Psychology, Neurology, and Philosophy

Many people that write about change write as if you've already got the support of executive leadership and that it's just a matter of learning how to execute. It's as if the whole buy-in problem has been solved already. Heather Stagl doesn't write from...

I can still remember the most astonishing and frightening moments in my son’s development. My brother had gotten married the day before in St. Louis and rather than head of directly to a honeymoon with his bride, they stuck around and showed us the t...

We do not like inconsistency.  That’s the fundamental driver behind Cognitive Dissonance: Fifty Years of a Classic Theory .  Joel Cooper provides appropriate nods to Leon Festinger – and those he studied with.  (See A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance , Fes...

There’s a lot of research that has been done on cognitive dissonance.  Cognitive Dissonance: Reexamining a Pivotal Theory in Psychology is a guide to evaluate the research and what we’ve learned over the 60+ years since it was first proposed.  (See ...

It's hard to work in learning and motivation, or even remotely care about how people work, without stumbling into Kurt Lewin's work. Most of the time, people quote the high level and don't go back to read his writing directly. They think about force fields...

It’s a thief. It steals. It steals the things which everyone holds dearest. It deprives us of what we believed we could never be deprived of. It’s a cruel and ruthless villain without remorse, as it takes the best and brightest among us and clouds the...

When a friend of mine told me about this book I was sort of concerned. I thought that somehow learning more about Social Engineering  was sort of like reading a book on how to make a bomb. Sure I know some people need to know how to make a bomb, but d...

I never wanted to be a spy. Astronaut, yes. Spy, no. I’m not sure why. Spies are glamorized in the movies (unless it is Spies Like Us ), but it wasn’t my thing. When the short book A Spy’s Guide to Thinking  came across my path, I thought it was wort...

It’s a classic.  A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance lays out Leon Festinger’s theory about how and why we change our attitudes.  More than 25 of the books that I’ve reviewed contain a direct reference to “cognitive dissonance.”  It underlies theories of ...

In Boston at SPTechCon , I had the pleasure of giving the keynote titled “SharePoint Psychology”. After that Jeremy Thake and I were talking about the keynote and he mentioned that to him many of the concepts were familiar. He traced his thoughts back...

Christiana Morgan is an unlikely person to have such an impact on psychology.  The path that she took was neither short nor straightforward, as Translate this Darkness: The Life of Christiana Morgan shows.  This isn’t the first time that I’ve encou...