Social Beings

Fiske provides psychologists with a cutting-edge approach on evolutionary and cross-cultural psychology. The book addresses research on three different levels: brain function and cognition, individual and situations, and groups and cultures. The second edition has been updated to present contemporary research in social psychology. It also discusses increasingly important issues in the field. This includes emotion science and the impact of neuroscience on social and personality psychology. Psychologists agree that the second edition captures an important movement in social psychology with the core motives approach.

Social Beings: Core Motives in Social Psychology, 3rd Edition provides psychologists with a cutting-edge approach on evolutionary and cross-cultural psychology. The book addresses research on three different levels: brain function and cognition, individual and situations, and groups and cultures. The second edition has been updated to present contemporary research in social psychology. It also discusses increasingly important issues in the field including emotion science and the impact of neuroscience on social and personality psychology. The Third Edition retains the previous editions’ features and adds the most up-to-date literature.

We are profoundly social creatures--more than we know. In Social, renowned psychologist Matthew Lieberman explores groundbreaking research in social neuroscience revealing that our need to connect with other people is even more fundamental, more basic, than our need for food or shelter. Because of this, our brain uses its spare time to learn about the social world--other people and our relation to them. It is believed that we must commit 10,000 hours to master a skill. According to Lieberman, each of us has spent 10,000 hours learning to make sense of people and groups by the time we are ten. Social argues that our need to reach out to and connect with others is a primary driver behind our behavior. We believe that pain and pleasure alone guide our actions. Yet, new research using fMRI--including a great deal of original research conducted by Lieberman and his UCLA lab--shows that our brains react to social pain and pleasure in much the same way as they do to physical pain and pleasure. Fortunately, the brain has evolved sophisticated mechanisms for securing our place in the social world. We have a unique ability to read other people’s minds, to figure out their hopes, fears, and motivations, allowing us to effectively coordinate our lives with one another. And our most private sense of who we are is intimately linked to the important people and groups in our lives. This wiring often leads us to restrain our selfish impulses for the greater good. These mechanisms lead to behavior that might seem irrational, but is really just the result of our deep social wiring and necessary for our success as a species. Based on the latest cutting edge research, the findings in Social have important real-world implications. Our schools and businesses, for example, attempt to minimalize social distractions. But this is exactly the wrong thing to do to encourage engagement and learning, and literally shuts down the social brain, leaving powerful neuro-cognitive resources untapped. The insights revealed in this pioneering book suggest ways to improve learning in schools, make the workplace more productive, and improve our overall well-being.

Social Beings, Future Belongings is a collection of sociological essays that address an increasingly relevant matter: what does belonging look like in the twenty-first century? The book critically explores the concept of belonging and how it can respond to contemporary problems in not only the traditional domains of citizenship and migration, but also in detention practices, queer and feminist politics, Australian literature and fashion, technology, housing and rituals. Drawing on examples from Australia, Europe, the United Kingdom and the United States, each topic is examined as a different kind of problem for the future – as a toil, an intensity or a promise. Ultimately, the collection argues that creating new ways to belong in contemporary times means reimagining the traditional terms on which belonging can happen, as well as the social itself. Read on their own, each chapter presents a compelling case study and develops a set of critical tools for encountering the empirical, epistemological and ontological challenges we face today. Read together, they present a diverse imagination that is capable of answering the question of belonging in, to and with the future. Social Beings, Future Belongings shows how belonging is not a static and universal state, but a contingent, emergent and ongoing future-oriented set of practices. Balancing empirical and theoretical work, this book will appeal to researchers, students and practitioners alike.

This is a study about perceptions of well-being. Its purpose is to investigate how these perceptions are organized in the minds of different groups of American adults, to find valid and efficient ways of measuring these percep tions, to suggest ways these measurement methods could be implemented to yield a series of social indicators, and to provide some initial readings on these indicators; i.e., some information about the levels of well-being perceived by Americans. The findings are based on data from more than five thousand Americans and include results from four separate representative samplings of the American population. One of the ways our research is unusual is that it includes a major methodological component. Typical surveys involve a modest effort at instru ment development, the application of the instrument to a group of respondents, and an analysis of the resulting data that mainly describes the people studied. Our work, however, was implemented in a series of sequential cycles, each of which consisted of conceptual development, instrument design, data collection, analysis, and interpretation. Ideas and findings generated in prior cycles affected the design of subsequent cycles.

The nature of time is one of the continuing mysteries of human life. This is of particular relevance to archaeology with its unique focus on the social development of the human species from its origins to the present. Christopher Gosden probes the way in which the rhythms of social life derive from our involvement in the world, particularly as those rhythms unfold over many thousands of years. The author argues that time is created through the social use of material things such as landscapes, settlements and monuments, and illustrates this with case studies drawn from Europe and the Pacific. The book provides a theory of social change and social being as the basis for understanding social formations over long periods of time. In developing this theory the author surveys ideas on human action and time as these have evolved over the last two centuries. Although the theory is designed and presented here to be of practical use in interpreting archaeological data - exemplified here in case studies - the broad scope of the book will ensure its interest to all concerned with the interactions between people and the material world.

What is Christian doctrine? The fourteen specially commissioned essays in this book serve to give an answer to many aspects of that question. Written by leading theologians from America and Britain, the essays place doctrine in its setting - what it has been historically, and how it relates to other forms of culture - and outline central features of its content. They attempt to answer questions such as 'what has, and does, Christian doctrine teach about God, the creation, the human condition and human behaviour?' and 'what is the part played in Christian doctrine by the Trinity, Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit?' New readers will find this an accessible and stimulating introduction to the main themes of Christian doctrine, while advanced students will find a useful summary of recent developments which demonstrates the variety, coherence and intellectual vitality of contemporary Christian thought.

Selfish Genes to Social Beings is a new history of life told from a different perspective: cooperation. Beginning with the heroic story of rescuers in the post-earthquake rubble of Mexico City, Jonathan Slivertown reveals the universal rules of cooperation that apply throughout the history of life.

This book presents a creative approach to the problem of individual authenticity. What is authenticity? What are its necessary conditions? How is an authentic self possible in society? What are the relationships of authenticity, morality, and happiness? The book examines a wide range of questions in Eastern and Western thought, to which it gives novel answers.

This book is the first to directly address the question of how to bridge what has been termed the "great divide" between the approaches of systems developers and those of social scientists to computer supported cooperative work--a question that has been vigorously debated in the systems development literature. Traditionally, developers have been trained in formal methods and oriented to engineering and formal theoretical problems; many social scientists in the CSCW field come from humanistic traditions in which results are reported in a narrative mode. In spite of their differences in style, the two groups have been cooperating more and more in the last decade, as the "people problems" associated with computing become increasingly evident to everyone. The authors have been encouraged to examine, rigorously and in depth, the theoretical basis of CSCW. With contributions from field leaders in the United Kingdom, France, Scandinavia, Mexico, and the United States, this volume offers an exciting overview of the cutting edge of research and theory. It constitutes a solid foundation for the rapidly coalescing field of social informatics. Divided into three parts, this volume covers social theory, design theory, and the sociotechnical system with respect to CSCW. The first set of chapters looks at ways of rethinking basic social categories with the development of distributed collaborative computing technology--concepts of the group, technology, information, user, and text. The next section concentrates more on the lessons that can be learned at the design stage given that one wants to build a CSCW system incorporating these insights--what kind of work does one need to do and how is understanding of design affected? The final part looks at the integration of social and technical in the operation of working sociotechnical systems. Collectively the contributors make the argument that the social and technical are irremediably linked in practice and so the "great divide" not only should be a thing of the past, it should never have existed in the first place.