for the love of social psychology essays on the study of human nature

For The Love of Social Psychology: Essays on The Study of Human Nature

Author	: John T. Jost
Publisher	: Academic Press
Release Date	: 2021-05-01
ISBN 10	: 0128154314
Pages	: 225 pages

GET BOOK!

For the Love of Social Psychology examines the most exciting and important contributions to the study of human nature in the 20th and early 21st centuries. Focusing on thought leaders in social psychology today, author John Jost scrutinizes the theorists and their work. This is particularly important as the discipline faces a period of intense self-criticism and conflict over statistical methods and practices. The ideas of social and personality psychology, which may well constitute its greatest asset to society and to interdisciplinary scholarship, are at risk of being lost or abandoned. For the Love of Social Psychology is a critical component in understanding these various thinkers within the context of the discipline, and in providing an optimistic vision for students, theorists, and practitioners so they can fulfill their goals of bettering society through scientific means. Summarizes major theorists and theories in social psych Focuses on major findings in stereotypes, bias, social thoughts and behavior Allows major theorists of today to frame questions and discoveries in the history of their specific areas over time Discovers what social psych has offered the psych field and science generally in theory and discovery

The Passions

Author	: P. M. S. Hacker
Publisher	: John Wiley & Sons
Release Date	: 2017-12-18
ISBN 10	: 1118951875
Pages	: 472 pages

GET BOOK!

A survey of astonishing breadth and penetration. No cognitive neuroscientist should ever conduct an experiment in the domain of the emotions without reading this book, twice. Parashkev Nachev, Institute of Neurology, UCL There is not a slack moment in the whole of this impressive work. With his remarkable facility for making fine distinctions, and his commitment to lucidity, Peter Hacker has subtly characterized those emotions such as pride, shame, envy, jealousy, love or sympathy which make up our all too human nature. This is an important book for philosophers but since most of its illustrative material comes from an astonishing range of British and European literature, it is required reading also for literary scholars, or indeed for anyone with an interest in understanding who and what we are. David Ellis, University of Kent Human beings are all subject to boundless flights of joy and delight, to flashes of anger and fear, to pangs of sadness and grief. We express our emotions in what we do, how we act, and what we say, and we can share our emotions with others and respond sympathetically to their feelings. Emotions are an intrinsic part of the human condition, and any study of human nature must investigate them. In this third volume of a major study in philosophical anthropology which has spanned nearly a decade, one of the most preeminent living philosophers examines and reflects upon the nature of the emotions, advancing the view that novelists, playwrights, and poets – rather than psychologists and cognitive neuroscientists – elaborate the most refined descriptions of their role in human life. In the book’s early chapters, the author analyses the emotions by situating them in relation to other human passions such as affections, appetites, attitudes, and agitations. While presenting a detailed connective analysis of the emotions, Hacker challenges traditional ideas about them and criticizes misconceptions held by philosophers, psychologists, and cognitive neuroscientists. With the help of abundant examples and illustrative quotations from the Western literary canon, later sections investigate, describe, and disentangle the individual emotions – pride, arrogance, and humility; shame, embarrassment, and guilt; envy and jealousy; and anger. The book concludes with an analysis of love, sympathy, and empathy as sources of absolute value and the roots of morality. A masterful contribution, this study of the passions is essential reading for philosophers of mind, psychologists, cognitive neuroscientists, students of Western literature, and general readers interested in understanding the nature of the emotions and their place in our lives.

Human Nature and the Limits of Science

Author	: John Dupré
Publisher	: Oxford University Press
Release Date	: 2001
ISBN 10	: 0199248060
Pages	: 201 pages

GET BOOK!

John Dupre warns that our understanding of human nature is being distorted by two faulty and harmful forms of pseudo-scientific thinking. Not just in the academic world but increasingly in everyday life, we find one set of experts seeking to explain the ends at which humans aim in terms ofevolutionary theory, and another set of experts using economic models to give rules of how we act to achieve those ends. Dupre charges this unholy alliance of evolutionary psychologists and rational-choice theorists with scientific imperialism: they use methods and ideas developed for one domain ofinquiry in others where they are inappropriate. He demonstrates that these theorists' explanations do not work, and furthermore that if taken seriously their theories tend to have dangerous social and political consequences. For these reasons, it is important to resist scientism - an exaggeratedconception of what science can be expected to do for us. To say this is in no way to be against science - just against bad science.Dupre restores sanity to the study of human nature by pointing the way to a proper understanding of humans in the societies that are our natural and necessary environments. He shows how our distinctively human capacities are shaped by the social contexts in which we are embedded. And he concludeswith a bold challenge to one of the intellectual touchstones of modern science: the idea of the universe as causally complete and deterministic. In an impressive rehabilitation of the idea of free human agency, he argues that far from being helpless cogs in a mechanistic universe, humans are rareconcentrations of causal power in a largely indeterministic world.Human Nature and the Limits of Science is a provocative, witty, and persuasive corrective to scientism. In its place, Dupre commends a pluralistic approach to science, as the appropriate way to investigate a universe that is not unified in form. Anyone interested in science and human nature willenjoy this book, unless they are its targets.