States of 1940, an isolationist country divided along class lines, still suffering the ravages of a decade-long depression, and woefully unprepared for war, was unified by a common threat and by the extraordinary leadership of Franklin Roosevelt to become, only five years later, the preeminent economic and military power in the world. At the center of the country's transformation was the complex partnership of Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt. While Franklin manned the war room at the White House and met with Winston Churchill, Joseph Stalin, Mackenzie King, and other world leaders to discuss strategy for the war abroad, Eleanor crisscrossed the country, visiting the American people, seeing how the war and policies her husband made in Washington affected them as individuals. Bringing to bear the tools of both history and biography, Goodwin relates the unique story of how Franklin Roosevelt, surrounded by his small circle of intimates, led the nation to military victory abroad against seemingly insurmountable odds and, with Eleanor's essential help, forever changed the fabric of American society.

In the 1960s Yale University psychologist Stanley Milgram famously carried out a series of experiments that forever changed our perceptions of morality and free will. The subjects—or “teachers”—were instructed to administer electroshocks to a human “learner,” with the shocks becoming progressively more powerful and painful. Controversial but now strongly vindicated by the scientific community, these experiments attempted to determine to what extent people will obey orders from authority figures regardless of consequences

What makes marriage work? -- Marriage styles: the good, the bad, and the volatile -- The four horsemen of the apocalypse: warning signs -- Your private thoughts become cast in stone -- The two marriages: his and hers -- Your marriage: the diagnosis -- The four keys to improving your marriage -- Strengthening the foundations.

Torture is the most widespread human rights crime in the modern world, practiced in more than one hundred countries, including the United States. How could something so brutal, almost unthinkable, be so prevalent? The Phenomenon of Torture: Readings and Commentary is designed to answer that question and many others. Beginning with a sweeping view of torture in Western history, the book examines questions such as these: Can anyone be turned into a torturer? What exactly is the psychological relationship between a torturer and his victim? Are certain societies more prone to use torture? Are there any circumstances under which torture is justified—to procure critical information in order to save innocent lives, for example? How can torture be stopped or at least its incidence be reduced?

A treatment of party identification, in which three political scientists argue that identification with political parties powerfully determines how citizens look at politics and cast their ballots. They build a case for the continuing theoretical and political significance of partisan identities.

The credibility of children's testimony is a highly debated topic in America's courtrooms, universities, and living rooms. Does the ingenuousness of children assure that their testimony will always be truthful? Or are children easily misled by overzealous investigators and therapists into making untrue allegations? Stephen J. Ceci and Maggie Bruck contend that the truth falls somewhere between these extremes. Using case studies ranging from the Salem Witch Hunt to the Little Rascals Day Care case to illustrate their argument, Jeopardy in the Courtroom draws from the vast corpus of scientific research to clarify what is most relevant for evaluating and understanding children's statements made in the legal arena.

To grasp the extent of changes taking place and to understand the forces of change, Academic Capitalism examines the current state of academic careers and institutions, with a particular focus on public research universities in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, and Australia. In this wide-ranging analysis, Slaughter and Leslie leave no aspect of academic work unexplored: undergraduate and graduate education, teaching and research, student aid policies, and federal research policies. All are part of the equation. The authors pay particular attention to how faculty spend their time, what forces drive their choices of activities, and what this means for higher education.

Smoke and Mirrors: The Devastating Effect of False Sexual Abuse Claims is an uncompromising examination of how false allegations originate, gather momentum, and too often culminate by ripping apart the lives of innocent people. Dr. Terence Campbell, a nationally recognized authority in the area of forensic psychology, passionately debates how false allegations of sexual abuse can occur anywhere to anyone

"How are the beliefs and behaviors of people influenced by others? For more than twenty years, Elliot Aronson's The Social Animal has been captivating readers by looking at the answers to this multifaceted question. Presenting the story of modern social psychology as a vivid, engaging narrative, Aronson has provided the most authoritative and accessible introduction to the field available. And by staying close to the real work of social psychologists, he ensures that each new edition incorporates the most important recent research and insights. The result: a classic - venerable yet vibrant.

Americans create 57% of the world's advertising while representing only 6% of its population; half of our waking hours are spent immersed in the mass media. Persuasion has always been integral to the democratic process, but increasingly, thoughtful discussion is being replaced with simplistic soundbites and manipulative messages. Drawing on the history of propaganda as well as on contemporary research in social psychology, Age of Propaganda shows how the tactics used by political campaigners, sales agents, advertisers, televangelists, demagogues, and others often take advantage of our emotions by appealing to our deepest fears and most irrational hopes, creating a distorted vision of the world we live in.

Of all the issues on the human rights agenda, torture offered Americans the moral high ground . . . until this year. With the abuses at Abu Ghraib that led to accusations of torture within the domestic criminal justice system, the question of cruel and unusual treatment has taken on new urgency in the United States and elsewhere.

Conflict of interest occurs at all levels of governance, ranging from local to global, both in the public and the corporate and financial spheres. There is increasing awareness that conflicts of interest may distort decision-making processes and generate inappropriate outcomes, thereby undermining the functioning of public institutions and markets. However, the current worldwide trend towards regulation, which seeks to forestall, prevent and manage conflicts of interest, has its price. Drawbacks may include the stifling of decision-making processes, the loss of expertise among decision-makers and a vicious circle of distrust. This interdisciplinary and international book addresses specific situations of conflict of interest in different spheres of governance, particularly in global, public and corporate governance.

Collection of sixty-five cases of erroneous criminal convictions of innocent people, the causes of error being due in the main to mistaken identification, circumstantial evidence, or perjury, or some combination of these. Includes an analysis of the statutes of European countries providing indemnity for wrongfully convicted and arrested persons, to be used as a basis for American legislation.

This volume contains essays by a range of distinguished philosophers on the problem of self-deception, or rather, self and deception. The work proceeds from the assumption that changing constructions of self within Western cultures, and alternative notions of self in other cultures requires that we rethink traditional strategies for explaining the phenomenon of self-deception. The concept of self is central to any sustained inquiry into self-deception, the pertinent issue being what sort of self is victim (or beneficiary) of self-deception.

We're all hypocrites. Why? Hypocrisy is the natural state of the human mind. Robert Kurzban shows us that the key to understanding our behavioral inconsistencies lies in understanding the mind's design. The human mind consists of many specialized units designed by the process of evolution by natural selection. While these modules sometimes work together seamlessly, they don't always, resulting in impossibly contradictory beliefs, vacillations between patience and impulsiveness, violations of our supposed moral principles, and overinflated views of ourselves. This modular, evolutionary psychological view of the mind undermines deeply held intuitions about ourselves, as well as a range of scientific theories that require a "self" with consistent beliefs and preferences. Modularity suggests that there is no "I." Instead, each of us is a contentious "we"--A collection of discrete but interacting systems whose constant conflicts shape our interactions with one another and our experience of the world.

Cognitive Illusions investigates a wide range of fascinating psychological effects in the way we think, judge and remember in our everyday lives. At the beginning of each chapter, leading researchers in the field introduce the background to phenomena such as illusions of control, overconfidence and hindsight bias. This is followed by an explanation of the experimental context in which these illusions can be investigated and a theoretical discussion drawing conclusions about the wider implications of these fallacy and bias effects.

This book first presents a brief description of the theoretical statement of cognitive dissonance as it appeared in Festinger's book Theory of Cognitive Dissonance.

Tell any smoker that his habit is unhealthy, and he most likely will agree. What mental process does a person go through when he or she continues to do something unhealthy? When an honest person tells a "white lie," what happens to his or her sense of integrity?

Most of us think of memory as a fixed, unchanging substance that exists permanently in our minds and that we call upon at will. But recent research on "autobiographical" memory shows that this conception is far from the truth. As John Kotre elegantly demonstrates in White Gloves, we are constantly rewriting our memories and, in the process, creating ever new personal histories. Using a variety of compelling narratives and drawing on the latest research on memory and the brain, Kotre provides the definitive look at how and why our memories change over a day and over a lifetime. In the process, he illustrates the true nature of memory in childhood, adolescence, adulthood, and old age.

A new approach to viewing memory -- Zones of convergence between different sciences -- Why other animals lack autobiographical memory -- Interdependent development of memory and other cognitive and emotional functions -- Development of learning and memory : the prenatal period and the first months of life -- The first quantum leap in memory development : the nine months' revolution -- The second quantum leap in memory development : language -- Exploring autobiographical memory in young children -- Autobiographical memory: a continuity in transformation -- The age at which memory occurs : results of an interdisciplinary research project on remembering and memory -- A formative theory of memory development -- Memory at advanced ages -- Autobiographical memory : a biocultural relay between the individual and the environment.

Why do intelligent people sometimes behave in ways so stupid that they destroy their livelihoods or even their lives? This book is the first to investigate the psychological basis for stupidity in everyday life. Experts shed light on the nature and theory of stupidity, whether stupidity is measurable, how people can avoid stupidity and its devastating consequences, and much more.

An original inquiry into the nature of major life decisions. Sloan uses biographical data and absorbing excerpts from life history interviews to clarify puzzling life turning-points.

This handbook established the concept of competence as an organizing framework for the field of achievement motivation. With an increased focus on connecting theory to application, the second edition incorporates diverse perspectives on why and how individuals are motivated to work toward competence in school, work, sports, and other settings. Leading authorities present cutting-edge findings on the psychological, sociocultural, and biological processes that shape competence motivation across development, analyzing the role of intelligence, self-regulated learning, emotions, creativity, gender and racial stereotypes, self-perceptions, achievement values, parenting practices, teacher behaviors, workplace environments, and many other factors.

An exploration of the human mind's capacity for instinctive understanding about the feelings and desires of others explains how the ability or inability to understand the minds of those around us leads to connection or conflict.

Outlines a provocative approach to improving one's life by embracing mistakes, citing cutting-edge behavioral studies and high-profile examples to reveal the importance of sincere apologies and taking responsibility.

Now, for the first time, philosopher and evolutionary psychologist David Livingstone Smith elucidates the essential role that deception and self deception have played in human - and animal - evolution and demonstrates that the very structure of our minds has been shaped from our earliest beginnings by the need to deceive. Smith shows us that by examining the stories we tell, the falsehoods we weave, and the unconscious signals we send out, we can learn much about ourselves and how our minds work.

Explores the author's theorized evolutionary basis for self-deception, which he says is tied to group conflict, courtship, neurophysiology, and immunology, but can be negated by awareness of it and its results.

Exposing the mind's deceptions and exploring how the mind defends and glorifies the ego, [the author] illustrates the brain's tendency toward self-delusion. Unbeknownst to us, our brain - vain, emotional, immoral, deluded, pigheaded, secretive, weak-willed, and bigoted - pushes, pulls, twists, and warps our perceptions. Whether it be hindsight bias, wishful thinking, unrealistic optimism, or moral excuse-making, each of us has a slew of mind-bugs and ordinary prejudices that prevent us from seeing the truth about the world, the people around us, and ourselves.

In Why People Believe Weird Things, science historian Michael Shermer explores the very human reasons we find otherworldly phenomena, conspiracy theories, and cults so appealing.

The author, a behavioral economist, challenges our preconceptions about dishonesty and urge us to take an honest look at ourselves. We all cheat, whether it is copying a paper in the classroom, or white lies on our expense accounts. Here the author explores how unethical behavior works in the personal, professional, and political worlds, and how it affects all of use, even as we think of ourselves as having high moral standards.

A seminal work on a biblical concept which has been applied across many disciplines to explain a people's process confusion with a world that doesn't act as they expect.

The WMD Mirage is a narrative trail that leads readers through the intelligence and misinformation about Iraq - and a telling portrait of how the Bush administration, with scant evidence and largely against the will of the international community, justified the urgent need for war to the American people and their few allies. It offers a clear-eyed and documented picture of how we got it wrong in Iraq and is the first book that includes the new conclusions of the Presidential Weapons of Mass Destruction Commission.

A behind-the-scenes examination of the Iran Hostage Crisis paints a portrait of the events leading up to the ordeal as a means for understanding it, drawing parallels to the current war on terrorism.

Fiascoes. Introduction: Why so many miscalculations? ; A perfect failure: The Bay of Pigs ; In and out of North Korea: "The wrong war with the wrong enemy" ; Pearl Harbor revisited: Or, why the fortress slept ; Escalation of the Vietnam War: How could it happen? -- Counterpoint. The Cuban Missile Crisis ; The making of the Marshall Plan. -- Theory, implications, and applications. The groupthink syndrome ; The Watergate cover-up: How clever manipulators can get caught in an avoidable quagmire ; Generalizations: Who succumbs, when, and why ; Preventing groupthink.

Investigation and report of the burglary at Watergate that climaxed with a President's resignation.

Ethnocentrism - our tendency to partition the human world into in-groups and out-groups - pervades societies around the world. Surprisingly, though, few scholars have explored its role in political life. Donald Kinder and Cindy Kam fill this gap with Us Against Them, their definitive explanation of how ethnocentrism shapes American public opinion.

It's easy to say that humans are "wired" for story, but why? In this book, the author offers a unified theory of storytelling. He argues that stories help us navigate life's complex social problems, just as flight simulators prepare pilots for difficult situations. Storytelling has evolved, like other behaviors, to ensure our survival. Did you know that the more absorbed you are in a story, the more it changes your behavior? That all children act out the same kinds of stories, whether they grow up in a slum or a suburb? That people who read more fiction are more empathetic? Of course, our story instinct has a darker side. It makes us vulnerable to conspiracy theories, advertisements, and narratives about ourselves that are more "truthy" than true. National myths can also be terribly dangerous: Hitler's ambitions were partly fueled by a story. But as is shown in this book, stories can also change the world for the better. We know we are master shapers of story. This book finally reveals how stories shape us.

In tracing the development of cognitive dissonance theory, he addresses the motivational property of dissonance, shifting models and understandings of the role of the self in dissonance theory, and issues of culture and race.

Broken family bonds can be one of the most intense sources of conflict. This book - which provides vital insights into the dynamics of family and other forms of violence - explores the damage caused to familial and social bonds by escalating feelings of shame during marital quarrels.

An in-depth account of one of New York City's most notorious crimes. On April 20, 1989, the body of a woman is discovered in Central Park, her skull badly smashed. Within days, five black and Latino teenagers confess to her rape and beating. The ensuing media frenzy and hysterical public reaction is extraordinary. The young men are tried and convicted as adults, despite the fact that the teens quickly recant their inconsistent and inaccurate confessions and that no tests or eyewitness accounts tie any of them to the victim. They serve their complete sentences before another man, serial rapist Matias Reyes, confesses to the crime and is connected to it by DNA testing. Intertwining the stories of these five young men, the police officers, the district attorneys, the victim, and Reyes, author Burns unravels the forces that made both the crime and its prosecution possible.

During the 1980s daycare workers were arrested, charged, tried, and convicted of committing horrible sexual crimes against the children they cared for. These crimes, social workers and prosecutors said, had gone undetected for years, and they consisted of a brutality and sadism that defied all imagining. Children across the country painted a nightmarish picture of their abuse. The dangers of babysitting services and day care centers became a national news media fixation, and legislatures took action to fend off the new threats facing the country's children. Of the many hundreds of people who were investigated in connection with day care and ritual abuse cases around the country, some 190 were formally charged with crimes, leading to more than 80 convictions. But, none of it happened. It was a decade-long outbreak of collective hysteria - on a par with the Salem witch trials.

The U.S. government spends enormous resources each year on the gathering and analysis of intelligence, yet the history of American foreign policy is littered with missteps and misunderstandings that have resulted from intelligence failures. In Why Intelligence Fails, Robert Jervis examines the politics and psychology of two of the more spectacular intelligence failures in recent memory: the mistaken belief that the regime of the Shah in Iran was secure and stable in 1978, and the claim that Iraq had active WMD programs in 2002.

Collects thirty-eight articles describing how innocent men and women have been coerced into confessing to crimes they did not commit, revealing the questionable methods police officers use to get confessions from suspects.

Conflict of Interest in Medical Research, Education, and Practice provides a comprehensive look at conflict of interest in medicine. It offers principles to inform the design of policies to identify, limit, and manage conflicts of interest without damaging constructive collaboration with industry. It calls for both short-term actions and long-term commitments by institutions and individuals, including leaders of academic medical centers; professional societies; patient advocacy groups; government agencies; and drug, device, and pharmaceutical companies.

Findings from research on false memory have major implications for a number of fields central to human welfare, such as medicine and law. Although many important conclusions have been reached after a decade or so of intensive research, the majority of them are not well known outside the immediate field. To make this research accessible to a much wider audience, The Science of False Memory has been written to require little or no background knowledge of the theory and techniques used in memory research.

How accurate is memory? Are there important differences in how and what we remember across the life span? What is the prevalence of "repressed memory" for traumatic events? What is the best way for therapists to elicit accurate memories from someone who may be a victim of incest? This book addresses these and other compelling questions reflecting deep divisions in scientific opinion, professional practice, and legal decision making. Leading researchers and practitioners review the current literature, describe new findings and clinical techniques, and draw upon their extensive experience in the field to provide diverse perspectives on the place of memory in our lives and the impact upon memory of personal, interpersonal, and situational influences.

This provocative and illuminating book charts the persistence of a cultural phenomenon. Tales of alien abduction, chronic fatigue syndrome, Gulf War syndrome, and the resurgence of repressed memories in psychotherapy are just a few of the signs that we live in an age of hysterical epidemics.

Looks at the history of autism research and argues that the media and advocates have mislead the public in their declaration that childhood vaccinations are the cause of autism.