Читать книгу Security Engineering - Ross Anderson - Страница 69

Psychology is a huge subject, ranging from neuroscience through to clinical topics, and spilling over into cognate disciplines from philosophy through artificial intelligence to sociology. Although it has been studied for much longer than computer science, our understanding of the mind is much less complete: the brain is so much more complex. There's one central problem – the nature of consciousness – that we just don't understand at all. We know that ‘the mind is what the brain does’, yet the mechanisms that underlie our sense of self and of personal history remain obscure.

Nonetheless a huge amount is known about the functioning of the mind and the brain, and we're learning interesting new things all the time. In what follows I can only offer a helicopter tour of three of the themes in psychology research that are very relevant to our trade: cognitive psychology, which studies topics such as how we remember and what sort of mistakes we make; social psychology, which deals with how we relate to others in groups and to authority; and behavioral economics, which studies the heuristics and biases that lead us to make decisions that are consistently irrational in measurable and exploitable ways.