John Bargh Ph.D.
AUTHOR

John Bargh Ph.D.

Health & Wellness
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"Before You Know It" is my first book for a general audience. I've edited a dozen or so academic books covering research and theory in psychology, and am approaching 200 research articles and chapters, but writing this book was a completely new experience. It is about my career as a scientist interested in free will and what human consciousness is actually for -- I wanted a better, more specific answer than "everything", which is where things were when I started in the 1970s. We are all interested in these basic questions but I got to spend my adult life trying to find the answers to them -- getting paid for what I wanted to do anyway, not bad eh? So I majored in psychology (and minored in Led Zeppelin, as a late night FM disc jockey) in college (Illinois) and went on to graduate PhD work in social psychology (Michigan) -- and then was very fortunate to land a job as a professor at NYU in Greenwich Village. What a life-changer, from the sleepy Midwest to the middle of Manhattan. That's where the book starts, and there are personal stories and anecdotes about my life in the big city for over 20 years followed by life in the beautiful pastoral countryside of Connecticut for the last 15 years, after I moved to Yale. And it also includes what I learned about human nature from observing that city life and then (different things!) from rural life, and especially from watching my daughter grow up while I was working on the book. And there are many 'inside' stories about the research going on in my lab -- how the mundane events in our day to day life can have remarkable influences on whether we like and trust someone or not, such as whether we are holding a hot or an iced cup of coffee at the moment. (Why should that matter?) And how our worries about flu viruses and germs in general can change our social and political attitudes such as about immigration, or same-sex marriage. (Huh? What does the flu have to do with immigration??) how we are able to make sense of the rapid-fire stimulus overload of a teeming metropolis packed with people, cars, noise, and craziness. How we know to seize on good opportunities and avoid danger and people who don't have our best interests at heart, something that mattered to long ago cavemen and cavewomen as much as it does to us today. Recently, we've been studying how thinking about the future -- what we want to get done and accomplish in the coming days and months -- change how we think about the present -- causing us to like some things we used to dislike and to make us take risks we've never taken before. Diet pills and tanning salons, for example, bad for your health maybe but if being more attractive is starting to matter -- now they are a good thing (or so we convince ourselves). I've personally learned some new things myself in the course of writing the book -- such as following Norman Mailer's advice and giving myself assignments days in advance of when I need them done. This allows my mind to work on them unconsciously in the background while I am doing other things, and then when I did sit down to write the next chapter, I knew already how I wanted to organize the different stories and studies, maybe even how to put things in just the right way. Letting my mind work on important tasks in the background and in advance was a huge help to writing the book, and a tactic I'd never used before I read Mailer's advice. But the other really helpful advice is something I've known about for over 20 years -- how to make the good intentions we all have much more likely to be acted upon and carried out. There's a simple but very effective, and research-tested, way of doing that called "implementation intentions" and I've used them in my personal and home life to do the right thing, and to avoid unwanted unconscious influences (such as to take my office problems and stress home with me in the evening). Hey, there are some dumb jokes as well. I tried to make reading the book a fun and interesting experience as much as I could. Hopefully you get useful science and helpful advice out of it but also have fun reading it as well. Basic info: born in Champaign, Illinois. Graduated Champaign Central High School 1973. Graduated University of Illinois 1977. PhD from University of Michigan 1981. Professor at NYU (Psychology) from 1981-2003. Professor at Yale (Psychology) 2003-present. Currently James Rowland Angell Professor of Psychology, and director of ACME lab. Major awards: Guggenheim Fellowship (2001), Early (1989) and Distinguished (2014) Career Achievement Awards from American Psychological Association, Honorary Doctorate from Radboud University, Nijmegen, The Netherlands (2008), Donald T. Campbell Award for Distinguished Career in Social Psychology (2006), inducted into American Academy of Arts & Sciences (2011).
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