Showing titles in Social Psychology & Interactions

Mindy McKnight, YouTube's favorite mom, shares the tools parents need to keep kids safe in their online lives--and shows how to create stronger family relationships as they do. A cross between Jen Hatmaker and Rosalind Wiseman, VIRAL PARENTING is a guide to raising responsible, safe, and...

Science doesn't speak for itself. Neck-deep in work that can be messy and confounding and naïve in the ways of public communication, scientists are often unable to package their insights into the neat narratives that the public requires. Enter celebrities, advocates, lobbyists, and the funders behind them, who take advantage of scientists' reluctance to provide easy answers, flooding the media with misleading or incorrect claims about health risks. In Bad Advice, Paul A. Offit shares hard-earned wisdom on the dos and don'ts of battling misinformation.

Over the last four decades, debt, bankruptcy, and home foreclosures have risen to epidemic levels, and the personal savings rate has sunk dangerously low. Why, in the richest nation on Earth, can't Americans hold on to their money? First published in 2008, Stuart Vyse's Going Broke described the epidemic of personal debt that existed in the years leading up to the Great Recession and anticipated the home mortgage crisis that started it. Ten years later, this fully updated new edition tackles the post-recession era of economic recovery.

How did human societies scale up from small, tight-knit groups of hunter-gatherers to the large, anonymous, cooperative societies of today - even though anonymity is the enemy of cooperation? How did organized religions with "Big Gods" - the great monotheistic and polytheistic faiths - spread to colonize most minds in the world? In Big Gods, Ara Norenzayan makes the surprising and provocative argument that these fundamental puzzles about the origins of civilization are one and the same, and answer each other.

"An excellent introduction to behavioral science with relatable examples is presented by an expert narrator." - AudioFile Magazine on The Life-Changing Science of Detecting Bullshit Expanding upon his viral TEDx Talk, psychology professor and social scientist John V. Petrocelli's The...

Brought to you by Penguin. Shame is being weaponized by governments and corporations to attack the most vulnerable. It's time to fight back Shame is a powerful and sometimes useful tool. When we publicly shame corrupt politicians, abusive celebrities, or predatory corporations, we reinforce...

King Charles III is Dracula's distant cousin. Governments are hiding information about UFOs. COVID-19 came from outer space. These sound like absurd statements, but some are true, and others are misinformation. But what exactly is misinformation? Who believes and spreads things that aren't true, and why? What solutions do we have available, and how well do they work? This book answers all these questions and more.

Columbia Business School professor Sandra Matz reveals in fascinating detail how big data offers insights into the most intimate aspects of our psyches and how these insights empower an external influence over the choices we make. This can be creepy, manipulative, and downright harmful, with scandals like that of British consulting firm Cambridge Analytica being merely the tip of the iceberg. Yet big data also holds enormous potential to help us live healthier, happier lives.

Cancel culture isn't just a moral panic: it erodes our ability to argue productively, listen generously and to be civil when we disagree. Whether on university campuses, in the workplace or on social media, it is a dysfunctional part of how individuals battle for power, status, and dominance. It's just one symptom of a much larger problem: why bother refuting your opponents, when you can just take away their platform or career? In this book, Lukianoff and Shlott analyze the pervasive effects of cancel culture and present a much-needed antidote for our dangerous and divisive times.

The world was in a loneliness crisis long before Covid-19. As human beings, our brains are wired for connection. The feelings of disconnectedness people are facing today—isolation within our families, digital addiction, emotional trauma—hold worrying consequences for our mental well-being. We’ve lost touch with the human tribe we were born into. In this compelling guide to navigating connection in our modern world, human connection phenom Simone Heng walks you through the meaning of human connection as it relates to every aspect of life.

Donald Trump won the election; climate change isn't real; America is a color-blind country. Despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, why do so many of us refuse to admit the truth? Denial is so much a part of our lives that we deny its existence all the time.

If you are speaking across generations, you need to understand how different generations hear. Pastor Darrell Hall (a millennial) harnesses the insights of generational science to explore how generations are distinct people groups with their own cultures and languages. With fresh research from the Barna Group on how generations communicate, Hall sheds light on how each generation receives verbal messages, from boomers and Xers to millennials and Gen Z and those not yet named. 

Author, social critic, and “New York City’s career elegist” (New York Times), Jeremiah Moss felt alienated in a town that had become suburbanized and sanitized. Then lockdown launched an unprecedented urban experiment: What happens when an entire social class abandons the city? Out in streets made vibrant by New Yorkers left behind, Moss found a sense of freedom he never thought possible.

As a commercial airline pilot, Mark has spent nearly two decades crossing the skies of our planet, touching down in the cities he imagined as a child. He experiences our metropolises in short layover visits that repeat over weeks, months or even years, giving him a unique perspective on the urbanisation of the world. In this intimate yet expansive work that weaves travelogue with memoir, Mark celebrates the cities he has come to know and love, through the lens of the hometown his heart has never left.

Just like with anything else in life, if you want to get better at sex, you need to practice. And if you want to understand the female orgasm, you need to start by understanding the female body. In Coming Soon, sexologist and psychotherapist Dania Schiftan shares her 10-step program for women to increase sexual responsiveness and deepen their awareness of their body's sensations, leading to more satisfying orgasms through penetration, the ability to control when and how to orgasm, and more empowering sex with a partner. 

The different ways that social change happens, from unleashing to nudging to social cascades. How does social change happen? When do social movements take off? Sexual harassment was once something that women had to endure; now a movement has risen up against it. White nationalist sentiments, on the other hand, were largely kept out of mainstream discourse; now there is no shortage of media outlets for them. In this book, with the help of behavioral economics, psychology and other fields, Cass Sunstein casts a bright new light on how change happens. 

Getting Gamers will show that rather than being a waste of time, video games can help us develop skills, make friends, succeed at work, form good habits, and be happy. Taking the time to learn what's happening in our heads as we play and shop allows us to approach games and gaming communities on our own terms and get more out of them. With examples from the games themselves, Jamie Madigan offers a fuller understanding of the impact of games on our psychology and the influence of psychology on our games.

The Art of Is contains breath-of-fresh-air thinking about how to cultivate the kind of game-changing creativity everyone seeks. Stephen Nachmanovitch shows exactly how the passion and immediacy of improvisation can be cultivated and how, in fact, we all improvise all the time - whether we are driving or deep in conversation.

Self-control may be the least-coveted fruit of the Spirit. But the truth is that people who are successful at self-control have freer, happier lives, and we all want that. After all, our bad habits - from the slight to the serious - bring with them a host of negative emotions, take up our time, and keep us from being the best version of ourselves.

Can a football game affect the outcome of an election? What about shark attacks? Or a drought? In a rational world the answer, of course, would be no. But as best-selling historian Rick Shenkman shows in Political Animals, our world is anything but rational. This isn't because we aren't smart. Instead, modern cues are setting off ancient, instinctive responses that worked to keep us safe in the Stone Age but lead us astray today.