"I hope you don’t mind that I made your link clickable ... much more useful for readers that way."

Thanks!

"So, you mention “psychology books” in your post ... were/are you a psych major?"
Yes, I am a graduate student getting my Masters in applied psychology.

"While I found the identity traps idea interesting when I first read Browne’s book, what I have concluded since then is that situations are typically more complex than that. In my own life, for example, I have tried to make myself become someone else for another—someone who I thought would be more interesting/desirable/suitable to the other person. Of course, not having a direct line into that other’s head, I was sometimes wildly wrong. That more than anything else brought home the lesson of the importance of being oneself."

Yeah, it's been a while, but I think Harry only mentions two traps. It looked to me as if you could translate them into corresponding cognitive biases, of which there are quite a number of them. Being oneself is something I think Harry strongly supported in his work. Of what use is liberty if we must be something we are not?

"Humans are fundamentally pattern-seeking organisms; we prefer a certain amount of predictability and order (that “certain amount” takes on a wide range of values across the population) and can have difficulties when they aren’t met. That said, successfully navigating a balance between patterns and novelty is one of the tricks that’s part of an interesting and fulfilling life."

Right, and we are also a social species. Nothing wrong with all of that, but certain people with bad intentions do attempt to take advantage of that. I find myself constantly updating my intellectual faculties like an anti-virus program to protect myself from all the BS that's out there. Great blogs like yours certainly helps me cut through the BS. :-)

http://thefreedomsymposium.blogspot.com