I really struggled with this one, I was looking forward to reading a beginnerfriendly introduction to this complex topic, but this little book is probably better for people who have already studied a bit of psychology.
The chapters are very dense, sometimes presenting a different theory in each paragraph, and you constantly need to jump between the main text and the boxes that explain the research.
A really introductory text on Psychology, which is such a vast field that it's impossible to cover in somepages, this is pretty interesting but being fromis not as up to date as it could be this second edition is from, and there could be some changes made.
One situation in which this lack of update immediately jumps at the reader is the way in which on a table of common mental illnesses it lists "transsexualism" as a mental illness in the same sentence as pedophilia and fetishism.
. . that's jarring as hell. It's no longer recognised as an illness by any major clinical body, so it just feels like an artifact of an earlier time,
Other than that it gives a competent overview of the different types of psychology practices and way in which it can be applied, it's ok, nothing particularly interesting about it, it covers some of the most famous psychological experiments and that is probably the most fun you can find here.
ความรฉบบพกพาทตองพกความรมาดวยประมาณนง
สำหรบเรามนกยอยยากอยดอะคะโดยสวนใหญ จะชอบสวนทเขายกกรณตวอยางเกยวกบพฤตกรรม การคลอยตาม อทธพลของเชาวปญญา บคลกภาพ การรบร และอกเยอะแยะมามากกวา พอโยงกบประสบการณของตวเองกสนกด เคยเรยนเรองนมาบางนดหนอย แตลมเกอบหมดละ มาอานตอนนกไดรอความรเกากนเลย What is psychology How do you study it
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I mean, what else can one expect Im reading this book to pan it.
The series overall is quite terrible, Many of the “A Very Short Introduction” books are a huge waste of time and written by people who dont know the topic well and frankly are terrible writers.
Since I have read quite a few psychology textbooks I decided to read this one just to review it, Im not reading it to learn anything, but rather to explain what works and doesnt,
The first chapter is quite fine, I mean, what can one expect from an intro Zero research, zero logical thinking, zero proper intro is here, We just spend a full chapter on the definition of psychology, Its stuff so obvious that pretty much everyone will know this already, On the other hand I do think this is a very good intro, Its rare you get a proper and direct intro to a field in these books, An intro that an alien landing on Earth would understand and apply, I do wish they had shown examples of psychology research and thinking and then focused on evolutionary psychology as the center element of the science, They hint at it, but never use any scientific terms or findings, The chapter does feel like a waste, but its a fine intro for the right reader, Its on a level that feels a bit too low unless you are a teenager or maybe a total social science outsider for some reason,
What gets into our minds Perception
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I could forgive the first chapter for “not being for me, but fine as an intro for beginners”.
This on the other hand is a chapter too much in the same style, Its about visual perception being subjective, Its all fine science philosophy, it's just boring, Still a fine intro, but who is this for So far the science is fine, but they only allude to it, So no outsider will actually understand how this all works as you dont show how we know this stuff or if there is a debate on this or not.
Its a short intro indeed, But this is barely an intro, Its a hazy summary of main ideas in the field only,
What stays in the mind Learning and memory
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Memory, Again, shallow overview with only explanations about how memory works, I like it. The level is quite low, But as an intro this is really good, This could easily be an intro chapter to memory in schools, Of course you dont learn much here, but after this you can read the actual science, This is very good.
How do we use what is in the mind Thinking, reasoning, and communicating
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They say that Asians are good at math likely because language may make people better at math somehow.
What Didnt even mention IQ differences,
Its about biases, It touches a bit on evolutionary psychology and biases, But again its theoretical and philosophical, Not bad, just boring. But have to mark it down for the stupid language point also,
This is from the book:
Children speaking Asian languages do consistently better at mathematics than Englishspeaking children and their number words reflect a basesystem e.
g.is represented as tentwo. First year school children from three Asian and three Western countries were asked to stack blue blocks, representingunits, and white blocks representingunit, into piles to show particular numbers.
More Asian than Western children
made two correct constructions for each number, The Asian children used two blocks representingunits more than the Western children, and the Western children used the singleunit blocks more than the Asian children,
Conclusion: language differences may influence mathematical skills,
The evidence is strengthened by the finding that bilingual Asian American children also score more highly on mathematical tests than do those who speak only English.
Why do we do what we do Motivation and emotion
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Found it hard to recall and recognize the research referred to here.
Its either because Im stupid or lazy or because they are sorta not keeping too close to modern research on emotions, Its largely presented without referring to science and sources, Especially the audiobook is quite useless as you cannot know if what they claim is rooted in research or personal opinions, At least in the book you can read the sources they used in the back of the book, I do feel like the book is going too far into the nurture camp here, They for example claim that there may not be universal emotions, Of course what they mean by this is not clear, Its such a blank slater statement that it becomes misleading instead of just critical, They rely on just looking critical while saying it and getting away with it, but these sort of statements are not informing readers, They are misinforming readers.
Is there a set pattern Developmental psychology
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A bit more pseudoscience, Again, why not just follow the basic science Why add opinions like this It also makes no scientific sense, There are some good points too, But its becoming a mix of science and just their own opinions, Which surely is not ideal for new readers,
Read this argument below, If you know something about psychology youll see right away how they are using cheap tricks to make a case for older people not declining in intelligence and memory.
Now, this decline is very wellknown and wellunderstood so they are actually arguing against the common understanding and should therefore have used bigger ammunition to get anywhere on this.
When intelligence was measured repeatedly in the same people there was no evidence that it declined with age rather, it increased slightly for those who continued to use their minds.
Similarly, the supposed deterioration of memory with age does not stand up well to scientific investigation but suggests that the system responds to the demands you make of it.
Comparisons of memory for everyday events show that older people perform slightly better than younger ones, possibly because they are more concerned about their memories and are more attentive and motivated during testing.
The belief that memory declines with increasing age was described as a myth in, as it appears to be partly due to a selffulfilling prophecy,
Can we categorize people Individual differences
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I was thinking I could point out errors without quoting the book, but its getting so bad that I have to be more clear to be believed.
Let's look into how they are actually wrong, This below is not even a full paragraph I just quote the relevant parts,
A particularly controversial
finding is that black Americans scored significantly lower than white Americans on standard intelligence tests originally the gap waspoints but this had narrowed to half that by the lates.
Indeed, most ethnic groups score lower than white middleclass groups on IQ tests, This finding has been interpreted by some as evidence of the intellectual superiority of some races over others, but other observations, such as the finding that German babies fathered by black and white American soldiers have similar IQs, suggest that the difference in IQ scores is unlikely to be due to genetic inferiority/superiority.
Similar differences in IQ scores are also found in relation to a childs parental income, It is much more likely that such differences between races and social classes reflect a deficit in standard IQ teststhey are biased in favour of the dominant often white middleclass culture.
They disprove genetic race IQ differences with a study that is not with random people, but rather WWsoldiers in Germany, Its a group of people that all likely took an IQ test to even get into the military and the lowest IQ people were not allowed in.
So the study doesnt really show us anything about a random sample of a country population, And calling it genetic inferiority/superiority is another weird thing, I get what they are getting at, but its not really terms you use in psychology as they are misleading, Then they repeat the claim about intelligence tests being biased pro White people, This is factually incorrect. We have known this to be false for overyears now,
And then this point below, Again another theory they pull out of thin air, Why is it here Extra attention increases your IQ Why are they saying this
There is also evidence showing that the amount of parental attention a child receives affects its IQthis may explain why firstborn children have slightly higher IQs than their siblings, because the first child usually gets more attention.
Another point:
There has also been much interest in whether IQ predicts behaviour, While there is a relationship between IQ and aspects of intelligent behaviour such as job performance, it is not a strong relationship and within most occupations there is a wide range of IQs.
In fact, some studies suggest that socioeconomic background is a better predictor of future academic and occupational success than IQ,
This is how most of their arguments go, Science says, studies show, some have found, a study showed, research shows, shown to be wrong, Its a style of argument that would legit not cut it in a freshman psychology exam, If you saw this in an exam youd fail the student, Yet here its how basically all pro nurture arguments are made, They talk about personality and IQ and then right away go into: but a good study showed that its not that heritable/important, Without explaining the study or explaining why they picked this one study showing that IQ is not important for job performance when most studies show the opposite.
Its lazy biased logic.
What happens when things go wrong Abnormal psychology
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Again very theoretical, So at least not total misinformation, A lot of the book is about personal advice not science, So there is a lot of stuff about how you should act morally and what researchers should conclude morally, Instead of going from the science out they try to take basic layman moral assumptions and then build the science around it, As you can guess this makes it quite unscientific, How can advice about how to treat and talk about mental illness be rooted in science Its just not something you will learn anything from unless you want to learn what the authors feel and assume about the world.
How do we influence each other Social psychology
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Again lowtier psychology, They mention iconic studies like the Milgram study and Aschs experiment, Its very basic stuff you could skip in such short books, The studies are very popular, but dont explain much as they are biased and weak, You can judge an intro psychology book on how they summarize these iffy studies where the experimenter indirectly manipulated the results and then was allowed to interpret the results himself.
In this book they use the old understanding of such studies where the professor who did the study and explained what it meant is assumed to be the allknowing expert.
There is not enough critical thinking like for example trying to see if the people who gave the shocks were just trying to help out and advance science.
They fully, and lazily, believe Milgram was correct in his “acting like Nazi soldiers” interpretation, And they also omitted to clearly point out that most people are not conforming in such studies,
Then they also include pseudoscience studies like the blue eyes/brown eyes groups experiment and Robbers cave experiment, Robbers cave is a fake study, They failed the study then redid it by controlling all variables to get the outcome they wanted, Should such study be included in a psychology book Not unless you want me to call you stupid for including it, Below is what they have to say about the study, Totally uncritical and blindly assuming the author is correct,
The researchers concluded that contact alone is insufficient to eliminate prejudiceit needed to be accompanied by the presence of superordinate goals that promote united, cooperative action.
The eye color experiment is just a very weak study, Who observed what How was it measured How great an influence did the study designer have in controlling the students Could the effect be the teacher directly influencing the students to prove a point Such studies are so iffy that its better to either ignore them or at least be very critical.
The authors are extremely critical of the idea of intelligence and g factor yet totally fall for all theseyear old experiments that have been panned for decades.
How do you write a psychology book while remaining so clueless about basic discussions in psychology
By the way, The stuff I quote here is at least experiments, I could have made them look way worse by quoting a random passage where they talk about nothing, Most of the book is about vague personal opinions and lowtier overviews, They usedsources in this chapter, And as you can see they failed at selecting proper studies,
What is psychology for
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I forgave the first few chapters for being basic talking points, But you really cannot have a book with this much vague overview of the field,
My final opinion on the book
Embarrassing, You may assume I focused on only the negatives to pan the book, but I really didnt, This is just not a quality book, I tried to present negative issues in my review, but you actually couldnt do the opposite, There is nothing to praise, They have some chapters that reveal a deeper understanding of WHAT psychology is, So the basic premises are presented here and you kinda understand what psychology is and isnt, Many ignorant laymen do think psychologists can read minds or that there is no science in psychology at all, Thats basically all this book will teach you about, Quite fine, but still not good, They only present very few studies, Its less thanstudies it feels, Thefirst chapters havereferences combined, And keep in mind many references are not single studies but overviews, So while total outsiders could learn a bit here anyone looking for research, science, and facts will be seriously disappointed, So if you have an IQ abovethis is a total waste,
I have read maybe“A Very Short Introduction” books and the average rating is under ⅗, Most I ratedout of, They are completely useless books, Not just bad intros, but just terrible pseudoscience or barely science, The one about African history didnt have anything about African history in it, It was just one long argument about how White people are biased so we shouldnt read their history about Africa, No alternative history was presented, Most of these books have similar structures where the research is ignored, This one especially tries to be a very shallow overview, And frankly when the chapters dont say much at all and dont use any sources I actually kinda accepted them as okay intros for children and teens.
Once they go into research they reveal such huge ignorance about the field that its not acceptable,
Dont read it, Skip it. Seriously, there are overintro psychology books out there,are worthless. But a few are fine, Dont settle. .