The Influential Mind Made Me Think

Once you make a post, it slowly floats away into oblivion. On your profile page, every new post pushes older posts further away. I wish there was a functionality to pin some posts, or change the UI of your profile page. Now that I have finished the series "The Influential Mind Made Me Think", I am creating this post for the purpose of bookkeeping. I wish I could somehow pin this post at the top of my page. I know that developers are working hard on the Hivemind network to introduce it to Steemit. With it, smaller groups can be created to posts things to or have relevant discussions. It will work similar to Reddit where there are sub-Reddits for any subject you can imagine. I can't wait for it. Nevertheless, I still think there are a lot of things to develop on.

Anyway, the purpose of this post is to keep an easy and fast access to any post part of The Influential Mind Made Me Think. The series started as a way of spreading the word on something that is my passion: behavioral sciences. There were a couple of positive unexpected byproducts. For example, it also helped me reinforce what I have learned and pushed me to do further research and studying. The series touches and expands upon different ideas or research presented in "The Influential Mind". The Influential Mind is a book written by Tali Sharot. She is an associate professor of cognitive neuroscience in the department of Experimental Psychology at University College London. Another renowned book by her is "The Optimism Bias". With it, she won the British Psychological Society Book award in 2014. The Influential Mind Made Me Think series is composed by the following 15 posts:

• The Influential Mind Made Me Think #1: Disinformation That The Information Era Has Created
• The Influential Mind Made Me Think #2: The Power Of Language And Ideas
• The Influential Mind Made Me Think #3: On The Facebook Scandal, Data Usage, And The Spreading Of Emotions
• The Influential Mind Made Me Think #4: On The Irrationality of Phobias
• The Influential Mind Made Me Think #5: On Agency And The Hardship Of Financial Decisions
• The Influential Mind Made Me Think #6: On How Agency Is Deeply Rooted In Us
• The Influential Mind Made Me Think #7: On The Pleasure And Pain Of Knowledge, And What We Choose To Learn
• The Influential Mind Made Me Think #8: On How Stress Changes Our Perspectives
• The Influential Mind Made Me Think #9: On How Stress Can Make You Avoid Possibly Fruitful Risks
• The Influential Mind Made Me Think #10: On How To Overcome The Fear Of Failure And Take Risks
• The Influential Mind Made Me Think #11: On How The Average Person Thinks To Be Above Average
• The Influential Mind Made Me Think #12: On How The Decisions Of Others Influence Us
• The Influential Mind Made Me Think #13: On Learning From Experiences And Why Financial Bubbles Are Generated
• The Influential Mind Made Me Think #14: On Crowd Wisdom
• The Influential Mind Made Me Think #15: More On Crowd Wisdom

The book's purpose is to display how we can influence others, and how others influence you. We learned that if you want to push someone into action, scaring them is a bad choice. Nevertheless, if you want to push someone into inaction, scaring them might be the way to go. Now we know that Google shows to you results that have been specially handpicked for you. Every time I come across someone with a phobia, now I question myself what could be the true roots for it. If the phobia is about flying, I wonder if the root is letting go of control. We also learned how stress can make you more perceptive towards negative cues. Furthermore, now I understand a lot better when people choose not to hear bad news. Finally, we learned how to get wise advice from a crowd, and how the opinions of others can affect our own.