The Wisest One in the Room: How You Can Benefit from Social Psychology's Most Powerful Insights

This book is a great walkthrough of several psychological concepts and how they are expressed in business. You do not need to be a psych major to enjoy it. I found it interesting and a strong bit of confirmation bias that as I was reading this, many business meetings and situations seemed to align. I am sure they were there all along, but it was when reading this that I was more attuned to see what was going on under the surface.

“the nine most terrifying words in the English language are, ‘I’m from the government and I’m here to help.’

The message we can take from virtually thousands of studies is that people are more susceptible to subtle situational influences

research showing that averaging the estimates of a large number of people concerning almost any uncertain variable—the temperature of a room, the number of jelly beans in a jar, or the likely winner of the Nobel Peace Prize—results in a value that is almost always more accurate than the overwhelming majority of individual estimates.

Lewinian recipe: Make the actions you want to encourage easier, akin to moving downhill; make the actions you want to discourage more difficult, akin to moving uphill.

Leonard Nimoy, who played the ultrarational Mr. Spock in the enduringly popular Star Trek TV series, felt compelled to title his biography, I Am Not Spock. Indeed, the fundamental attribution error is so powerful and pervasive that Nimoy eventually gave up, titling the second of his autobiographies, I Am Spock.

people respond to their surrounding circumstances not as they are but as they are interpreted. How we interpret a situation guides how we act in two distinct ways. What we think the situation we’re confronting is about determines how we think, feel, and act in response.

most consistent and remarkable findings in the behavioral science literature over the past century is that people’s behavior is often more predictive of their attitudes than their attitudes are of their behavior.

The central message of chapter 2 was that while you can try to change someone’s behavior by targeting the person’s heart and mind, sometimes it’s best to target behavior directly. The additional lesson here is that if you target behavior in a psych-wise manner, the heart and mind will follow. Long ago the Babylonian Talmud anticipated the “primacy of behavior” with the following commentary: “One should always occupy himself with Torah and good deeds, [even if] it be not for their own sake, for out of good work misapplied in purpose there comes [the desire to do it] for its own sake.”

The philosopher David Hume famously maintained that extraordinary claims require the support of extraordinarily convincing data, and it is his dictum that we wisely follow when we read of alien abductions, Bigfoot sightings, or reports of psychic prophecies. The solution is easy to state but difficult to follow, or at least difficult to follow consistently. What you need to do is to slow down and consciously look for information that challenges whatever proposition you are evaluating, especially if the proposition conforms to your current views or preferences. Does vegetarianism promote good health? Your first instinct, especially if you’re a vegetarian, will be to think of healthy. Studies have shown that when people are encouraged to ask themselves, “Why might my initial impression be wrong?” or “Why might the opposite be true?” they tend to show less of a confirmation bias and, as a result, make far more accurate assessments.

Here is the Link to the Amazon book.