Books like Terror, Love, and Brainwashing by Alexandra Stein

Carol Dweck explores how the two fundamental mindsets—fixed and growth—shape our attitudes, goals, and success across work, relationships, and parenting, offering practical strategies to shift from stagnation to opportunity.

Learn how to express feelings and needs without hostility, fostering empathy and compassion in personal, professional, and political conversations.

Explores the groundbreaking science of neuroplasticity, showing how the brain can recover from injury, learn new skills, and even rewire itself to overcome long‑standing mental limits.

Margaret Thaler Singer surveys the psychology of cults, offering evidence, examples and practical advice for spotting and escaping cult influence.

Exploring how our brain’s self‑justification keeps us from admitting mistakes, this book shows why we cling to wrong beliefs, how bias distorts memory, and offers strategies to own errors in personal and public life.

Michel Foucault’s seminal work traces the evolution of punishment and surveillance, revealing how modern societies exercise power through disciplinary institutions such as prisons, schools, and hospitals.

David Brooks examines the forces that drive people's success and the social structures that shape achievement, offering insights into personality, social status, and mobility in America.

Danielle “Tanya” Bigelow, a former child with obsessive‑compulsive disorder, now seeks help from psychologist Alex Delaware after her aunt confesses to murder. The case pulls Delaware and LAPD Detective Milo Sturgis through Los Angeles’ darkest corners in search of a phantom victim.

Stanley Milgram’s Obedience to Authority documents an experiment where participants, following orders from an experimenter, administer electric shocks to learners, revealing how ordinary people can comply with harmful commands.

Edwin Hutchins combines his background as an anthropologist and an open-ocean racing sailor and navigator in this account of how anthropological methods can be combined with cognitive theory to produce a new reading of cognitive science. His theoretical insights are grounded in an extended analysis of ship navigation - its computational basis, its historical roots, its social organization, and the details of its implementation in actual practice aboard large ships. The result is an unusual interdisciplinary approach to cognition in culturally constituted activities outside the laboratory - "in the wild.". Hutchins examines a set of phenomena that have fallen between the established disciplines of psychology and anthropology, bringing to light a new set of relationships between culture and cognition. The standard view is that culture affects the cognition of individuals. Hutchins argues instead that cultural activity systems have cognitive properties of their own that differ from the cognitive properties of the individuals who participate in them. Each action for bringing a large naval vessel into port, for example, is informed by culture; thus the navigation team can be seen as a cognitive and computational system. Introducing life in the Navy and work on the bridge, Hutchins makes a clear distinction between the cognitive properties of an individual and the cognitive properties of a system. In striking contrast to the usual laboratory tasks of research in cognitive science, he adopts David Marr's paradigm and applies the principal metaphor of cognitive science - cognition as computation - to the navigation task. After comparing modern Western navigation with the method practiced in Micronesia, Hutchins explores the computational and cognitive properties of systems that involve multiple individuals. He then turns to an analysis of learning or change in the organization of cognitive systems at several scales. . Hutchins's conclusion illustrates the costs of ignoring the cultural nature of cognition and points to ways in which contemporary cognitive science can be transformed by new meanings and interpretations.

The world is in the grips of mass formation—a dangerous, collective type of hypnosis—as we bear witness to loneliness, free-floating anxiety, and fear giving way to censorship, loss of privacy, and surrendered freedoms. It is all spurred by a singular, focused crisis narrative that forbids dissident views and relies on destructive groupthink. Desmet’s work on mass formation theory was brought to the world’s attention on The Joe Rogan Experience and in major alternative news outlets around the globe. Read this book to get beyond the sound bites! Totalitarianism is not a coincidence and does not form in a vacuum. It arises from a collective psychosis that has followed a predictable script throughout history, its formation gaining strength and speed with each generation—from the Jacobins to the Nazis and Stalinists—as technology advances. Governments, mass media, and other mechanized forces use fear, loneliness, and isolation to demoralize populations and exert control, persuading large groups of people to act against their own interests, always with destructive results. In The Psychology of Totalitarianism, world-renowned Professor of Clinical Psychology Mattias Desmet deconstructs the societal conditions that allow this collective psychosis to take hold. By looking at our current situation and identifying the phenomenon of “mass formation”—a type of collective hypnosis—he clearly illustrates how close we are to surrendering to totalitarian regimes. With detailed analyses, examples, and results from years of research, Desmet lays out the steps that lead toward mass formation, including: - An overall sense of loneliness and lack of social connections and bonds - A lack of meaning—unsatisfying “bullsh*t jobs” that don’t offer purpose - Free-floating anxiety and discontent that arise from loneliness and lack of meaning - Manifestation of frustration and aggression from anxiety - Emergence of a consistent narrative from government officials, mass media, etc., that exploits and channels frustration and anxiety In addition to clear psychological analysis—and building on Hannah Arendt’s essential work on totalitarianism, The Origins of Totalitarianism—Desmet offers a sharp critique of the cultural “groupthink” that existed prior to the pandemic and advanced during the COVID crisis. He cautions against the dangers of our current societal landscape, media consumption, and reliance on manipulative technologies and then offers simple solutions—both individual and collective—to prevent the willing sacrifice of our freedoms. “We can honor the right to freedom of expression and the right to self-determination without feeling threatened by each other,” Desmet writes. “But there is a point where we must stop losing ourselves in the crowd to experience meaning and connection. That is the point where the winter of totalitarianism gives way to a spring of life.” > “Desmet has an . . . important take on everything that’s happening in the world right now.”—Aubrey Marcus, podcast host > > “[Desmet] is waking a lot of people up to the dangerous place we are now with a brilliant distillation of how we ended up here.”—Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.

This monumental work, complete here in one volume, undertakes to determine scientifically what distinctive personality traits characterize the phenomenon of prejudice. The authors' purpose is to discover the social psychological factors which have made it possible for the authoritarian type of man - a new concept of an "anthropological" species - to threaten the survival of the individualistic and democratic type prevalent in the past century and a half of our civilization. The book mobilizes the skills of the different branches of the social sciences in one common research program. Experts in the fields of social theory and depth psychology, depth analysis, clinical psychology, political sociology and projective testing have pooled their methods and resources. Working in the closest cooperation, they here present a detailed picture of the authoritarian type of man. By isolating the destructive germ of the authoritarian personality, the book lays a major foundation for long-range attack upon the anti-democratic forces in modern society. (from the back cover.)

Erich Fromm examines how modern societies foster dependence on authority, ultimately leading to the loss of freedom and the rise of totalitarianism.