Children and learning

Preschool lessons: New research shows that teaching kids more and more, at ever-younger ages, may backfire. - By Alison Gopnik - Slate Magazine

Fascinating article.

Punished By Rewards

This book talks about the problems with using carrots (as opposed to sticks) with children, in the workplace, and in society. A bit long-winded and full of anecdotal evidence, but the book presents a very plausible theory of how people dislike any efforts to subvert their control (whether real or perceived) over their lives.

Parenting

I've been reading Alfie Kohn's fascinating book Punished By Rewards (which I was led to by Daniel Pink's book Drive), which argues for a radical rethinking of how we interact: in particular, with respect to rewards.

As I read more about him online, I found the article linked to by the title of this post. That article summarizes his philosophy with respect to praise (as a reward) and parenting. I like the philosophy very much, but it is also a troubling indictment of our incentive-driven society.

Drive

Drive, by Daniel Pink, is a fascinating book about work vs. play, motivation and money. Some experiments have shown that economic incentives ($) can actually lower the long-term performance of so-called "knowledge workers". That is, performing an interesting task (i.e., writing software) can become less interesting to workers if management links performance too heavily to pay. The best explanation in the book for that is that it takes away the worker's sense of autonomy: people want to work, and they want to solve interesting and worthwhile problems.

Well worth reading. The author gave a talk about his book at work, but I wasn't able to listen to the talk, unfortunately.

Welcome to Your Brain

Written by two neuroscientists, this is an entertaining book about our knowledge of the brain. It was a little too cheerily written to hold my attention as a serious book, but it was still interesting.

One of the authors, Sam Wang, runs the web site Princeton Election Consortium, which had a lot of interesting stuff during the last election.

Nudge

This book, about how choices should be "architected" because of how people behave like humans and not economic engines, is interesting. Too bad too much of the book is devoted to justifying the authors' philosophy (which they call "libertarian paternalism"). Otherwise, it's a decent book in the constellation of books that talk about the intersection of psychology and economics.

The Essential Difference

This book by Simon Baron-Cohen (yes, he is the brother of Sasha Baron-Cohen!) talks about a lot of research that examines the differences between men and women. Simplistically, he characterizes men as (on average) better at systemizing, and women as better at empathy. Highly believable, and he quotes a lot of relevant research. Interesting...

The Lucifer Effect

The Lucifer Effect is a compelling story about The Stanford Prison Experiment, as well as how its conclusions relate to what happened at Abu Gharib. Scary stuff.

Watch the clip of Zimbardo's interview with Stephen Colbert. Entertaining, if sort of beside the point of the book.

The Sexual Paradox

Susan Pinker's book is fascinating: it is about what she has seen as the differences between men and women in her practice as a psychologist, a lot of related research, and some interviews with various men and women. The book is sprinkled with a little too much non-quantitative data, but the interviews are interesting. The basic question of that the author tries to answer is: is it possible to have equality of measured outcomes with respect to male/female balance in workplaces, or do differences between the ways that men and women make choices inherently lead to different measured outcomes? Her answer is the latter: that men and women are biologically different, and when given choices, will make different ones that will lead to different outcomes.

The Time Paradox

This book is worth reading, although it rambles on a bit. Zimbardo (who was the infamous psychologist who conducted the Stanford Prison Experiment) and John Boyd talk about how you can classify your personality based on your attitudes towards the past, the present, and the future. Take the assessment test on the website!

The Art of Woo

I read this book after taking a seminar at work with one of the authors, G. Richard Shell. He is a very compelling and down-to-earth speaker, and the book is pretty valuable as a business-psychology tutorial on how to sell ideas. Definitely worth reading, if you have to work in any kind of organization (which means everyone...).

The Paradox of Choice

I read through The Paradox of Choice by Barry Schwarz. It talks about how we humans do poorly with too many choices, as we appear to be driven by regret or the anticipation of regret. For example, too many choices can lead to paralysis, possibly due to the fact that the sum of the opportunity costs goes up with the number of choices. Overall, this book covers a lot of the same material that is covered in Stumbling on Happiness by Daniel Gilbert. The latter was more entertaining; the former more analytical. Of course, as both authors discuss, memories are hardly reliable, so I could be wrong in this comparison!

Emotional Intelligence

I've been reading parts of Daniel Goleman's book Emotional Intelligence.
Wikipedia has an interesting discussion about this topic. Overall, it talks about a lot of commonsense stuff, but maybe that's easy to see in hindsight. Some of the claims in the book about how society was deteriorating seem completely overblown: the book implies that a lack of emotional intelligence was responsible for many societal ills.

Personality strengths

Now, Discover Your Strengths is an interesting book about personality types---more accurately, personality strengths. It makes an interesting claim that everyone should focus on building their careers around their strengths, not on fixing their weaknesses. They have an online questionnaire that evaluates the top 5 strengths out of their universe of 34. Mine were:

1. Learner


2. Deliberative


3. Responsibility


4. Restorative


5. Activator

I'm still mulling this over to see if this classification describes me well.