In his widely praised book, award-winning psychologist Jonathan Haidt examines the world's philosophical wisdom through the lens of psychological science, showing how a deeper understanding of enduring maxims-like Do unto others as you would have others do unto you, or What doesn't kill you makes you stronger-can enrich and even transform our lives.
Customer Reviews:
Avg. Customer Rating: 4.5 / 5.0
This might become a classic---so much wisdom in so little space:
The blurb on the front cover of this book is "For the reader who seeks to understand happiness, my advice is: begin with Haidt." I believe this assertion is exactly right. I have never read a single volume that summarized and wove into a coherent whole the variety of insights concerning human happiness that have been discovered by philosophers and religious gurus of the past and modern social psychologists. Moreover, this book is beautifully written, the exposition of various theories always taking a fresh... more info
AMAZING BOOK:
It's an amazing book for whoever is looking to understand how our mind works, how it's nature is structured, how the simple stuff the people already have identified about our nature has been proven by science and so can easily be described (as opposed to just believing somebody older because he says so)
Outstanding field of psychology:
This book provides a great overvieuw of the latest developments in positive psychology.
This is the first really new thing I learned in the field of psychology since i obtained my master (2004) It is written very well and is a must for every person who seeks to understand the psychology of happiness (no real a-priori knowledge needed) minor remarks: I'm not sure whether his interpretation of the Harlow experiments are accurate. And he doesn't accredit Nuttin for the letter-effect
A Happy Accident, but an Accident Nevertheless:
Haidt attempts a synthesis of the proto-psychological observations of the sages from the western, middle eastern, Chinese and Indian cultural traditions with modern psychological research into the cognitive and emotional functioning of healthy minds. There is much that is interesting in the book, from both the psychological and historical perspective, but the author's concern for accessibility (for which he thanks, or perhaps blames, an employee of his publisher) has come at the expense of achieving any... more info
