Deceiving appearances

I make it a point to never read a book with a boring cover. Unless I have to for a class, that is.

I just read a book for my writing class whose cover bears a striking resemblance to this:


It's called Judgments Over Time: The Interplay of Thoughts, Feelings, and Behaviors. Such a “fascinating” title only made it lose more points.

Upon flipping through the book, you would realize that it is in fact a collection of psychology articles about how a person changes (or doesn't change) the way they think, feel, and behave over time. Almost twenty percent of the book is reference pages. You might come across an occasional nonsensical diagram that seems to be trying to graph a person's life with a sinusoidal curve representing non-quantified high and low coherence levels. It is titled “Potential Life Niches,” and you might even sit for a moment to try and figure out what all the arrows mean before taking a deep breath and turning to the front of the book to begin a part of your life that is likely to be one of those low coherence pits in the graph you just gave up on.

You would be pleasantly surprised however. The foreword is written by some guy named George Lowenstein, and he's a bit like David Letterman in that he's pretty funny and makes you feel smart. I sort of had that sophisticated smile-and-adjust-your-bow-tie reaction when he quoted Pangloss from Voltaire's Candide and I recognized it. I also chuckled to myself when he referred to the “mild-mannered office-mate [who] entertains fantasies of murdering you.”

At this point, I may need to remind you that this book is not about the criminally insane but rather how impressions, memories, and expectations adjust over time. And I think that it was pretty well-put-together. Lowenstein's humor doesn't continue through all of the articles, but they are engaging enough to keep my attention once I realized that they could read my mind, including my violent fantasies.

In fact, they seem to know quite a bit about me. There is a whole article on defensive pessimism, a condition where people set their expectation low because it drives them to work harder and achieve more. I always think it's a little odd when I realize that my disorders have names.

In general though, I really enjoyed my little self-exploration through this book. Then again, perhaps you should ask one of the authors how much I really enjoyed it. They might just tell you that I've reconstructed my memory just because I'm happy to be done.