For me, it was a book called ‘The Outsiders’ by S.E Hinton. It is known as a literary classic these days, but it was quite hard hitting when it was released back in the 1960s.
In a nut shell; It is about a group of semi-impoverished greaser friends growing up in 1960s Tulsa, Oklahoma, and all the life challenges they face, and how they react to prejudice against them whilst coping with family issues.
It was the first book that made me realise that some people in society don’t get it easy growing up, and I discovered what it meant to live on the ‘wrong side of town’ and what societal prejudice was. The outsiders was the first novel I read that brought up hard subjects like; domestic violence, alcoholism, street gang violence etc.
It was the first book to shatter my naive way of thinking about the world, at 13 years old! It is still one of my favourite stories to this day, and for all its slightly dark themes, I love the compassionate friendship and brotherhood that is displayed in this book!
Freakonomics. Realising that humans are inherently selfish and associating their actions with how they stand to benefit made me understand people and relationships also better.
I hate to break it to you, but almost everything in Freakonomics has been disproven by modern psychological, sociological, and economic research. The authors published their pop science project a little too early.
It may have but since reading it I have tried to step in the shoes of any person I am dealing with and tried to understand their objectives from any interaction and it has definitely helped me understand people better and interact with them better. Its the philosophy that the book purports that most actions are driven by self-interest either consciously or subconsciously and I have definitely realized it to be true in most cases.
In the book’s anecdote about bagels, 100% of people had the incentive to steal the bagels, but only 10% did. In the example with teachers cheating, 100% of teachers had the incentive to cheat, but only 5% did. Understanding incentives is not shown to be predictive of behavior even within the anecdotal narratives presented to reach that specific conclusion.
There’s also the issue that the book is entirely about statistics, and almost all the statistics are done incorrectly. The comparison between the relative safety of playing at a house with a gun vs a pool demonstrates three common errors in the book:
1.) Conceptual error. The author examines deaths per gun vs deaths per pool. This is wrong. Households with guns tend to have more than one gun, while households with pools tend to have exactly one pool, so this question doesn’t adequately control for the relative distribution of guns and pools among households.
2.) Research error. The figure for drownings per year doesn’t distinguish between drowning deaths in residential pools vs drowning deaths in bath tubs or natural water sources.
3.) Statistical error. The work done is meant to show the probability of death by gun vs the probability of death by pool, but the way its worked is specifically asking the question “what is the probability of drowning or dying by gunshot given that I don’t know whether the household has a gun, a pool, both, or neither.” It should have included the Bayesian, ie “What is the probability of dying by gunshot in a household given I know that household has a gun vs the probability of drowning in a pool given I know the household has a pool.”
Anyway, humans are actually genetically pre-disposed to be altruistic. Hopefully, this new information offers similar, but more correct, insights.