Social Behavior Psychology

All of us constantly broadcast information to others, even when we don't say a word. Sales professionals broadcast to potential clients in a way that wins new business. Managers broadcast to their teams about projects. Colleagues broadcast to one another about available resources. The messages we choose to broadcast shape others' beliefs in the potential for success and their ability to create positive change.

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.

In The Culture Code, Daniel Coyle goes inside some of the world's most successful organizations - including Pixar, the San Antonio Spurs, and the US Navy's SEAL Team Six - and reveals what makes them tick. He demystifies the culture-building process by identifying three key skills that generate cohesion and cooperation and explains how diverse groups learn to function with a single mind.

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.

Understand personality traits, character, emotions, and values through pure observation or simple questions. Analyzing people in a flash - it’s not easy, and it’s not simple. But that’s because you don’t know the tools in this audiobook. Think Like a Psychologist is about working backward from the person in front of you. You will learn to draw conclusions about people’s emotions, behavior, past experiences, and overall personality and temperament based on small yet important pieces of information.

Carol Dweck’s multi-million-copy bestseller Mindset transformed our view of individual potential, coining the terms “fixed” and “growth” mindset: in a “fixed” mindset, talent and intelligence are viewed as predetermined traits, while in a “growth” mindset, talent and intelligence can be nurtured. In Cultures of Growth, Dweck’s protégé, Mary Murphy, a social psychologist at both Stanford and Indiana University, shows that mindset transcends individuals.

We've all seen the happiness on the face of a child while playing in the school yard. Or the blissful abandon of a golden retriever racing across a lawn. This is the joy of play. By definition, play is purposeless, all-consuming, and fun. But as Dr. Stuart Brown illustrates, play is anything but trivial. It is a biological drive as integral to our health as sleep or nutrition. We are designed by nature to flourish through play.

The Age of Persuasion is for those who say "advertising doesn't work on me" as well as those who want to understand how this industry has become inseparable from modern culture. Using their popular CBC Radio series as a starting point, Terry O'Reilly and Mike Tennant tell the fascinating story of how modern marketing came of age - from the early players to the Mad Men of the 1960s and beyond.

Listeners will turn to The Dictionary Body Language again and again - a body-language bible for anyone looking to understand what their boss really means, interpret whether a potential romantic partner is interested or not, and learn how to put themselves forward in the most favorable light.

Do you wish to know the secrets to influence people’s thoughts, feelings, and behavior? Do you wish that you could easily win over friends and leverage your relationships to get what you want? The solution to these problems is to learn the insidious persuasion techniques that are used by some of the most successful people in the world. Psychology of Persuasion is full of tricks and techniques that will have an immediate and tangible impact on your ability to influence people.

Tribalism is our most misunderstood buzzword. We’ve all heard pundits bemoan its rise, and it’s been blamed for everything from political polarization to workplace discrimination. But as acclaimed cultural psychologist and Columbia professor Michael Morris argues, our tribal instincts are humanity’s secret weapon. Ours is the only species that lives in tribes: groups glued together by their distinctive cultures that can grow to a scale far beyond clans and bands. Morris argues that our psychology is wired by evolution in three distinctive ways.

Explore the depths of human psychology and learn to defend yourself against manipulations with "Dark Psychology and Gaslighting Manipulation" - the powerful bundle that combines two essential guides to understanding the human mind, winning influence, and navigating toxic relationships in the realm of persuasion.

The author of the legendary best seller Influence, social psychologist Robert Cialdini, shines a light on effective persuasion and reveals that the secret doesn't lie in the message itself but in the key moment before that message is delivered.

New York Times best-selling author Dan Heath examines how to prevent problems before they happen, drawing on insights from his innovative behavior research, as well as hundreds of new interviews with unconventional problem solvers. Most of us spend our days handling a deluge of pressing issues. We’re so accustomed to managing emergencies as they strike that we often don’t stop to think about how we could prevent crises before they happen. Why stop at treating the symptoms when you could develop a cure?

Leonard Mlodinow, the best-selling author of The Drunkard’s Walk and coauthor of The Grand Design (with Stephen Hawking), gives us a startling and eye-opening examination of how the unconscious mind shapes our experience of the world and how, for instance, we often misperceive our relationships with family, friends, and business associates, misunderstand the reasons for our investment decisions, and misremember important events.

This groundbreaking book explores the revolution in psychotherapy that brought an understanding of the social nature of people's brains into a therapeutic context. Louis Cozolino is a master at synthesizing neuroscience and demonstrating how it applies to psychotherapy practice. Here, he argues that all forms of psychotherapy are successful to the extent to which they enhance change in relevant neural circuits.

Are videogames bad for us? It's the question on everyone's mind, given teenagers' captive attention to videogames and the media's tendency to scapegoat them. It's also - if you ask clinical psychologist Alexander Kriss - the wrong question. In his therapy office, Kriss looks at videogames as a window into the mind. Is his patient Liz really "addicted" to Candy Crush - or is she evading a deeper problem? And when Jack immerses himself in Mass Effect, is he eroding his social skills - or honing them via relationship - building gameplay?

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.

How many people does the ideal team contain? How do groups bond, earn trust and forge shared identities? How can leaders build environments adaptable enough to respond to shocks and still enable people to thrive together? How can you feel close to people if your only point of contact is a phone or a computer? In The Social Brain leading experts from the worlds of evolutionary psychology and business management come together to offer a primer on great team working. They explain what size groups work and how to shape them according to the nature of the task at hand.

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.