Chapter 13 Find Out More

Malcolm Gladwell (2005). Blink: The power of thinking without thinking. Boston: Little, Brown.

This is a beautifully written brief book about the beneficial and harmful effects of our capacity to make quick, implicit, relatively unconscious judgments about people and other objects. Gladwell is a professional writer who has thoroughly familiarized himself with contemporary social psychological research. Here he relates research on implicit judgments to such practical issues as speed dating, market research, advertising, and racial prejudice.

Mark Leary (2008). The curse of the self: Self-awareness, egotism, and the quality of human life. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.

Our capacity for self-reflection is a large part of what makes us human. It allows us to think about and learn from our past successes and failures, to see ourselves somewhat as others see us, and to contemplate and plan our futures. However, that same capacity also contributes to human misery. Over-emphasis on the self can lead to fruitless rumination, crippling self-conscious anxiety, egocentric selfishness and narcissism, and life-threatening depression when the bubble of self-inflation breaks or fails to materialize. Leary is the social psychologist who developed the sociometer theory of self-esteem. In this book, for the general reader, he writes clearly and persuasively about the dark side of too much focus on the self and too little focus on the world outside ourselves.

Dan Ariely (2010). Predictably irrational: The hidden forces that shape our decisions. New York, NY: HarperCollins.

Ariely is one of a new breed of economist who is bringing psychology to bear in understanding how people make economic decisions. With experiments, logic, and humor he explains here why we often work harder for nothing than for money, why our choices of what to buy often have little to do with their actual value, and why we sometimes do and sometimes don’t behave in accordance with our moral values.

Roy Baumeister and John Tierney (2012). Willpower: Rediscovering the greatest human strength. New York: NY: Penguin Books.

In this book Baumeister teams up with science writer John Tierney to tackle the issue of willpower, a close cousin to self-control. Baumeister and Tierney look at the science of willpower, much of it stemming from Baumeister’s own research, and produce a highly readable book that is both scientifically accurate and applicable to almost everyone’s daily life.

Carolyn Cunningham (Ed.) (2012). Social networking and impression management: Self-presentation in the digital age. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books.

This collection of chapters written by several communication experts explores the ways people in the western world interact via digital means. By referencing current events as examples, the authors help readers understand the ways in which the internet is changing how people engage in self-management. The authors cite current research on behavior as it pertains to social networking sites versus face to face interactions. If you want to know where 21st century communication is headed, this is a good place to start.