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Author: Pascal Boyer
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300235178
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 393
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Book Description
A scientist integrates evolutionary biology, genetics, psychology, economics, and more to explore the development and workings of human societies. “There is no good reason why human societies should not be described and explained with the same precision and success as the rest of nature.” Thus argues evolutionary psychologist Pascal Boyer in this uniquely innovative book. Integrating recent insights from evolutionary biology, genetics, psychology, economics, and other fields, Boyer offers precise models of why humans engage in social behaviors such as forming families, tribes, and nations, or creating gender roles. In fascinating, thought-provoking passages, he explores questions such as: Why is there conflict between groups? Why do people believe low-value information such as rumors? Why are there religions? What is social justice? What explains morality? Boyer provides a new picture of cultural transmission that draws on the pragmatics of human communication, the constructive nature of memory in human brains, and human motivation for group formation and cooperation. “Cool and captivating…It will change forever your understanding of society and culture.”—Dan Sperber, co-author of The Enigma of Reason “It is highly recommended…to researchers firmly settled within one of the many single disciplines in question. Not only will they encounter a wealth of information from the humanities, the social sciences and the natural sciences, but the book will also serve as an invitation to look beyond the horizons of their own fields.”—Eveline Seghers, Evolutionary Studies in Imaginative Culture
Author: Pascal Boyer
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300235178
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 393
Get Book Here
Book Description
A scientist integrates evolutionary biology, genetics, psychology, economics, and more to explore the development and workings of human societies. “There is no good reason why human societies should not be described and explained with the same precision and success as the rest of nature.” Thus argues evolutionary psychologist Pascal Boyer in this uniquely innovative book. Integrating recent insights from evolutionary biology, genetics, psychology, economics, and other fields, Boyer offers precise models of why humans engage in social behaviors such as forming families, tribes, and nations, or creating gender roles. In fascinating, thought-provoking passages, he explores questions such as: Why is there conflict between groups? Why do people believe low-value information such as rumors? Why are there religions? What is social justice? What explains morality? Boyer provides a new picture of cultural transmission that draws on the pragmatics of human communication, the constructive nature of memory in human brains, and human motivation for group formation and cooperation. “Cool and captivating…It will change forever your understanding of society and culture.”—Dan Sperber, co-author of The Enigma of Reason “It is highly recommended…to researchers firmly settled within one of the many single disciplines in question. Not only will they encounter a wealth of information from the humanities, the social sciences and the natural sciences, but the book will also serve as an invitation to look beyond the horizons of their own fields.”—Eveline Seghers, Evolutionary Studies in Imaginative Culture
Author: Walter J. Freeman
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 9780231120081
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 190
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Book Description
I think, therefore I am. The legendary pronouncement of philosopher René Descartes lingers as accepted wisdom in the Western world nearly four centuries after its author's death. But does thought really come first? Who actually runs the show: we, our thoughts, or the neurons firing within our brains? Walter J. Freeman explores how we control our behavior and make sense of the world around us. Avoiding determinism both in sociobiology, which proposes that persons' genes control their brains' functioning, and in neuroscience, which posits that their brains' disposition is molded by chemistry and environmental forces, Freeman charts a new course--one that gives individuals due credit and responsibility for their actions. Drawing upon his five decades of research in neuroscience, Freeman utilizes the latest advances in his field as well as perspectives from disciplines as diverse as mathematics, psychology, and philosophy to explicate how different human brains act in their chosen diverse ways. He clarifies the implications of brain imaging, by which neural activity can be observed during the course of normal movements, and shows how nonlinear dynamics reveals order within the fecund chaos of brain function.
Author: Cordelia Fine
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393340244
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 369
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Book Description
Sex discrimination is supposedly a distant memory. Yet popular books, magazines and even scientific articles defend inequalities by citing immutable biological differences between the male and female brain. Why are there so few women in science and engineering, so few men in the laundry room? Well, they say, it's our brains.
Author: Marvin Minsky
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 0671657135
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 342
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Book Description
Computing Methodologies -- Artificial Intelligence.
Author: Toshio Yamagishi
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 4431539360
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 188
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Book Description
This book is written around the central message that collectivist societies produce security, but destroy trust. In collectivist societies, people are connected through networks of strong personal ties where the behavior of all agents is constantly monitored and controlled. As a result, individuals in collectivist networks are assured that others will abide by social norms, and gain a sense of security erroneously thought of as “trust.” However, this book argues that this security is not truly trust, based on beliefs regarding the integrity of others, but assurance, based on the system of mutual control within the network. In collectivist societies, security is assured insofar as people stay within the network, but people do not trust in the benevolence of human nature. On the one hand, transaction costs are reduced within collectivist networks, as once accepted into a network the risk of being maltreated is minimized. However, joining the network requires individuals to pay opportunity cost, that is, they pay a cost by forgoing potentially superior opportunities outside the security of the network. In this era of globalization, people from traditionally collectivistic societies face the challenge of learning how to free themselves from the security of such collectivistic networks in order to explore the opportunities open to them elsewhere. This book presents research investigating how the minds of individuals are shaped by the conflict between maintaining security inside closed networks of strong ties, and venturing outside of the network to seek out new opportunities.
Author: Howard Gardner
Publisher: Harvard Business Review Press
ISBN: 1633690652
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 261
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Book Description
Think about the last time you tried to change someone’s mind about something important: a voter’s political beliefs; a customer’s favorite brand; a spouse’s decorating taste. Chances are you weren’t successful in shifting that person’s beliefs in any way. In his book, Changing Minds, Harvard psychologist Howard Gardner explains what happens during the course of changing a mind – and offers ways to influence that process. Remember that we don’t change our minds overnight, it happens in gradual stages that can be powerfully influenced along the way. This book provides insights that can broaden our horizons and shape our lives.
Author: Anton Howes
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691207615
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 424
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Book Description
"For almost 300 years, an organisation has quietly tried to change almost every aspect of life in Britain. That organisation is the Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce, often known simply as the Royal Society of Arts. It has acted as Britain's private national improvement agency, in every way imaginable - essentially, a society for the improvement of everything and anything. This book is its history. From its beginnings in a coffee house in the mid-eighteenth century, the Society has tried to change Britain's art, industry, laws, music, environment, education, and even culture. It has sometimes even succeeded. It has been a prize-fund for innovations, a platform for Victorian utilitarian reformers, a convenor of disparate interest groups, and the focal point for social movements. There has never been an organisation quite like it, constantly having to reinvent itself to find something new to improve. The book rewrites many of the old official histories of the Society and updates them to the present day, incorporating over half a century of further research into the periods they covered, along with new insights into the organisation's evolution. The book reveals the hidden and often surprising history of how a few public-spirited people tried to make their country better, offering lessons from their triumphs and their failures for all would-be reformers today"--
Author: Mark Pagel
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393065871
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 431
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Book Description
A fascinating, far-reaching study of how our species' innate capacity for culture altered the course of our social and evolutionary history. A unique trait of the human species is that our personalities, lifestyles, and worldviews are shaped by an accident of birth—namely, the culture into which we are born. It is our cultures and not our genes that determine which foods we eat, which languages we speak, which people we love and marry, and which people we kill in war. But how did our species develop a mind that is hardwired for culture—and why? Evolutionary biologist Mark Pagel tracks this intriguing question through the last 80,000 years of human evolution, revealing how an innate propensity to contribute and conform to the culture of our birth not only enabled human survival and progress in the past but also continues to influence our behavior today. Shedding light on our species’ defining attributes—from art, morality, and altruism to self-interest, deception, and prejudice—Wired for Culture offers surprising new insights into what it means to be human.
Author: Dorothy L. Cheney
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226102440
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 360
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Book Description
Animals.
Author: L. S. Vygotsky
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674076699
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 180
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Book Description
Vygotsky’s sociocultural theory of cognitive development in his own words—collected and translated by an outstanding group of scholars. “A landmark book.” —Contemporary Psychology The great Russian psychologist L. S. Vygotsky has long been recognized as a pioneer in developmental psychology. But his theory of development has never been well understood in the West. Mind in Society corrects much of this misunderstanding. Carefully edited by a group of outstanding Vygotsky scholars, the book presents a unique selection of Vygotsky’s important essays, most of which have previously been unavailable in English. The mind, Vygotsky argues, cannot be understood in isolation from the surrounding society. Humans are the only animals who use tools to alter their own inner world as well as the world around them. Vygotsky characterizes the uniquely human aspects of behavior and offers hypotheses about the way these traits have been formed in the course of human history and the way they develop over an individual's lifetime. From the handkerchief knotted as a simple mnemonic device to the complexities of symbolic language, society provides the individual with technology that can be used to shape the private processes of the mind. In Mind in Society Vygotsky applies this theoretical framework to the development of perception, attention, memory, language, and play, and he examines its implications for education. The result is a remarkably interesting book that makes clear Vygotsky’s continuing influence in the areas of child development, cognitive psychology, education, and modern psychological thought. Chapters include: 1. Tool and Symbol in Child Development 2. The Development of Perception and Attention 3. Mastery of Memory and Thinking 4. Internalization of Higher Psychological Functions 5. Problems of Method 6. Interaction between Learning and Development 7. The Role of Play in Development 8. The Prehistory of Written Language
