Psychology Books

The Political Mind: Why You Can't Understand 21st-Century American Politics with an 18th-Century Brain

George Lakoff

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Total reviews: 10 Average rating: 3.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

In What’s the Matter with Kansas?, Thomas Frank pointed out that a great number of Americans actually vote against their own interests. In The Political Mind, George Lakoff explains why.

As it turns out, human beings are not the rational creatures we’ve so long imagined ourselves to be. Ideas, morals, and values do not exist somewhere outside the body, ready to be examined and put to use. Instead, they exist quite literally inside the brain—and they take physical shape there. For example, we form particular kinds of narratives in our minds just like we form specific muscle memories such as typing or dancing, and then we fit new information into those narratives. Getting that information out of one narrative type and into another—or building a whole new narrative altogether—can be as hard as learning to play the banjo. Changing your mind isn’t like changing your body—it’s the same thing.

But as long as progressive politicians and activists persist in believing that people use an objective system of reasoning to decide on their politics, the Democrats will continue to lose elections. They must wrest control of the terms of the debate from their opponents rather than accepting their frame and trying to argue within it.

This passionate, erudite, and groundbreaking book will appeal to readers of Steven Pinker and Thomas Frank. It is a fascinating read for anyone interested in how the mind works, how society works, and how they work together.

State of Confusion: Political Manipulation and the Assault on the American Mind

Bryant Welch

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Total reviews: 4 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

Finally, the answer to the many questions that have been preying on the minds of millions of Americans has arrived. Why are Americans so vulnerable to divisive political tactics? Why did Americans get dragged into such an unwise war in Iraq? Why do fundamentalist religious groups, Fox News, and right-wing radio still play such influential roles in America’s political landscape? And why are long-accepted rational scientific ideas like evolution under siege? These questions hold America’s future in the balance. Ultimately, they are questions about the American mind. Psychologist-attorney Dr. Bryant Welch has the answers.

If America is going to change the mind-set that led us to war in Iraq and left us unable to confront our serious national problems, this book is vitally important. Drawing on his unique experience both as a clinical psychologist and a Washington, D.C., political figure with the American Psychological Association, Dr. Welch shows how the long-term effects of sophisticated new forms of political manipulation have not only led to our debacle in Iraq but are also currently undercutting America’s ability to address its very serious problems. In the 1944 movie Gaslight, a husband drives his wife to the brink of insanity by playing games with her sense of reality. Just as in the movie, America’s most recent political “gaslighters,” such as George W. Bush, Karl Rove, Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter, and many religious leaders, have generated and exploited confusion in the minds of countless Americans.

Gaslighters prey on their victim’s vulnerability to paranoia, sexual perplexity, and envy to undermine the mind’s ability to function rationally. Welch examines why millions of Americans, in response to such assaults, subconsciously and dangerously create their own simplistic reality, even if it is completely different from the more complex reality of the world.

Most important, State of Confusion explains how and why Americans must act now to fight back against this harmful manipulation before it’s too late. Dr. Welch’s exploration of the American mind is both fascinating and frightening, and State of Confusion is a must-read for everyone who cares about the future of this great country.

The Political Brain: The Role of Emotion in Deciding the Fate of the Nation

Drew Westen

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Total reviews: 2 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

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The Political Brain is a groundbreaking investigation into the role of emotion in determining the political life of the nation. For two decades Drew Westen, professor of psychology and psychiatry at Emory University, has explored a theory of the mind that differs substantially from the more "dispassionate" notions held by most cognitive psychologists, political scientists, and economists—and Democratic campaign strategists. The idea of the mind as a cool calculator that makes decisions by weighing the evidence bears no relation to how the brain actually works. When political candidates assume voters dispassionately make decisions based on "the issues," they lose. That's why only one Democrat has been re-elected to the presidency since Franklin Roosevelt—and only one Republican has failed in that quest.

In politics, when reason and emotion collide, emotion invariably wins. Elections are decided in the marketplace of emotions, a marketplace filled with values, images, analogies, moral sentiments, and moving oratory, in which logic plays only a supporting role. Westen shows, through a whistle-stop journey through the evolution of the passionate brain and a bravura tour through fifty years of American presidential and national elections, why campaigns succeed and fail. The evidence is overwhelming that three things determine how people vote, in this order: their feelings toward the parties and their principles, their feelings toward the candidates, and, if they haven't decided by then, their feelings toward the candidates' policy positions.

Westen turns conventional political analyses on their head, suggesting that the question for Democratic politics isn't so much about moving to the right or the left but about moving the electorate. He shows how it can be done through examples of what candidates have said—or could have said—in debates, speeches, and ads. Westen's discoveries could utterly transform electoral arithmetic, showing how a different view of the mind and brain leads to a different way of talking with voters about issues that have tied the tongues of Democrats for much of forty years—such as abortion, guns, taxes, and race. You can't change the structure of the brain. But you can change the way you appeal to it. And here's how…

The Bush Tragedy

Jacob Weisberg

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Total reviews: 54 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

This is the book that cracks the code of the Bush presidency. Unstintingly yet compassionately, and with no political ax to grind, Slate editor in chief Jacob Weisberg methodically and objectively examines the family and circle of advisers who played crucial parts in George W. Bush’s historic downfall.

In this revealing and defining portrait, Weisberg uncovers the “black box” from the crash of the Bush presidency. Using in-depth research, revealing analysis, and keen psychological acuity, Weisberg explores the whole Bush story. Distilling all that has been previously written about Bush into a defining portrait, he illuminates the fateful choices and key decisions that led George W., and thereby the country, into its current predicament. Weisberg gives the tragedy a historical and literary frame, comparing Bush not just to previous American leaders, but also to Shakespeare’s Prince Hal, who rises from ne’er-do-well youth to become the warrior king Henry V.

Here is the bitter and fascinating truth of the early years of the Bush dynasty, with never-before-revealed information about the conflict between the two patriarchs on George W.’s father’s side of the family–the one an upright pillar of the community, the other a rowdy playboy–and how that schism would later shape and twist the younger George Bush; his father, a hero of war, business, and Republican politics whose accomplishments George W. would attempt to copy and whose absences he would resent; his mother, Barbara, who suffered from insecurity, depression, and deep dissatisfaction with her role as housewife; and his younger brother Jeb, seen by his parents as steadier, stronger, and the son most likely to succeed.

Weisberg also anatomizes the replacement family Bush surrounded himself with in Washington, a group he thought could help him correct the mistakes he felt had destroyed his father’s presidency: Karl Rove, who led Bush astray by pursuing his own historical ambitions and transforming the president into a deeply polarizing figure; Dick Cheney, whose obsessive quest to restore presidential power and protect the country after 9/11 caused Bush and America to lose the world’s respect; and, finally, Donald Rumsfeld and Condoleezza Rice, who encouraged Bush’s foreign policy illusions and abetted his flight from reality.

Delving as no other biography has into Bush’s religious beliefs–which are presented as at once opportunistic and sincere–The Bush Tragedy is an essential work that is sure to become a standard reference for any future assessment. It is the most balanced and compelling account of a sitting president ever written.

The Political Brain: The Role of Emotion in Deciding the Fate of the Nation

Drew Westen

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Total reviews: 35 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

The Political Brain is a groundbreaking investigation into the role of emotion in determining the political life of the nation. For two decades Drew Westen, professor of psychology and psychiatry at Emory University, has explored a theory of the mind that differs substantially from the more "dispassionate" notions held by most cognitive psychologists, political scientists, and economists—and Democratic campaign strategists. The idea of the mind as a cool calculator that makes decisions by weighing the evidence bears no relation to how the brain actually works. When political candidates assume voters dispassionately make decisions based on "the issues," they lose. That's why only one Democrat has been re-elected to the presidency since Franklin Roosevelt—and only one Republican has failed in that quest.

In politics, when reason and emotion collide, emotion invariably wins. Elections are decided in the marketplace of emotions, a marketplace filled with values, images, analogies, moral sentiments, and moving oratory, in which logic plays only a supporting role. Westen shows, through a whistle-stop journey through the evolution of the passionate brain and a bravura tour through fifty years of American presidential and national elections, why campaigns succeed and fail. The evidence is overwhelming that three things determine how people vote, in this order: their feelings toward the parties and their principles, their feelings toward the candidates, and, if they haven't decided by then, their feelings toward the candidates' policy positions.

Westen turns conventional political analyses on their head, suggesting that the question for Democratic politics isn't so much about moving to the right or the left but about moving the electorate. He shows how it can be done through examples of what candidates have said—or could have said—in debates, speeches, and ads. Westen's discoveries could utterly transform electoral arithmetic, showing how a different view of the mind and brain leads to a different way of talking with voters about issues that have tied the tongues of Democrats for much of forty years—such as abortion, guns, taxes, and race. You can't change the structure of the brain. But you can change the way you appeal to it. And here's how…

Godless: The Church of Liberalism

Ann Coulter

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Total reviews: 936 Average rating: 3.5 of 5

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"If a martian landed in America and set out to determine the nation's official state religion, he would have to conclude it is liberalism, while Christianity and Judaism are prohibited by law.

Many Americans are outraged by liberal hostility to traditional religion. But as Ann Coulter reveals in this, her most explosive book yet, to focus solely on the Left's attacks on our Judeo-Christian tradition is to miss a larger point: liberalism is a religion—a godless one.

And it is now entrenched as the state religion of this county.

Though liberalism rejects the idea of God and reviles people of faith, it bears all the attributes of a religion. In Godless, Coulter throws open the doors of the Church of Liberalism, showing us its sacraments (abortion), its holy writ (Roe v. Wade), its martyrs (from Soviet spy Alger Hiss to cop-killer Mumia Abu-Jamal), its clergy (public school teachers), its churches (government schools, where prayer is prohibited but condoms are free), its doctrine of infallibility (as manifest in the "absolute moral authority" of spokesmen from Cindy Sheehan to Max Cleland), and its cosmology (in which mankind is an inconsequential accident).

Then, of course, there's the liberal creation myth: Charles Darwin's theory of evolution.

For liberals, evolution is the touchstone that separates the enlightened from the benighted. But Coulter neatly reverses the pretense that liberals are rationalists guided by the ideals of free inquiry and the scientific method. She exposes the essential truth about Darwinian evolution that liberals refuse to confront: it is bogus science.

Writing with a keen appreciation for genuine science, Coulter reveals that the so-called gaps in the theory of evolution are all there is—Darwinism is nothing but a gap. After 150 years of dedicated searching into the fossil record, evolution's proponents have failed utterly to substantiate its claims. And a long line of supposed evidence, from the infamous Piltdown Man to the "evolving" peppered moths of England, has been exposed as hoaxes. Still, liberals treat those who question evolution as religious heretics and prohibit students from hearing about real science when it contradicts Darwinism. And these are the people who say they want to keep faith out of the classroom?

Liberals' absolute devotion to Darwinism, Coulter shows, has nothing to do with evolution's scientific validity and everything to do with its refusal to admit the possibility of God as a guiding force. They will brook no challenges to the official religion.

Fearlessly confronting the high priests of the Church of Liberalism and ringing with Coulter's razor-sharp wit, Godless is the most important and riveting book yet from one of today's most lively and impassioned conservative voices.


"Liberals love to boast that they are not 'religious,' which is what one would expect to hear from the state-sanctioned religion. Of course liberalism is a religion. It has its own cosmology, its own miracles, its own beliefs in the supernatural, its own churches, its own high priests, its own saints, its own total worldview, and its own explanation of the existence of the universe. In other words, liberalism contains all the attributes of what is generally known as 'religion.'" —From Godless


From the Hardcover edition.

Life's a Campaign: What Politics Has Taught Me About Friendship, Rivalry, Reputation, and Success

Chris Matthews

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Total reviews: 35 Average rating: 3.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

Chris Matthews is like no other TV interviewer. Life’s a Campaign is like no other book on success.

Famous for demanding the truth from his Hardball guests, Chris Matthews now reveals what the people running this country rarely confess: the secrets of how they got to the top. Here is the first book on power with insight snatched from those who wield it. Life’s a Campaign exposes the tactics, tricks, and truths that help people get ahead–and can help you, too, whatever your field of ambition.

Written in the assertive, good-natured style that is Matthews’s trademark, Life’s a Campaign is the most useful kind of investigative reporting. You’ll benefit from his insider’s scrutiny of the Congress, the White House, and the national news media. Here are the methods, showcased in fascinating anecdotes and case histories, that presidents, senators, and other powerful people use to persuade others and win–and the life lessons they provide for the rest of us.

You’ll learn about Bill Clinton’s laser-focused ability to listen to those he wants to seduce–and how he’s been teaching that craft to his wife, Hillary; how Ronald Reagan employed his basic optimism to win history to his side; the simple steps in human diplomacy that the first President Bush exploited to assemble a worldwide posse to attack Saddam Hussein and gain global approval in a way his son has failed to do; how Nancy Pelosi became the first woman Speaker of the House by practicing the most fundamental of human qualities: hardnosed loyalty. You’ll also find out, for the first time, about Matthews’s own wild ride through the turbulent, converging rapids of politics and journalism.

The big payoff in Life’s a Campaign is what you’ll learn about human nature:

• People would rather be listened to than listen.
• People don’t mind being used; what they mind is being discarded.
• People are more loyal to the people they’ve helped than the people they’ve helped are loyal to them.
• Not everyone’s going to like you.
• No matter what anybody says, nobody wants a level playing field.

Knowing such truths is the successful person’s number one advantage in life. As you’ll learn in Life’s a Campaign, mastering–and employing–these truths separates the leaders from the followers.

Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia

Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari

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Total reviews: 19 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Original, brilliant... insightful, but distorted in perspective. 5 out of 5 stars.
24 of 29 people found this review helpful.

Why am I giving this book a five star rating? Because this work is an effort at a new theory that is systematic and terminologically consistent and must have been a torture for the writers to conjure up in their head.

It certainly is a torture to read this work. Not because I can't understand hard-core philosophy - I have read, understood and liked Hegel, Heidegger, Sartre and Derrida, considered amongst the most abstruse stylists - but because it is difficult to empathize with writers who characterize themselves and their readers as 'desiring machines' rather than as subjects with consciousness and will.

Is desire the only thing that defines human beings - what about will, thinking, compassion, judgment? And further why am I supposed to be a machine and in what sense? These are the questions that came to my mind. The authors never explain. The question of the subject is dismissed in one sentence.

It is also difficult to agree with writers who dismiss all seeking of power and all active resistance by implication as fascism and preach escape/flight as the most radical ideology of resistance and hope.

And it is difficult to find hope in the vain jargon of molecular vs. molar, in the lines of escape or flight, or in a schizoid approach to life (a schizophrenic has no control over himself - is a machine and hence is the authors' favorite).

The authors fail in their synthesis of Marx and Freud although they come close and fail to understand Nietzsche, one of their favorite philosophers. Marx, Freud and Nietzsche would turn violently in their graves, if they ever know what Deleuze/Guattari did to their philosophies. They speculations on incest, kinship etc., are just too weak, sketchy and merely assertoric to be taken seriously.

I do not endorse the philosophy of Deleuze/Guattari. To be sure they offer brilliant insights but their line of argument has as many holes as Swiss cheese.

Yet there are a few things that are brilliant in the work and it certainly remains an original and challenging work. Having, stated my disappointment with the work, now let me also state the better aspects of this work. This work has a very well argued theory of control mechanisms in primitive, barbarian and capitalist societies.

The authors rightly point out that capitalism governs well because it always generates new rules to survive (new axiomatic) and controls because all social codes are 'decoded' (de-codified) into flows (loose, lawlike systems of control) and de-territorialized. (Other writers have explained the same things in simpler jargon, but Deleuze-Guattari need to be given due credit for the brilliance of their analysis of capitalism, although their libidnalization of economics doesn't add anything valueable to the analysis of either libido or economics and seems forced).

The other hallmark of this work is that it offers one of the more interesting critiques of Freud's Oedipal complex, psychotherapy and its role in making humans conformist. They demolish the Daddy-Mommy-Me triangle and its implications in making us conformists quite effectively.

However, it may be borne in mind that there have been better criticisms of Freud's theories and Deleuze/Guattari are in some respects more Freudian than Freud with their libidinal interpretations of human beings as desiring machines and of economy as investment of desire (libidnal economy).

To sum up, this work is worth reading for its analysis of capitalism, and to some extent for its critique of psychoanalysis. However this is not a work that offers hope for the oppressed or an agenda for political action although followers of Deleuze/Guattari like Antonio Negri and Alain Badiou take their philosophy in a more positive direction. The best portion is the third section, followed by second. The least satisfactory portions and the last and the first, although they are essential to read in order to understand the relevant middle portion of the work.

And of course human beings are not desiring machines no matter what Deleuze/Guattari say. Beyond a metaphor, machinism is delusory. We are what we are. Happy to be human and animal rather than machines. Much as post-structuralist and post-modernists dismiss the question of the subject, the question remains - alive and active and kicking.

The Mind of the Terrorist: The Psychology of Terrorism from the IRA to al-Qaeda

Jerrold M. Post

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Total reviews: 2 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

A must read for any professional in the field 4 out of 5 stars.
2 of 2 people found this review helpful.

If you ever wonder how those terrorists can do what they do this is the book for you. This book is the best one volume catch all book on about every terrorist group that there is. The author does a great job diagnosing what motivates each of those groups he highlights. He puts you into the mind of each group in a short, concise narrative on the group. You can see what motivates them to do what they do. His information is very applicable, right out of the newspaper. He goes over both FARC and PKK. Both groups recently had their chapters of fame in the world's newspapers just within the past month. Through every chapter you can see terrorists aren't like us. Each group is motivated by a slightly different cause. However it is easy to say that they all aren't like the average American. We are fooling ourselves to think otherwise. The author does offer some great tips on how to fight terrorism. His tips are real thought provoking and worthy of a look by all.

Editorial Review:

In contrast to the widely held assumption that terrorists as crazed fanatics, Jerrold Post demonstrates they are psychologically “normal” and that “hatred has been bred in the bone”. He reveals the powerful motivations that drive these ordinary people to such extraordinary evil by exploring the different types of terrorists, from national-separatists like the Irish Republican Army to social revolutionary terrorists like the Shining Path, as well as religious extremists like al-Qaeda and Aum Shinrikyo. In The Mind of the Terrorist, Post uses his expertise to explain how the terrorist mind works and how this information can help us to combat terrorism more effectively.

Understanding Public Opinion

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Despite the number of academics, journalists, and political professionals who engage in the study of American political opinion, there is little consensus among these groups about its study, use, or nature. This has led to a flowering of diversity in the field - diversity of concepts and theories, diversity of questions, and diversity of methods.

The second edition of Understanding Public Opinion introduces new, classroom-friendly essays that capture this diversity, and highlight the many approaches that social scientists use to explore and explain public opinion. These 15 contributions will expose your students to innovative and original research while showing how the sources, content, and consequences of public opinion in the United States continue to evolve.

With the combined efforts of twenty-five recognized experts, students will get a flavor for the range of public opinion research with such topics as reactions to political advertising, trust in local government, economic issues in presidential elections, and a comparative look at public support for transitions to democracy in Post-Soviet states. The ideal supplement, Understanding Public Opinion, Second Edition, expands on the established topics of any public opinion course, fleshing out important ideas that basic texts can only cover briefly.

Contributors: Alan I. Abramowitz and Kyle L. Saunders; Henry E. Brady, Kay Lehman Schlozman, Sidney Verba, and Laurel Elms; Paul R. Brewer; Allison Calhoun-Brown; Shanto Iyengar and Markus Prior; William G. Jacoby; John R. Hibbing; Kathleen McGraw; William Mishler and Richard Rose; John Mueller; Wendy Rahn and Tom Rudolph; Virginia Sapiro; Paul Sniderman and Ted Carmines; Carole Uhlaner and Chris Garcia; Clyde Wilcox and Barbara Norrander