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Rereading ‘the Gift of Fear’ in the Age of Mass Shootings
It’s been 25 years since Gavin de Becker’s influential book “The Gift of Fear” was published, teaching readers how to tell the difference between “true fear” and “unwarranted fear” by trusting their intuition. De Becker opens the book with a story about a woman who was raped and nearly murdered after letting a man into her apartment, even after she felt uncomfortable by his presence. He recounts how this woman initially ignored warning signs to avoid seeming rude. But after the rape, when the man went to the kitchen to get a knife to kill her, she trusted the impulse that told her to flee, which saved her life. “The Gift of Fear” skyrocketed de Becker to personal safety stardom.
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3 Common Thinking Traps and How to Avoid Them, According to a Yale Psychologist
The mind is a tricky thing. It can lead us to believe that we can confidently sing "Bohemian Rhapsody" at karaoke even though we haven't heard the song in years, or that one terrible review on Yelp is reason enough not to go to a 4-star rated restaurant. These thinking errors are what people in the psychology community call cognitive biases. And that's the focus of a new book out this month, Thinking 101: How to Reason Better to Live Better, by Yale psychology professor Woo-kyoung Ahn. In the book, Ahn highlights some of the most pernicious cognitive slip-ups we make — and how biases can cloud our judgment and affect the people around us. ...
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The Brain Loves a Challenge. Here’s Why.
As a rock climber, I fight against gravity while I scale the walls and their rocklike holds. But my arms invariably fatigue, my grip slips with sweat, and, sometimes, my nerves question whether I should stick to easier climbing routes. Trying to do hard things is, well, hard. And exerting ourselves physically and mentally often feels bad. Yet we seek out these challenges without any obvious extrinsic reward. I’m paying a monthly membership fee for the experience of flailing and falling in a rock-climbing gym. Others go even further, scaling mountains, running marathons or even ultramarathons.
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Empathizing With the Opposition May Make You More Politically Persuasive
Trying to understand people we disagree with can feel like a lost cause, particularly in contentious political environments. But valuing empathy across party lines can make our political arguments more persuasive.
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Talking With Birds: The Fascinating World of Avian Intelligence
Irene Pepperberg pioneered the study of bird cognition back in the 70s and still studies the cognitive and communicative abilities of grey parrots. In this conversation with APS’s Ludmila Nunes, she speaks about research on parrots’ cognitive abilities, their conservation and preservation in the wild, and much more.
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The Forgotten Lessons of the Recovered Memory Movement
Most students in psychology and psychiatry programs today are too young to have any firsthand memory of the moral panic engendered by the recovered memory movement in the 1980s and early 1990s. This was a time when therapists proudly advertised their ability to help clients unearth supposedly repressed memories of childhood sexual abuse; the accusations that followed shattered families and communities across the country. The belief that such memories could be repressed and then recovered through special techniques was widespread among mental health professionals for well over a decade.
