Reading Material

I don't get as much time to read as I used to but love to settle down with a good book as often as I can.. what are you reading at the moment? How do you choose what you read..? Do you follow specific authors or subjects or wait until somebody gives you a new book?

The most recent book that I read is called 'Flipnosis - The Art of Split Second Persuasion' by Kevin Dutton, Amazon link to Flipnosis . I was inspired to read this after researching the area of government think tanks and coming across the 'behavioural insight team.' This all sounded very Orwellian to me and I wanted to investigate further. I have read about the subject in the past and like many people I am interested in psychological experiments; but it is interesting to consider how these results are applied.

One experiment discussed in the book is the 'Milgram' experiment where individuals were told to give electric shocks to a person in another room. The person in the other room was fictional but the operators did not know this; it was scary how many of the operators continued to 'shock' the victims even when there were audible screams.  It clearly showed the effect of authority on our behaviour Milgram experiment. Of course, to some extent our perception of authority depends on our social circle and our background but the results are surprising.

This links together with the book that I am currently reading; 'The Filter Bubble' by Eli Pariser Amazon link to Filter Bubble. It explains how the internet is becoming more personalised and therefore influencing our choice of news, shopping, friends and entertainment.  The power of Google and Facebook to collect our data is probably not surprising but the way that data is used might be...