The summer heat is already starting to appear in the northern hemisphere and with it the hours of free time that are crying out for a book , a magazine or a martini .

Books to help you learn Psychology in an entertaining way

Following the trail of that article about books on psychology with which to accompany Christmas , in Psychology and Mind we are aware of this and so we want to propose some recommendations to cover the first of these needs: the books with which to accompany stretching out in the shade. Here you have five titles that will delight anyone interested in psychology.

Good reading!

Why We Lie… Especially to Ourselves, by Dan Ariely

Dan Ariely is known for explaining lines of research in psychology as if they were narratives, and this book perfectly follows that rule. Entertainment and popularization of science go hand in hand in this interesting text.

Here you will find a compendium of chapters in which Ariely dismantles the idea that people lie by responding to purely rational criteria, seeking material benefits at the expense of the ignorance of others, and provides some evidence on the relationship between lying and our way of perceiving ourselves.

And all this without abandoning the sense of humour that characterises him. A light and entertaining reading on one of the most uncomfortable subjects: dishonesty.

More information about the book, here.

What Makes Us Human, by Michael Gazzaniga

Our way of thinking and feeling does not exist in a vacuum. It has its reason for being in the biological processes that run through our body and brain and shape what we understand as “our mind”.

The famous Californian neuroscientist Michael S. Gazzaniga explains in this book the biological foundations of human thought and behavior and some of its similarities and differences with what other animals do and feel.

He does so through clear explanations that reflect the author’s fascination with the great questions facing neuroscience .

You can learn more about this book by clicking here.

3. From animals to gods, by Yuval Harari

Many psychological processes are shaped by culture, and this in turn cannot be understood apart from History : the line along which human beings have been developing life, with its advances and regressions, is the foundation of culture , which emerges from all these variables.

From animals to gods is the perfect union between a compressed narration of the history of humanity, the cultural drifts that have taken place in it and the ways of thinking that have shaped it. It is a real gem for its concreteness and for explaining difficult things in a clear and pleasant way.

In this book you will not find a cold analysis of what humanity is and has been , but an interpretation of our journey as a species based on material evidence and inspiring reflections behind it.

Consult more information by clicking on this link.

4. The deceptions of the mind, by S. L. Macknik and S. Martúnez-Conde

The human mind is not only discovered through its capacities; its functioning can also be glimpsed from its failures .

The Deceptions of the Mind is a book in which the blind spots of our ways of thinking and understanding reality are collected and exposed to everyone’s view, almost to our shame. To this end, these authors tell anecdotes placed in the kind of situations in which our brain is most likely to be exposed: before the scenario of a magician.

Here you can read the explanations to the most Martian magic tricks and the psychological processes that explain that they are able to deceive all the people in the audience.

Consult about this book here.

5. The Lucifer Effect: The Why of Evil, by Philip Zimbardo

One of the most renowned psychologists talking about one of the most known experiments in the world : the case of Stanford prison.

The result, of course, is one of the books on psychology par excellence about morality and its relationship to the circumstances in which we find ourselves. The importance of context in our personality and in how we behave is greater than we might suppose.

In this extensive work you will find both the narrative of Stanford’s experience and the reflections it produced in Philip Zimbardo and its relationship with other cases of moral corruption from the context, such as what happened in Abu Ghraib during the Iraq war.

More about this book here.