Useful Delusions: The Power and Paradox of the Self-Deceiving Brain PDF Download

Author: Shankar Vedantam
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393652211
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 198

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Book Description
A Behavioral Scientist Notable Book of 2021 A Next Big Idea Club Best Nonfiction of 2021 From the New York Times best-selling author and host of Hidden Brain comes a thought-provoking look at the role of self-deception in human flourishing. Self-deception does terrible harm to us, to our communities, and to the planet. But if it is so bad for us, why is it ubiquitous? In Useful Delusions, Shankar Vedantam and Bill Mesler argue that, paradoxically, self-deception can also play a vital role in our success and well-being. The lies we tell ourselves sustain our daily interactions with friends, lovers, and coworkers. They can explain why some people live longer than others, why some couples remain in love and others don’t, why some nations hold together while others splinter. Filled with powerful personal stories and drawing on new insights in psychology, neuroscience, and philosophy, Useful Delusions offers a fascinating tour of what it really means to be human.

Author: Anna Elisabetta Galeotti
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108423728
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 273

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Book Description
Explores self-deception and its consequences for political decision-making.

Author: John J. Mearsheimer
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199975450
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 155

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Book Description
Presents an analysis of the lying behavior of political leaders, discussing the reasons why it occurs, the different types of lies, and the costs and benefits to the public and other countries that result from it, with examples from the recent past.

Author: Philipp Schweighauser
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
ISBN: 0813939046
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 348

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Book Description
The art of the early republic abounds in representations of deception: the villains of Gothic novels deceive their victims with visual and acoustic tricks; the ordinary citizens of picaresque novels are hoodwinked by quacks and illiterate but shrewd adventurers; and innocent sentimental heroines fall for their seducers' eloquently voiced half-truths and lies. Yet, as Philipp Schweighauser points out in Beautiful Deceptions, deception happens not only within these novels but also through them. The fictions of Charles Brockden Brown, Hugh Henry Brackenridge, Susanna Rowson, Hannah Webster Foster, Tabitha Gilman Tenney, and Royall Tyler invent worlds that do not exist. Similarly, Charles Willson Peale's and Raphaelle Peale's trompe l'oeil paintings trick spectators into mistaking them for the real thing, and Patience Wright's wax sculptures deceive (and disturb) viewers. Beautiful Deceptions examines how these and other artists of the era at times acknowledge art's dues to other social realms—religion, morality, politics—but at other times insist on artists' right to deceive their audiences, thus gesturing toward a more modern, autonomous notion of art that was only beginning to emerge in the eighteenth century. Building on Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten's definition of aesthetics as "the science of sensuous cognition" and the writings of early European aestheticians including Kant, Schiller, Hume, and Burke, Schweighauser supplements the dominant political readings of deception in early American studies with an aesthetic perspective. Schweighauser argues that deception in and through early American art constitutes a comment on eighteenth-century debates concerning the nature and function of art as much as it responds to shifts in social and political organization.

Author: Walter Gratzer
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0191500208
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 340

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Book Description
Walter Gratzer's themes in the stories he relates in this book are collective delusion and human folly. Science is generally seen as a process bound by rigorous rules, which its practitioners must not transgress. Deliberate fraud occasionally intrudes, but it is soon detected, the perpetrators cast out and the course of discovery barely disturbed. Far more interesting are the outbreaks of self-delusion that from time to time afflict upright and competent researchers, and then spread like an epidemic or mass-hysteria through a sober and respectable scientific community. When this happens the rules by which scientists normally govern their working lives are suddenly suspended. Sometimes these episodes are provoked by personal vanity, an unwillingness to acknowledge error or even contemplate the possibility that a hard-won success is a will o' the wisp; at other times they stem from loyalty to a respected and trusted guru, or even from patriotic pride; and, worst of all, they may be a consequence of a political ideology which imposes its own interpretation on scientists' observations of the natural world. Unreason and credulity supervene, illusory phenomena are described and measured, and theories are developed to explain them - until suddenly, often for no single reason, the bubble bursts, leaving behind it a residue of acrimony, recrimination, embarrassment, and ruined reputations. Here, then, are radiations, measured with high precision yet existing only in the minds of those who observed them; the Russian water, which some thought might congeal the oceans; phantom diseases that called for heroic surgery; monkey testis implants that restored the sexual powers of ageing roues and of tired sheep; truths about genetics and about the nature of matter, perceptible only to Aryan scientists in the Third Reich or Marxist ideologues in the Soviet Union; and much more. The Undergrowth of Science explores, in terms accessible to the lay reader, the history of such episodes, up to our own time, in all their absurdity, tragedy, and pathos.

Author: Shankar Vedantam
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 0385525222
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 290

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Book Description
The hidden brain is the voice in our ear when we make the most important decisions in our lives—but we’re never aware of it. The hidden brain decides whom we fall in love with and whom we hate. It tells us to vote for the white candidate and convict the dark-skinned defendant, to hire the thin woman but pay her less than the man doing the same job. It can direct us to safety when disaster strikes and move us to extraordinary acts of altruism. But it can also be manipulated to turn an ordinary person into a suicide terrorist or a group of bystanders into a mob. In a series of compulsively readable narratives, Shankar Vedantam journeys through the latest discoveries in neuroscience, psychology, and behavioral science to uncover the darkest corner of our minds and its decisive impact on the choices we make as individuals and as a society. Filled with fascinating characters, dramatic storytelling, and cutting-edge science, this is an engrossing exploration of the secrets our brains keep from us—and how they are revealed.

Author: Eric Alterman
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 9780143036043
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 468

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Book Description
Assesses the impact of governmental and presidential lies on American culture, revealing how such lies become ever more complex and how such deception creates problems far more serious than those lied about in the beginning.

Author: Tim Bayne
Publisher: Psychology Press
ISBN: 1136874879
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 312

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Book Description
This volume is an interdisciplinary examination of the relationship between delusions and self-deception, bringing recent work on motivated reasoning to bear on the problems posed by these forms of pathological belief. The volume will appeal to cognitive scientists, clinicians and philosophers interested in the nature of belief and the disturbances to which it is subject.

Author: William J. Bernstein
Publisher: Grove Press
ISBN: 0802157114
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 491

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Book Description
This “disturbing yet fascinating” exploration of mass mania through the ages explains the biological and psychological roots of irrationality (Kirkus Reviews). From time immemorial, contagious narratives have spread through susceptible groups—with enormous, often disastrous, consequences. Inspired by Charles Mackay’s nineteenth-century classic Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, neurologist and author William Bernstein examines mass delusion through the lens of current scientific research in The Delusions of Crowds. Bernstein tells the stories of dramatic religious and financial mania in western society over the last five hundred years—from the Anabaptist Madness of the 1530s to the dangerous End-Times beliefs that pervade today’s polarized America; and from the South Sea Bubble to the Enron scandal and dot com bubbles. Through Bernstein’s supple prose, the participants are as colorful as their “desire to improve one’s well-being in this life or the next.” Bernstein’s chronicles reveal the huge cost and alarming implications of mass mania. He observes that if we can absorb the history and biology of this all-too-human phenomenon, we can recognize it more readily in our own time, and avoid its frequently dire impact.

Author: Israel Rosenfield
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 9780393321999
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 180

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Book Description
What if Freud had left a final paper declaring that morality arises not from the guilt caused by Oedipal desires but, instead, from fear of the unchallengeable authority demonstrated in megalomania? CUNY history professor Rosenfield makes this the premise of his novel debut--and produces a wonderful, chewy, intellectual delight.