Take Grumpy Cat, for instance, who isn’t really grumpy – it’s just the way her face was made. We mistake the features of their resting face for a temporary emotional expression instead.

We feel so sure that we know someone’s personality from just their face, but we are wrong. The power of a person’s face over our impressions of their personality is a case in point. Subsequent research (on humans) showed that events in the outside world can indeed affect us directly and unconsciously – but only through activating internal cognitive mechanisms that he had long insisted were irrelevant.ģ. But we so wanted to believe otherwise that we persisted in the illusion. Skinner’s last-gasp appeal to the general public, following the “ cognitive revolution” in psychology of the 60s, arguing that we had no actual freedom of will, that our conscious thoughts were not causal at all. The book that got me started in psychology, a bestseller when I was taking a high-school psychology class. Beyond Freedom and Dignity by BF Skinner (1971)

Best books to read 2017 psychology