The Psychology Book: From Shamanism to Cutting-Edge Neuroscience, 250 Milestones in the History of Psychology

by Wade E. Pickren, Philip G. Zimbardo (Foreword)

What could be more fascinating than the workings of the human mind? This stunningly illustrated survey in Sterlings Milestones series chronicles the history of psychology through 250 landmark events, theories, publications, experiments, and discoveries. Beginning with ancient philosophies of well-being, it touches on such controversial topics as phrenology, sexual taboos, electroshock therapy, multiple personality disorder, and the nature of evil.

Genres: Psychology, Nonfiction, Science, History, Reference, Philosophy, Neuroscience

528 pages, Hardcover

First published May 6, 2014

Reviews

[Florin Pitea · Rating 5 out of 5]

An excellent book. Worth buying. Worth reading. Worth keeping. Worth consulting now and then, if and when needed.

[Max McKinnon · Rating 1 out of 5]

A nice book detailing the developments of psychological findings over the years.

Universal facial emotions, personal ethic development, social identity, stanford prison experiment, stereotype effect, double blind study, BITCH, earlier forms of lobotomies, and many more.

Some of the excerpts don’t do the best job explaining summarizing the results or their significance. But mostly it was enjoyable short summaries.

So far, the Science book has been the best one in this collection.

Edit:
Whoaaaaa I was totally blown away by Humankind’s in depth look into the Stanford prison experiment and the Milgram shock experiment. The experiments are both a bunch of dramatized garbage. The kid that made headlines for breaking down for example, his real deal was he thought he could study while making money in there, and when they took his books, he faked a breakdown so he could be released. And various other things of that nature happened, where it was more a test of how people act and what they do with money and pressure. And in the Milgram experiment, they found that most people knew it was fake, and those that didn’t were disgusted and quit when given the order to continue shocking, those nunbers thrown out instead of accurately reported. Eg 9/9 instead of 9/10. Wow what awful science.

Reducing this to two stars for pushing those two popular but long disproven experiments.

Edit:
WHOA WHOA THEY ALSO GOT THE MILGRAM SHOCK EXPERIMENT WRONG.

Both the SPE and Milgram shock experiment were the two most disaster causing faked psychological findings. Sucks to see this book pushing long disproven lies.

Our disastrous punitive based prisons and their high recidivism rates can in large part thank incompetence with the scientific method like SPE and the Martison report.

Book isn’t worth of positive stars in its current state. I’m going to ask the author to correct these disastrous errors in continuing long disproven studies that continue to harmfully affect leadership and political choices surrounding prisons.

Thanks Humankind for doing a proper coverage of these topics and the damage these false conclusions have done.

[Jennifer · Rating 4 out of 5]

I enjoyed this book. I learned new things about topics I had already studied. A few topics were completely new to me.

The only problem is that you can't tell which topics are still considered accurate and which ones have been discredited or updated either part or in full, so read it as if it is historical and do your own research on topics of interest. (There are many more instances than they point out.)

It is a good coffee table book for psychology lovers because of how it is organized and the pictures.

[Rex · Rating 4 out of 5]

Twenty years have passed for the development of Neuroscience in the 21st century. We can see how many old school concepts and scientific ideas in the universe of psychology have run out of fashion. The critical point is the death of Psychologism: the school of ideas that our mind, our feeling, our thoughts, our sadness, our happiness are somehow different from our brains. It's all gone.

I wonder at 2100, when we write a History Book of Neuroscience for the 21st century, how many concepts that are hip and in right now will be gone with the knowledge cycle.

[Sara · Rating 4 out of 5]

Pickren's entry into the Sterling Milestone series is worth the read for anyone mildly interested in psychology OR history.
With brief synopses of critical points in the development of psychology, the reader will quickly learn a little about a lot. The chronological format of the book is utilized well, and makes it easy for readers to follow the sometimes confusing history of psychology. Although at times it can get a bit lengthy or repetitive in its' descriptions, Pickren generally does a good job in presenting the information in layman's terms.

[Lucie Gardet · Rating 5 out of 5]

As a future psychology student, this book is just my bible. He summarized the many concepts of this science. He is very simple to read and understand so I advice everyone who is interested in psychology, confirmed as beginners.

[Eugene Kernes · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book shows various ideas regarding our brain and mind have are shaped. Pickren shows the circumstances that created the psychological concept including its meaning and importance. Many times, there are references to how the past psychological views influenced out current perspectives. The development of the ideas by the various individuals is a focus of this book.

Many explanations held by the past are wrong, but they helped point out problems and alternatives which future generations took. The evolution of ideas, although not central to this book, is marvelously laid out. From trying to separate mind and body, to the physiological response of how the mind can help or harm the body. Pickren points out that other fields impacted psychology, such as economics. The rise of artificial intelligence is also shown.

Most of this book is about the psychological reasoning which were developed in the late 19th to late 20th century. In some cases, the author explains that a particular view was shared by a different culture before but not in the particular manner, which points out a much bigger problem that the book is about mostly western psychology. Each psychological theory is presented with its history and explanation of what it entails, but at times, the theory itself is barely presented. This book is great survey of psychological concepts and resource for how to obtain a better understanding of the concepts.

[Karen · Rating 4 out of 5]

I enjoyed this book, though it took me a while to get through it. I think this is a good book to start reading if you are interested in psychology, but don't know where to start. As someone with several degrees in Neuroscience, of course, we had run ins with psychology and psychiatry, because Neuroscience deals with the physical running of the brain, while psychology deals with something less tangible. I've read a variety of books on the brain, and of course had to take case studies in ethics of which there were an awful lot of psychiatric 'stunts' that were purportedly experiments that were absolutely awful. I also have read about Freud and a variety of other psychologists/psychiatrists. I know Freud isn't paid much attention to now...but it's good to understand the background to both the people involved and the medications used in psychiatry.

Because these books are more like encyclopedias on specific topics, they take a bit of a slog to get through. But they provide a good basis from which to dive deeper into the topics. I will probably get more of these types of DK books in the future.

[William Yip · Rating 4 out of 5]

Some explanations were confusing and I had to Google the concept to understand it. The author made biased statements at times. Some of the pictures were irrelevant to the chapters they were in. That said, the book serves as a good reference manual. Like many other fields, psychology started via religion and intuition and became increasingly scientific and institutionalized. I quite liked the chapters on flow, positive psychology, and similar concepts that portray people as capable of bettering themselves.

[Ogi Ogas · Rating 2 out of 5]

My ratings of books on Goodreads are solely a crude ranking of their utility to me, and not an evaluation of literary merit, entertainment value, social importance, humor, insightfulness, scientific accuracy, creative vigor, suspensefulness of plot, depth of characters, vitality of theme, excitement of climax, satisfaction of ending, or any other combination of dimensions of value which we are expected to boil down through some fabulous alchemy into a single digit.

[Clara · Rating 4 out of 5]

Sehr interessantes Buch; es gab auch mehrere Einträge von anderen wissenschaftlichen Bereichen, von denen ich gar nicht wusste, dass sie mit Psychologie zu tun haben. Außerdem ist es nicht zu kompliziert oder detailliert erklärt, sondern bietet eine gute und kompakte Übersicht, also wenn jemand grade erst anfängt sich mit Psychologie zu beschäftigen, dann ist das ein echt gutes Buch ( auch wenn es verdammt viele Rechtschreibfehler gab. )

[Hiram Brown · Rating 4 out of 5]

Many interesting tidbits

Was a bit surprised that so many short disconnected pages could keep bringing me back. Very interesting to see how much our attempts to understand ourselves have varied over the years.

[Purvis · Rating 1 out of 5]

Mish mash. Strange mixture of important and trivial selections. Even stranger idea selection within individual selections for those that I knew well.
Looks, and reads, like a work notebook sent to a publisher.

[Lucas Medal · Rating 3 out of 5]

It’s more of a book to keep in the living room to entertain guests than to enjoy. Structure becomes very repetitive and dull, but there’s a lot of information. Also, it is supremely eurocentric.

[Sadia Prity]

this is osam book

[Kenneth · Rating 3 out of 5]

Basic en simpel, maar een goede introductie.

[Nicole · Rating 5 out of 5]

Super cool read. Very interesting. I do wish the writing was on the right side, but that's just me being picky an holding a heavy book. Amazing information an great illustrations

[Justin · Rating 2 out of 5]

There are other books with very similar titles that go into far more depth and are better at summarizing

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

Dear Lector:

Se recomienda idealmente su lectura en caso de estar o haber estudiado psicología, incluso si ya eres psicólogo. Contiene una redacción sencilla y temas sobre todo el proceso que ha influido en la psicología.

[Sophia · Rating 4 out of 5]

The whole series of 250 Milestones is an amazing way to learn about the development of a certain field. Psychology is a new field, so this turned out to be a fairly detailed history (especially compared with the previous books on math and physics). As a psychology undergraduate, I recognized a lot but not everything of what was mentioned.
The only problem was that sometimes the entries include a conclusion on what the current consensus is on that subject (accepted or rejected), but sometimes it didn't, as was the case with the Autism entry (which I mention because it's a socially important issue, and really should be corrected).
All the same, you can learn a lot from these books, and they're very understandable.

[Micaela is here · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fantastic assimilation of phycology history! Thorough, easy to understand and follow, a must read for anyone starting their psychology studies.

[Jessica Pelletier · Rating 4 out of 5]

Un livre intéressant parlant de nombreux sujets touchant à la psychologie humaine au cours de l'histoire

[Rose Boyer · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great Book

[Victoria McOrangepeel · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was the best romance book ever. It was very enjoyable, especially when Felicia and Robby got together. It had me in tears!