Social Psychology & Interactions Books - Page 3

Influence: Science and Practice

Robert B. Cialdini

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 128 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Good Intro to Social Psych 4 out of 5 stars.
0 of 2 people found this review helpful.

Its an older book so the information might be a bit dated. Its a lot of what you will learn in an intro psych course or soc psych course.

Good book for lay person though. Its entertaining and well orgainized.

Editorial Review:

Influence: Science and Practiceis an examination of the psychology of compliance (i.e. uncovering which factors cause a person to say "yes" to another's request). Written in a narrative style combined with scholarly research, Cialdini combines evidence from experimental work with the techniques and strategies he gathered while working as a salesperson, fundraiser, advertiser, and in other positions inside organizations that commonly use compliance tactics to get us to say "yes." Widely used in classes, as well as sold to people operating successfully in the business world, the eagerly awaited revision of Influence reminds the reader of the power of persuasion. Cialdini organizes compliance techniques into six categories based on psychological principles that direct human behavior: reciprocation, consistency, social proof, liking, authority, and scarcity.

Extraordinary Popular Delusions & the Madness of Crowds

Charles Mackay

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 59 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

A fun and easy read on the stupidity of people 4 out of 5 stars.
1 of 1 people found this review helpful.

I really enjoyed this book. Often, people seem to think the problems of the modern world are new and insurmountable issues. This book shows the cycle of life is just that, a cycle. Working on the stock market, I'm constantly assailed with the negative news of the day. This book cites examples of the same issues we now face... only these examples come from roughly 300 years ago.

I am amazed that, as a species, we still cannot seem to learn from our past. This book shows that unregulated markets are rife with corruption, and the ignorant often suffer. Looking at our current housing market crisis, I see many similarities with the corruption and suffering of generations past. Within these pages, unscrupulous people will learn to profit. Of course, those same unscrupulous people will also be the ones crying for deregulation. There is a lesson to be learned here. Pick up the book and enjoy.

Editorial Review:

A complete repackaging of the classic work about grand-scale madness, major schemes, and bamboozlement--and the universal human susceptibility to all three. This informative, funny collection encompasses a broad range of manias and deceptions, from witch burnings to the Great Crusades to the prophecies of Nostradamus.

The 33 Strategies of War

Robert Greene

Amazon Price: $17.13 List Price: $25.95 Usually ships in 24 hours By: Viking Adult Amazon Marketplace: 73 new & used starting at $3.97

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 51 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

Robert Greene’s groundbreaking guides, The 48 Laws of Power and The Art of Seduction, espouse profound, timeless lessons from the events of history to help readers vanquish an enemy or ensnare an unsuspecting victim. Now, with The 33 Strategies of War, Greene has crafted an important new addition to this ruthless and unique series.

Spanning world civilizations, synthesizing dozens of political, philosophical, and religious texts and thousands of years of violent conflict, The 33 Strategies of War is a comprehensive guide to the subtle social game of everyday life informed by the most ingenious and effective military principles in war. Structured in Greene’s trademark style, The 33 Strategies of War is the I-Ching of conflict, the contemporary companion to Sun Tzu’s The Art of War. Abundantly illustrated with examples from history, including the folly and genius of everyone from Napoleon to Margaret Thatcher, Shaka the Zulu to Lord Nelson, Hannibal to Ulysses S. Grant, as well as movie moguls, Samurai swordsmen, and diplomats, each of the thirty-three chapters outlines a strategy that will help you win life’s wars. Learn the offensive strategies that require you to maintain the initiative and negotiate from a position of strength, or the defensive strategies designed to help you respond to dangerous situations and avoid unwinnable wars. The great warriors of battlefields and drawing rooms alike demonstrate prudence, agility, balance, and calm, and a keen understanding that the rational, resourceful, and intuitive always defeat the panicked, the uncreative, and the stupid. An indispensable book, The 33 Strategies of War provides all the psychological ammunition you need to overcome patterns of failure and forever gain the upper hand.

The Verbally Abusive Relationship: How to Recognize It and How to Respond

Patricia Evans

List Price: $7.95 By: Adams Media Corp Amazon Marketplace: 60 new & used starting at $0.01

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 228 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

If you or someone you know answers "yes" to one or more of the following questions, this book is required reading:

Does your partner seem irritated or angry at you several times a week?
Does he deny being angry when he clearly is?
Do your attempts to discuss feelings of pain or emotional distress leave you with the feeling that the issue has not been resolved?
Do you frequently feel perplexed and frustrated by his responses, as though you were each speaking a different language?

Almost everyone has heard of or knows someone who is part of a verbally abusive relationship-if they're not involved in one themselves. In The Verbally Abusive Relationship, you'll find validation and understanding-it's "not all in your head"-and encouragement for your efforts to change the situation. In this expanded second edition, author Patricia Evans explores the damaging effects of verbal abuse on children and the family, and offers valuable insight and recommendations to therapists, as well as those who seek therapeutic support.

104 Activities That Build: Self-Esteem, Teamwork, Communication, Anger Management, Self-Discovery, Coping Skills

Alanna E. Jones

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 40 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Great Resource! 5 out of 5 stars.
1 of 1 people found this review helpful.

I found this book to have some great ideas for group activities that introduce and teach social/emotional skills. As a social worker in a junior high school, I have implemented many of these activites into my daily activities. Highly recommended for teachers, counselors, social workers, etc.

One Math Teacher who Needed Some Ideas...got them! 4 out of 5 stars.
0 of 0 people found this review helpful.

Sometimes, like before long school breaks, i want to plan an activity for the kids that is fun and helps them learn a little more about themselves and/or each other. This book has lots of great ideas divided by category (very helpful); i'm planning to try several of them in the next schoolyear (2008-09). Also, some of the games can be adapted to serve instructional purposes; a bonus!

Great Activities! 5 out of 5 stars.
0 of 0 people found this review helpful.

This is the best book, filled with fun activities to use in therapeutic groups! I ordered another one because someone took my original copy and I can't live without it.

great buy 5 out of 5 stars.
0 of 0 people found this review helpful.

I am so glad I bought this book, I can't wait to try these new ideas with my kids so I can excite them into learning.

Worth the purchase 4 out of 5 stars.
0 of 0 people found this review helpful.

Out of 104 activities I found about a dozen to use for a social skills group with 3rd, 4th, 6th and 7th graders. You may not want to use ONLY this book to plan a group, but it has provided some very good ideas to incorporate into my groups.

The Sociopath Next Door

Martha Stout

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 218 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

Who is the devil you know?

Is it your lying, cheating ex-husband?
Your sadistic high school gym teacher?
Your boss who loves to humiliate people in meetings?
The colleague who stole your idea and passed it off as her own?

In the pages of The Sociopath Next Door, you will realize that your ex was not just misunderstood. He’s a sociopath. And your boss, teacher, and colleague? They may be sociopaths too.

We are accustomed to think of sociopaths as violent criminals, but in The Sociopath Next Door, Harvard psychologist Martha Stout reveals that a shocking 4 percent of ordinary people—one in twenty-five—has an often undetected mental disorder, the chief symptom of which is that that person possesses no conscience. He or she has no ability whatsoever to feel shame, guilt, or remorse. One in twenty-five everyday Americans, therefore, is secretly a sociopath. They could be your colleague, your neighbor, even family. And they can do literally anything at all and feel absolutely no guilt.

How do we recognize the remorseless? One of their chief characteristics is a kind of glow or charisma that makes sociopaths more charming or interesting than the other people around them. They’re more spontaneous, more intense, more complex, or even sexier than everyone else, making them tricky to identify and leaving us easily seduced. Fundamentally, sociopaths are different because they cannot love. Sociopaths learn early on to show sham emotion, but underneath they are indifferent to others’ suffering. They live to dominate and thrill to win.

The fact is, we all almost certainly know at least one or more sociopaths already. Part of the urgency in reading The Sociopath Next Door is the moment when we suddenly recognize that someone we know—someone we worked for, or were involved with, or voted for—is a sociopath. But what do we do with that knowledge? To arm us against the sociopath, Dr. Stout teaches us to question authority, suspect flattery, and beware the pity play. Above all, she writes, when a sociopath is beckoning, do not join the game.

It is the ruthless versus the rest of us, and The Sociopath Next Door will show you how to recognize and defeat the devil you know.

Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me): Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions, and Hurtful Acts

Carol Tavris, Elliot Aronson

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 63 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

what a terrific book! 5 out of 5 stars.
3 of 3 people found this review helpful.

I'm not usually a big fan of 'self-help' books, but I was caught by the title and couldn't resist. What a terrific book! Well written and accessible, the authors do a very good job of making their many points about the mechanisms of self-justification (and why we should all care) without sounding accusatory or offending the reader. I highly recommend this book to pretty much anyone and everyone.

Beware of the Kindle edition 4 out of 5 stars.
1 of 2 people found this review helpful.

This fine book has extensive and substantive footnotes, but the lousy Kindle software doesn't have live links to the footnotes, which makes it MUCH more difficult to move back and forth between the text and the footnotes. The only hope is to add a bookmark to the page you are on, and then move to the footnote section, which starts at location 3638 -- leave a bookmark at the last footnote you looked at, and then when you want to look at the next footnote, you can go back to that bookmark. Then, every now and then, delete the previous bookmarks for the earlier pages/footnotes.

Editorial Review:

Why do people dodge responsibility when things fall apart? Why the parade of public figures unable to own up when they screw up? Why the endless marital quarrels over who is right? Why can we see hypocrisy in others but not in ourselves? Are we all liars? Or do we really believe the stories we tell?

Backed by years of research and delivered in lively, energetic prose, Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me) offers a fascinating explanation of self-deception—how it works, the harm it can cause, and how we can overcome it.

The Age of American Unreason

Susan Jacoby

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 98 Average rating: 3.5 of 5

The thesis is correct, of course, but skip the first 8 chapters. 2 out of 5 stars.
4 of 7 people found this review helpful.

With apologies to other reviewers, a 5-star or 4-star review of Jacoby's `Unreason' would require a winking unreason, although she has some very strong moments (chapters 9, 10, and 11 contain some rather interesting essays with which I generally agree). Apart from the stark inconsistencies, departures from reason, certain Hollywood-driven fictionalizations of historical events, sporadic bursts of emotionalism, and us-versus-them dogmatism (I'll touch on some of these below), I was most immediately struck by her self-certainty. She tells the reader of the voluminous great literary works that she had already devoured before entering high school. The reader should make no mistake--the author is a formidable "intellectual" and champion/guardian to lofty realms of "genuine intellectual" authority. Be awed folks (inside joke), we're here treading the paths of the author's "genuine intellectual elite." Funny things is, in reading some rather intelligent people, like Plato, Descartes, Kant, Leibniz (the smartest guy most smart people never actually read), Dostoevsky, Einstein, Gamow, Feynman, and so forth, I don't recall being forced to choke on their tantrums or visions of personal "intellectualism" (although we may say there is some of the latter in Plato). One can only smile thinking what Richard Feynman's reaction would be to Jacoby's nakedly impassioned authority-seeking! Despite her occasionally declared disdain for certain self-congratulating intellection-police, there can be little avoiding the fact that she seeks and assumes such rolls. As a related side bar, throughout most of the discourses it appears that her knowledge of science, and the issues that historically surround it, might have been gleaned from five minutes of watching a dramatically simplified presentation of the Discovery channel (although she does better in chapter 9). Of course none of this is to say that she is consistently wrong on all issues considered, I wholly concur on some points and go at least part way down many other of her paths.

Scholarly dispassion surfaces somewhat intermittently through at least 2/3 of this volume. In the mean time, Jacoby is ticked that folks are so given to calling people `folks'. She's disappointed that television doesn't provide better programming, but she's also aghast that people would watch much television--whatever, in abstract, the programming might potentially be. She's ticked that "lowbrow" types don't support their views with evidence and documentation--but it is quickly evident that she often doesn't mind proceeding without these tools of reason herself. She's disturbed that Americans are so greatly entertained by vulgar language, and likens this to `12 year olds laughing at farts' (I agree, by the way), but she's also miffed by the _lack_ of vulgarity in the language of `young Republicans.' She's annoyed with people esteeming Bob Dylan. While she decries the influence that entertainment products have on too many people's thinking, it is delusional to presume she is exempt on this count. Her multiple and extra-historical revisitations of the famed "Scopes monkey trial" trace more to the 1960 movie fictionalization, and to other popular literary and film alterations, than to the far more nuanced historical realities, a very good factual and non-triumphalist account of which is given by the late Harvard paleontologist SJ Gould (see Rocks of Ages, 1999). Jacoby's version amounts to the conveniently simplistic and non-questioning triumphalism that she rightly despises when it come from other quarters. William Jennings Bryan was _not_ the backward fundamentalist due to Stanley Kramer's film and Susan Jacoby's sermons, and while Jacoby rightly assails Social Darwinism as being a specie of anti-intellectualism, it was precisely the claims of Social Darwinism's academic authorities that alarmed the progressive Bryan (Harvard offered a major in eugenics--the consummate practical `scientific' application of Social Darwinism--until 1945!). Jacoby has no use for mere facts if they don't fit with her dispositions.

The swagger here is, sooner or later (in my case, sooner), hard to take, but I readily admit that I agree with many of her views. For example: (a) I too disdain TV and rarely watch it--but find no use in ranting against the fact that others embrace the intellectual numbness of it all it. People that must watch American Idol do not care what I (or Susan Jacoby) think about Idol or Entertainment Tonight or the entire vast breadth of the entertainment-gaga American wasteland. (b) I agree that "middlebrow"** popular American authors of earlier generations (think Michener [Tales of the South Pacific, Alaska, etc], who's works involved much hard-headed historical and scientific research) constructed `historical fiction' far truer to history than the sensationalized "historical fiction" of the present day (think Dan Brown's popular but stupefying perversions of "history" [The Da Vinci Code]). (c) I agree that the tsunami-like advance of instant gratification technologies, especially video gaming (discussed in chapter 10), is poison to intellect-engaging activities like reading and examining the past for insight into what is now happening in our larger world.
** Jacoby is hopelessly smitten with social and intellectual castes, labelings, and an expansive battery of "-ism"s; chapter 8 is a conflated War of Isms.

Well, an earlier draft of this review was lengthier, but I don't think that is necessary, so I'll end it here. If one wallows too much in this sort of "genuine intellectual" analysis, one risks soundings as cocksure as Jacoby does. But I'll finish on an `up note': skip the first eight chapters and you've got a shorter and more interesting book that flirts with a 4 star rating instead of an almost insufferably protracted 2 star book.

Editorial Review:

Combining historical analysis with contemporary observation, Susan Jacoby dissects a new American cultural phenomenon---the addiction to infotainment, from television to the Internet, which has resulted in a lazy and credulous public.

Emotional Vampires: Dealing With People Who Drain You Dry

Albert J. Bernstein

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 81 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Useful, Informative, Easy to Read 5 out of 5 stars.
7 of 7 people found this review helpful.

I came across this book when a close friend of mine ran into issues with a difficult person in her life. Some one gave her the book, and (because I read everything in sight!) I subsequently read it. It was very beneficial in explaining my relationship with my youngest son and in helping him understand me as well. I have tendencies toward the obsessive-compulsive side, while he tends toward the hystrionic. I credit this book with helping both of us to come to terms with our very different views of the world, and I am happy to say that our relationship is stronger and much more positive because of this book. The book helps you pinpoint your own strengths and weaknesses, gives you strategies for self-improvement, and recommends specific steps for dealing with all types of difficult, puzzling people in your life. It does all this in and easy-to-read, informative, and entertaining format. If you have a person in your life whose personality you just can't seem to "get," or if you seem to rub others the wrong way and don't understand why, I highly recommend this book! I have given away copies and continue to loan my own out on a regular basis.

Editorial Review:

The author of Dinosaur Brains offers protection from people who seek to destroy the emotional and psychological well-being of others. Like the fabled demons, these vampires: -- Think their needs are more important than yours -- Believe "the rules" apply only to other people -- Use their tempers in the same way terrorists use bombs Emotional Vampires tells readers how to spot a "vampire" in their lives, which defense strategies to employ to prevent one from striking, and what to do if and when they find themselves under attack.

The Civility Solution: What to Do When People Are Rude

P. M. Forni

Amazon Price: $13.57 List Price: $19.95 Usually ships in 24 hours By: St. Martin's Press Amazon Marketplace: 53 new & used starting at $11.06

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Total reviews: 8 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

Many of us find ourselves confronted with rudeness every day and don’t know how to respond.  From the intrusive cell-phone user who holds loud conversations in public to the hostile highway driver who cuts one off with a quick swerve of his car, politeness seems to be on a downward spiral, surprising us at every turn. P.M. Forni, the author of Choosing Civility, has the answer. knows that rudeness begets rudeness and, in The Civility Solution, he shows us what to do when confronted with bad behavior by being assertive as well as civil. In more than one hundred different situations, he shows us how to break the rudeness cycle by responding to a variety of confrontations from bullying to rude internet behavior or the hurtful words of an insensitive family member.  How would you respond to the following?

…A salesperson ignores your requests

…A fellow driver gives you the infamous “finger”

…Your child’s playmate misbehaves 

…Your boss publicly reprimands you

P. M. Forni has solutions for all of these and many more.  In yet another simple and practical handbook, P. M. Forni presents logical solutions that reinforce good behavior and make our world a more civil place.