Social Behavior Psychology

If you're like most people, you think that your choices and behaviors are driven by your individual personal tastes and opinions. You wear a certain jacket because you like the way it looks. You picked a particular career because you found it interesting. The notion that our choices are driven by our own personal thoughts and opinions is patently obvious. Right? Wrong. Without our realizing it, other people's behavior has a huge influence on everything we do at every moment of our lives, from the mundane to the momentous occasion.

Most people, including many policy makers, activists, scientists, and philosophers, have encouraged us to be more empathetic - to feel the pain and pleasure of others. Yale researcher and author Paul Bloom argues that this is a mistake. Far from leading us to improve the lives of others, empathy is a capricious and irrational emotion that appeals to our narrow prejudices. It muddles our judgment and often leads to cruelty. We are at our best when we are smart enough not to rely on it and draw upon a more distanced compassion.

You are a mind reader, born with an extraordinary ability to understand what others think, feel, believe, want, and know. It's a sixth sense you use every day, in every personal and professional relationship you have. At its best, this ability allows you to achieve the most important goal in almost any life: connecting, deeply and intimately and honestly, to other human beings. At its worst, it is a source of misunderstanding and unnecessary conflict, leading to damaged relationships and broken dreams. How good are you at knowing the minds of others?

An informative and entertaining account of how actions send signals that shape behaviors and how to design better incentives for better results in our life, our work, and our world.

I know my own mind. I am able to assess others in a fair and accurate way. These self-perceptions are challenged by leading psychologists Mahzarin R. Banaji and Anthony G. Greenwald as they explore the hidden biases we all carry from a lifetime of exposure to cultural attitudes about age, gender, race, ethnicity, religion, social class, sexuality, disability status, and nationality. Blindspot is the authors’ metaphor for the portion of the mind that houses hidden biases.

From the author of the groundbreaking New York Times bestseller The Female Brain, here is the eagerly awaited follow-up book that demystifies the puzzling male brain.

Dr. Louann Brizendine, the founder of the first clinic in the country to study gender differences in brain, behavior, and hormones, turns her attention to the male brain, showing how, through every phase of life, the "male reality" is fundamentally different from the female one. Exploring the latest breakthroughs in male psychology and neurology with her trademark accessibility and candor, she reveals that the male brain:

*is a lean, mean, problem-solving machine. Faced with a personal problem, a man will use his analytical brain structures, not his emotional ones, to find a solution.

*thrives under competition, instinctively plays rough and is obsessed with rank and hierarchy.

*has an area for sexual pursuit that is 2.5 times larger than the female brain, consuming him with sexual fantasies about female body parts.

*experiences such a massive increase in testosterone at puberty that he perceive others' faces to be more aggressive.


The Male Brain finally overturns the stereotypes. Impeccably researched and at the cutting edge of scientific knowledge, this is a book that every man, and especially every woman bedeviled by a man, will need to own.

Praise for The Female Brain:
"Louann Brizendine has done a great favor for every man who wants to understand the puzzling women in his life. A breezy and enlightening guide to women and a must-read for men."
—Daniel Goleman, author of Emotional Intelligence






From the Hardcover edition.

Containing a fascinating exploration of the depths of the human mind, this insightful book takes listeners on a deep dive to discover the hidden parts of the psyche. Covering the subtle world of body language and non-verbal communication, along with the lesser-known secrets of human behavior, you’ll discover how you can draw on a rich collection of insights to protect yourself from manipulators and abusers.

It’s not your imagination: We’re living in a time of moral decline. Publicly, we’re bombarded with reports of government leaders acting against the welfare of their constituents; companies prioritizing profits over health, safety, and our best interests; and technology posing risks to society with few or no repercussions for those responsible. Personally, we may be conflicted about how much privacy to afford our children on the internet; how to make informed choices about our purchases and the companies we buy from; or how to handle misconduct we witness at home and at work.

Americans precede anything negative with three nice comments; French, Dutch, Israelis, and Germans get straight to the point; Latin Americans and Asians are steeped in hierarchy; Scandinavians think the best boss is just one of the crowd. It's no surprise that when they try and talk to each other, chaos breaks out. In The Culture Map, INSEAD professor Erin Meyer is your guide through this subtle, sometimes treacherous terrain in which people from starkly different backgrounds are expected to work harmoniously together.

We live in a world of stuff. We dispose of most of it in as little as six months after we receive it. The byproducts of our quest to consume are creating an environmental crisis. Aja Barber wants to change this - and you can, too. In Consumed, Barber calls for change within an industry that regularly overreaches with abandon, creating real imbalances in the environment and the lives of those who do the work - often in unsafe conditions for very low pay - and the billionaires who receive the most profit.

Dr. Jeffrey Bernstein shares a groundbreaking 10-day program to help parents understand their child's behavior and regain control of their household. In this updated edition, parents will learn how to face new challenges, including defiance resulting from excessive technology use (even to the point of addiction) and the stress of modern family life. Dr. Bernstein explains what causes defiance in kids and why it's so destructive to the family, then offers parents a step-by-step guide on how to reduce conflict and end upsetting behaviors.

"إن السلوك البشري، في معظمه، معقدٌ وغامض. في بعض الحالات، يكون الأشخاص من حولنا حمقى. إن فهم السلوك الإنساني مهمة لا تنتهي أبدًا، وهو مسعى لا نهاية له لمعرفة ما يقبع وراء خيارات الشخص من أسباب. من السهل ومن الخطير أيضًا أن تقوم بتصنيف شخص يتصرف بطريقة مختلفة عنك كجاهل أو مخطئ أو حتى غبي. لكن عالم اليوم يتطلب فهمًا أكثر تطورًا نقوم على أساسه بتقييم الشخص وفق نقاط قوته وضعفه."

Spread through the public in the form of popular stories, ideas can go viral and move markets - whether it's the belief that tech stocks can only go up or that housing prices never fall. Whether true or false, stories like these - transmitted by word of mouth, by the news media, and increasingly by social media - drive the economy by driving our decisions about how and where to invest, how much to spend and save, and more. But despite the obvious importance of such stories, most economists have paid little attention to them. Narrative Economics sets out to change that.

We live in a gendered world, where we are ceaselessly bombarded by messages about sex and gender. On a daily basis, we face deeply ingrained beliefs that sex determines our skills and preferences, from toys and colors to career choice and salaries. But what does this constant gendering mean for our thoughts, decisions, and behavior? And what does it mean for our brains? Drawing on her work as a professor of cognitive neuroimaging, Gina Rippon unpacks the stereotypes that surround us from our earliest moments and shows how these messages mold our ideas of ourselves.

To succeed in a fast-changing world, individuals and companies know they must create a culture of growth, where experimentation and feedback are encouraged, and learning is integrated into the everyday. Yet we often get stuck in a well-worn pattern of habits that don’t move us forward. Why? Because many of us get trapped in the Performance Paradox: the counterintuitive phenomenon that if we focus only on performing, our performance suffers. How can we give ourselves the space to experiment and grow while also delivering high-level results?

“Scale” has become a favored buzzword in the startup world. But scale isn't just about accumulating more users or capturing more market share. It's about whether an idea that takes hold in a small group can do the same in a much larger one. Translating an idea into widespread impact, says University of Chicago economist John A. List, depends on one thing only: whether it can achieve “high voltage”—the ability to be replicated at scale. In The Voltage Effect, List explains that scalable ideas share a common set of attributes, while any number of attributes can doom an unscalable idea.

Driving is a fact of life. We are all spending more and more time on the road, and traffic is an issue we face everyday. This audiobook will make you think about it in a whole new light.

For more than three decades, Dr. John Bargh has been responsible for the revolutionary research into the unconscious mind, research that informed best sellers like Blink and Thinking Fast and Slow. Now, in what Dr. John Gottman said "will be the most important and exciting book in psychology that has been written in the past 20 years", Dr. Bargh takes us on an entertaining and enlightening tour of the forces that affect everyday behavior while transforming our understanding of ourselves in profound ways.

There is so much we get wrong about power: who has it, what it looks like, and the role it plays in our lives. Grounded in over two decades’ worth of scientific research and inspired by the popular class of the same name at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business, Acting with Power offers a new and eye-opening paradigm that overturns everything we thought we knew about the nature of power.

In the current period of social and political unrest, conversations about identity are becoming more frequent and more difficult. On subjects like critical race theory, gender equity in the workplace, and LGBTQ-inclusive classrooms, many of us are understandably fearful of saying the wrong thing. Kenji Yoshino and David Glasgow, founders of the Meltzer Center for Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging at NYU School of Law, are here to show potential allies that these conversations don’t have to be so overwhelming.