Introductory psychology / practical psychology books

What books/authors would a more well-read person recommend to someone who knows nothing about psychology? I can't make sense of this world, and I feel that I could handle myself better if I had a more solid understanding of the human mind and its defects and peculiarities. I know how lame that sounds, and I know most practical psychology books are crap (I am often told all psychology is crap period). I'm not looking for something immediately useful, I'm looking for knowledge. Is the "mistake book" a good place to start?

>>11130 People always say Cialdini... and Cialdini was fun, informative and digestible. But I don't know how well the text stood up under the replication crisis. It looks like there actually is a 2024 update+expansion, so maybe there were issues- maybe with "priming" experiments? Fun link, at least one bad entry and from 2010 so maybe out of date https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/xg3hXCYQPJkwHyik2/the-best-textbooks-on-every-subject But what it says for an intro to cognitive science is >Subject: Cognitive Science >Recommendation: Cognitive Science, by Jose Luis Bermudez >Reason: Jose Luis Bermudez's Cognitive Science: An Introduction to the Science of Mind does an excellent job setting the historical and conceptual context for cognitive science, and draws fairly from all the fields involved in this heavily interdisciplinary science. Bermudez does a good job of making himself invisible, and the explanations here are some of the clearest available. >In contrast, Paul Thagard's Mind: Introduction to Cognitive Science skips the context and jumps right into a systematic comparison (by explanatory merit) of the leading theories of mental representation: logic, rules, concepts, analogies, images, and neural networks. The book is only 270 pages long, and is also more idiosyncratic than Bermudez's; for example, Thagard refers to the dominant paradigm in cognitive science as the "computational-representational understanding of mind," which as far as I can tell is used only by him and people drawing from his book. In truth, the term refers to a set of competing theories, for example the computational theory and the representational theory. While not the best place to start, Thagard's book is a decent follow-up to Bermudez's text. >Better, though, is Kolak et. al.'s Cognitive Science: An Introduction to Mind and Brain. It contains more information than Bermudez's book, but I prefer Bermudez's flow, organization and content selection. Really, though, both Bermudez and Kolak offer excellent introductions to the field, and Thagard offers a more systematic and narrow investigation that is worth reading after Bermudez and Kolak. It is an intro and for undergrads, I figure that's the closest it gets to being good for guys like us who didn't go to college for psych. I am about to read it. And there is a 2022 release, so it should be cleaned up and rigorous. The replication crisis was a big thing in the 2010s.

Note that books on cognitive science and science of mind should in no way be considered books on general psychology. They're about one very narrow, specific, limited subject that falls within the domain of psychology.

>I'm not looking for something immediately useful, I'm looking for knowledge. The western mentality really is something to behold, take out all usefulness and just eat a soup of data slop. Just why? The whole point of psychology is to help people who have diseases of the mind, not to catalog “the mind”, psychology is a hard physiological science that works together with neurology. So, yes, you should read both cognitive science and science of the mind, you are not asking for introduction level content of psychology in any way, maybe basic epistemology, but not psychology.

>>11289 It's not entirely western but it's decisively German (and general anglosphere) . Nietzsche and Goethe had long rants about this in the 18th and 19th century already and praised a gay (not in homosexual) science. It's an Enlightement thing (product of a christian shadow) that was already a stark reactionary psychological answer to the middle ages. Just read Kant and you'll see the madness. This is one of the main differences between south and north europe (though it's shrinking every generation). Are you not western though? I'm saging still even though it's relevant to psychology.

>>11289 >psychology is a hard physiological science that works together with neurology. Most clueless thing I’ve read in a while, thanks for the laugh

>>11130 the idea of an introductory text is that it should be a fairly approchable work with two main features, neither of which generally qualifies one as "well read" but gives one the tools to become well read. 1) a good introductory text should give you a solid overview of the topic. Descartes' Meditations are not a good introduction to philosophy as a whole for this reason, though it ks a good introduction to Cartesian in particular. 2) a good introductory text should familiarize you with the canon of that topic. How do freud, jung, adler, bernes, lowenstein, ellis, and pavlov relate to eachother? what books are foundational, what superfluous? for these two reasons, i can suggest Current Psychotherapies by Corsini and Wedding. its popular enough at the undergrad level that its pretty easy to source a copy (physical or digital) (i got mine from a book donation bin near a university) and it gives a broad overview of both the history of psychology and the currently dominating psychological theories. you will become familiar with the terminology, concepts, and thinkers in the field. it is however, 500 pages of textbook. though its very easy to digest compared to some books in the field (im looking at the psychology of transference by jung and beyond the pleasure principle by freud), if you hate reading youll not get a lot out of this. for that reason my secondary recommendation is a very short introduction to psychology put out by oxford university press. its like a 100 page encyclopedia entry. imagine Wikipedia but written by an expert. its a decent starting point, if fairly pithy. sorry for the reddit spacing if thats outside of the board culture. new to lain, let me know if my post quality can be improved in some particular way.

>>11331 Psychology: A Very Short Introduction or Psychology : an introduction? Sorry if it's an obvious question, I just wanna make sure I'm downloading the right one.

>>11130 Start with introductory textbook. Then read Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung.

>>11622 i said very, and indicated the publisher.

OP, the two books you're looking for are: Psychology in Everyday Life by Myers and DeWall Psychology Applied to Modern Life by Weiten, Dunn, and Hammer