Showing titles in Social Psychology & Interactions

Journalist and author Oliver Burkeman is well-known for his long-running Guardian column, 'How to Change Your Life', and has written three best-selling books on happiness, productivity and time management. In this radio collection, he looks at four central ills of modernity—busyness, anger, the insistence on positivity and the decline of nuance. Talking to a range of experts, he discovers how these problems became so widespread, and how we can go about tackling them.

Why does paying for things often feel like it causes physical pain? Why does it cost you money to act as your own real estate agent? Why are we comfortable overpaying for something now just because we've overpaid for it before? In Small Change, world renowned economist Dan Ariely answers these intriguing questions and many more as he explains how our irrational behaviour often interferes with our best intentions when it comes to managing our finances.

Steven Pinker looks at how the relationship between words and thoughts can help us understand who we are. Why do so many swear words involve topics like sex, bodily functions, or the divine? Why do some children's names thrive while others fall out of favour? Why do we threaten and bribe and seduce in such elaborate, often comical ways? How can a choice of metaphor damn a politician or start a war? And why do we rarely say what we actually mean?

Take a step through the looking glass to a strange land, one where Piers Morgan is a voice worth listening to about race, where white people buy self-help books to help them cope with their whiteness, where Boris Johnson and Donald Trump are seen by the majority of the population as 'the right (white) man for the job'. Kehinde Andrews is your piercing, wry and not a little funny guide back to sanity, unpicking the absurd and outrageous lies society tells to keep up the status quo and The Psychosis of Whiteness is your lifeboat out of this topsy turvey world.

In 24 absorbing lectures, you’ll discover many of the different cognitive, motivational, and emotional factors that underlie social behavior. Along the way, you’ll come to appreciate - and evaluate critically - research in the behavioral sciences, applying what you learn from social psychology research to events in the real world. At the end of this course, you will have clearer self-awareness, better tools to foster friendships and romantic relationships, and a more compassionate heart to become a better global citizen.

It’s harder than it seems – after all, it’s only human to thirst after the juicy updates, jaw-dropping stories, and idle chatter that we typically collect over drinks with friends. No one knows this better than journalist Kelsey McKinney, whose Normal Gossip podcast has accrued a listenership of millions. In YOU DIDN'T HEAR THIS FROM ME, McKinney explores the murkiness of everyday storytelling.

The psychology classic - a detailed study of scientific theories of human nature and the possible ways in which human behavior can be predicted and controlled - from one of the most influential behaviorists of the 20th century and the author of Walden Two.

In 1979, a secret unit was established by the most gifted minds within the US Army. Defying all known accepted military practice - and indeed, the laws of physics - they believed that a soldier could adopt the cloak of invisibility, pass cleanly through walls and, perhaps most chillingly, kill goats just by staring at them. Entrusted with defending America from all known adversaries, they were the First Earth Battalion. And they really weren't joking. What's more, they're back and fighting the War on Terror.

Faced with the ceaseless stream of news about war, crime, and terrorism, one could easily think we live in the most violent age ever seen. Yet as New York Times bestselling author Steven Pinker shows in this startling and engaging new work, just the opposite is true: violence has been diminishing for millennia and we may be living in the most peaceful time in our species's existence.

Tired of hate-liking other people’s engagement photos on Instagram? It’s time to completely obliterate the “good girl” inside of you. You know the one: She thrives on external validation, accepts whatever scraps of affection are thrown at her, and is always the first one to bend to someone else’s will. And she needs to get the hell out of here. While you may feel like you’re doing everything right, that doesn’t explain why all the guys are still swiping left. This book will.

If you're like most people, you probably believe that your identity is stable. But in fact, your identity is constantly changing - often outside your conscious awareness and sometimes even against your wishes. That fluid identity has a powerful influence over your feelings, beliefs and behaviours. In The Power of Us, psychologists Dominic Packer and Jay Van Bavel integrate their own cutting-edge research in psychology, neuroscience and economics to explain what identity really is and show how to harness its dynamic nature.

We all worry about what others think of us. We all long to succeed and fear failure. We all suffer - to a greater or lesser degree, usually privately and with embarrassment - from status anxiety. For the first time, Alain de Botton gives a name to his universal condition and sets out to investigate both its origins and possible solutions. He looks at history, philosophy, economics, art, and politics - and reveals the many ingenious ways that great minds have overcome their worries. The result is a book that is not only entertaining and thought-provoking - but genuinely wise and helpful as well.

Whakapapa is a Maori idea which embodies our universal human need to belong. It represents a powerful spiritual belief—that each of us is part of an unbroken and unbreakable chain of people who share a sacred identity. Owen places this concept at the core of his methods to maximise a team's performance.

Nothing is more familiar and yet less understood than the human mind. It defines the experience of being human, and yet its workings contain some of the deepest mysteries ever encountered. Written by one of the world's greatest teachers of psychology, The Human Mind provides a masterful and riveting guide to all that we have learned since modern science began probing those mysteries.

Encounters with embarrassment, guilt, self-consciousness, remorse, etc. are an unavoidable part of everyday life, and they sometimes have lessons to teach us - about our goals and values, about the person we expect ourselves to be. In contrast to the prevailing cultural view of shame as a uniformly toxic influence, Shame is a book that approaches the subject of shame as an entire family of emotions which share a “painful awareness of self.”

In 1936 anthropologist Tom Harrison, poet and journalist Charles Madge and documentary filmmaker Humphrey Jennings set up the Mass Observation Project. The idea was simple: ordinary people would record, in diary form, the events of their everyday lives. An estimated one million pages eventually found their way to the archive - and it soon became clear this was more than anyone could digest. Today, the diaries are stored at the University of Sussex, where, remarkably, most remain unread.

It seems obvious that pleasure leads to happiness - and pain does the opposite. And yet we are irresistibly drawn to a host of experiences that truly hurt, from the exhilarating fear of horror movies or extreme sport, to the wrenching sadness of a song or novel, to the gruelling challenges of exercise, work, creativity and having a family. In The Sweet Spot, pre-eminent psychologist Paul Bloom explores the pleasures of suffering and explains why the activities that provide most satisfaction are often the ones that involve greatest sacrifice.

In Hidden Games, MIT economists Moshe Hoffman and Erez Yoeli find a surprising middle ground between the hyperrationality of classical economics and the hyper-irrationality of behavioural economics. They call it hidden games. Reviving game theory, Hoffman and Yoeli use it to explain our most puzzling behaviour, from the mechanics of Stockholm syndrome and internalised misogyny to why we help strangers and have a sense of fairness.

One of the last major stories on the Third Reich that remains largely untold is that of the extraordinary wave of suicides, carried out not just by much of the Nazi leadership, but by thousands of ordinary Germans, in the Second World War's closing period. Some of these were provoked by terror in the face of advancing Soviet troops or by personal guilt, but many could not be explained in such relatively straightforward terms.

Fascinating and provocative, Dan Ariely’s The (Honest) Truth about Dishonesty is an insightful and brilliantly researched take on cheating, deception, and willpower. The internationally best-selling author pulls no punches when it comes to home truths. His previous titles Predictably Irrational and The Upside of Irrationality have become classics in their field, revealing astonishing traits that run through modern humankind. Now acclaimed behavioural economist Dan Ariely delves deeper into psychology.