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Burton, Robert A. On Being Certain: Believing You are Right Even When You’re Not (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2008). In this book, neurologist Robert Burton examines the relationship between what we think we know and what we actually know, demonstrating that our knowledge of the world around us “is limited by fundamental conflicts in how our minds work.”
Chabris, Christopher, and Daniel Simons. The Invisible Gorilla and Other Ways Our Intuitions Deceive Us. (New York: Crown, 2010). There is often a gap between what we think is true about the world and what is actually true. In this book Chabris and Simons uncover some of the mental blind spots that affect all of us and offer ways we can perceive the world more accurately.
Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly. Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. New York: Harper & Row, 1990. Audio-recording, Simon & Schuster, 2002. An intriguing book with the powerful thesis that human happiness is largely the result of fully attending to the physical and sensory nature of the task at hand such that we forget everything else in order to concentrate our efforts. The book has many implications for improving interpretive competence.
Hall, Edward T. Beyond Culture. Magnolia, Mass.: Peter Smith Publishers, 1992. An extremely insightful and highly readable book about the role of culture in structuring our perceptions of reality and everyday events.
Judson, Sylvia Shaw. The Quiet Eye: A Way of Looking at Pictures. Washington, D.C.: Regnery Gateway, 1988. First published in 1954, this simple but elegant little book encourages the kind of contemplation that fosters interpretive competence. In the author’s own words, it is meant to “communicate a sense of affirmation, of wonder, of trust. This is a spirit alien to much of the art of our insecure time, but one which I am confident will some day return.”
Langer, Ellen J. and Sandra Burr. Counterclockwise: Mindful Health and the Power of Possibility. (New York: Ballantine Books, 2009). Is it possible to turn back the clock? Drawing on studies on the connection between mind and body, Langer answers, “Yes,” showing how expectations can affect our physical well-being.
Langer, Ellen J. Mindfulness. Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 2000. A highly readable and enlightening look at the ways in which our social categories trap us and make us victims of our own constructs. Langer describes many of her own research studies on various aspects of “mindless behavior.” She conducts research the way novelists write stories. In one study, she recreated a nursing home retreat environment to stimulate the year 1959 in order to study the ability of mindful behavior to reverse the detrimental effects of aging.
Watzlawick, Paul. How Real Is Real? New York: Random House, 1976. A wide-ranging look at the ways animals, people, and governments manage reality through ritual, perceptual tendencies, and the use of disinformation. The implications for communication are thoroughly explored.