(Ok, so I’ve gotten somewhat distracted from doing book reviews of late, its not because I’ve stopped reading…I’m still spending plenty of time on trains…just that I’ve been growing a pile of ‘things I should do when I get around to it’)
This book describes a series of psychological experiments carried out in the last century, focussing on the social impact of those experiments rather than the overt science of them. It is written in an informal style following the journey of discovery about the experiments and some of the people involved in them. At times just meeting the people, others attempting to recreate the experiments in a world that has seen them before.
In some ways it paints a depressing picture of how little impact some of these experiments have had on the mental health care systems. It starts with the Milgram experiment and describes the effects it had on some of the participants. Certainly I had heard of most of these experiments, without either understanding the context within which they were run nor how recently they have all been conducted.
The book is an easy collection to start understanding some more about psychological experiments, how to perform them and what has been the impact of some of the higher profile ones. It isn’t a science book as such, rather a book about scientists interacting with a world they don’t seem to understand.
Who should read this book? Armchair psychologists, anyone who is interested in the social impact of scientific process.
(book 7, week 23)
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