In Your Head

I don't really know anything about psychology, but whenever I learn anything about it I find it incredibly fascinating and always end up playing games in my mind, which makes everyday thinking a little more fun. I think that it would be a really cool major if you got into the right stuff, but the one psychology class I took (psy 201 mind and brain) didn't impress me much so I gave up on that pretty quickly. However, before I took the class (and part of the reason why I took the class) my dad sent me a really interesting psychology book calle The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom by Jonathan Haidt, a professor at the University of Virginia.
The title sounds like a Dr. Phil self help book, but deals with pretty in depth psychology studies and the like. Basically its all about studying from a scientific standpoint what makes people happy. Its pretty much what you expect: family, friends, things you enjoy doing, not being stressed. But the best part of the book for me is all of the studies that it describes. One passage that I find particularly interesting:

"Whenever you see or hear a word that resembles your name, a little flash of pleasure biases you towards thinking the thing is good. So when a man namesd Dennis is considering a career, he ponders the possibilities: 'Lawyer, docter, banker, dentist...dentist...something about dentist just feels right.' And in fact, people named Dennis or Denise are slightly more likely than people with other names to become dentists. Louis and Louise are more likely to move to Louisiana or St. Louis, George and Georgina are more likely to move to Georgia. The own-name preference even shows up in marriage records: People are slightly more likely to marry people whose names sound like their own, even if the similarity is just sharing a first initial. When Pelham presented his findings to my academic department, I was shocked to realize that most of the married people in the room illustrated his claim: Jerry and Judy, Brian and Bethany, and the winners were me, Jon, and my wife, Jayne."

Most of the studies support the general hypothesis that we have very little control over our thoughts and actions because the concious mind is so heavily influenced by the subconcious. We conciously decide to eat because chemicals are telling us that we are hungry and that getting food is probably a good idea. Haidt compares the concious mind to a rider on an elephant, which represents the unconcious. The rider can direct the elephant, but can never really control it. I shouldn't even try to explain this in a couple paragraphs, you should get the book.

some links to check out:
http://www.amazon.com/Happiness-Hypothesis-Finding-Modern-Ancient/dp/0465028012

really cool experiment, also check out the stanford prison experiment
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment

test yourself here, do the research studies they are way bettter.
https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/