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A substantially revised edition of Jon Elster's critically acclaimed book exploring the nature of social behavior and the social sciences.
Why do human beings move? In this lucid portrayal of human behavior, Fred Dretske provides an original account of the way reasons function in the causal explanation of behavior. Biological science investigates what makes our bodies move in the way they do. Psychology is interested in why persons—agents with reasons—move in the way they do. Dretske attempts to reconcile these different points of view by showing how reasons operate in a world of causes. He reveals in detail how the character of our inner states—what we believe, desire, and intend—determines what we do.
Equity and Justice in Social Behavior provides a critical assessment of the social psychological knowledge relevant to justice. This book illustrates how the broad concept of justice pervades the core literature of social psychology. Organized into 12 chapters, this book begins with an overview of the primary justice theories and identifies some of the focal issues with which they are concerned. This text then provides the necessary theoretical background for the study. Other chapters consider the various individual difference variables known to affect adherence to social justice norms. This book explains as well how the perceived causes of justice affect attempts to seek redress, and how actors and observers diverge in their perspectives about justice. The final chapter deals with the normative and instrumental interpretations that have been offered to explain justice behavior. This book is a valuable resource for social psychologists, social scientists, philosophers, political actors, theorists, and graduate students.
Social neuroscience is a rapidly growing, interdisciplinary field which is devoted to understanding how social behavior is regulated by the brain, and how such behaviors in turn influence brain and biology. Existing volumes either fail to take a neurobiological approach or focus on one particular type of behavior, so the field is ripe for a comprehensive reference which draws cross-behavioral conclusions. This authored work will serve as the market's most comprehensive reference on the neurobiology of social behavior. The volume will offer an introduction to neural systems and genetics/epigenetics, followed by detailed study of a wide range of behaviors – aggression, sex and sexual differentiation, mating, parenting, social attachments, monogamy, empathy, cooperation, and altruism. Research findings on the neural basis of social behavior will be integrated across different levels of analysis, from molecular neurobiology to neural systems/behavioral neuroscience to fMRI imaging data on human social behavior. Chapters will cover research on both normal and abnormal behaviors, as well as developmental aspects. - 2016 PROSE Category winner - Honorable Mention for Biomedicine and Neuroscience - Presents neurobiological analysis of the full spectrum of social behaviors, while other volumes focus on one particular behavior - Integrates and discusses research from different levels of analysis, including molecular/genetic, neural circuits and systems, and fMRI imaging research - Covers both normal and abnormal behaviors - Covers aggression, sex and sexual differentiation, mating, parenting, social attachments, empathy, cooperation, and altruism
The Explanation of Social Action is a sustained critique of the conventional understanding of what it means to "explain" something in the social sciences. It makes the strong argument that the traditional understanding involves asking questions that have no clear foundation and provoke an unnecessary tension between lay and expert vocabularies. Drawing on the history and philosophy of the social sciences, John Levi Martin exposes the root of the problem as an attempt to counterpose two radically different types of answers to the question of why someone did a certain thing: first person and third person responses. The tendency is epitomized by attempts to explain human action in "causal" terms. This "causality" has little to do with reality and instead involves the creation and validation of abstract statements that almost no social scientist would defend literally. This substitution of analysts' imaginations over actors' realities results from an intellectual history wherein social scientists began to distrust the self-understanding of actors in favor of fundamentally anti-democratic epistemologies. These were rooted most defensibly in a general understanding of an epistemic hiatus in social knowledge and least defensibly in the importation of practices of truth production from the hierarchical setting of institutions for the insane. Martin, instead of assuming that there is something fundamentally arbitrary about the cognitive schemes of actors, focuses on the nature of judgment. This implies the need for a social aesthetics, an understanding of the process whereby actors intuit intersubjectively valid qualities of complex social objects. In this thought-provoking and ambitious book, John Levi Martin argues that the most promising way forward to such a science of social aesthetics will involve a rigorous field theory.
Practical tools and other resources to help adolescents and adults improve their social success through better self-regulation, improved interpretation of social cues and other interpersonal skills, in order to lead successful independent lives.
In this provocative book, Christina Lee takes a consciously critical approach to the apparently unchallenged principle that conscious thought is the cause of all human behavior. Without becoming polemical or destructive, she reconsiders a wide range of issues in mainstream American and European social psychology. Suitable for an international audience, the book deals with issues in mainstream American and European social psychology. It assumes some familiarity with contemporary social and applied psychology, and would be appropriate as a text or supplementary reading for senior undergraduate and postgraduate courses in social psychology and psychological theory, although it is also written with an academic research audience in mind. While it is written largely for psychologists, it would also be of interest to academics from other social-science disciplines with a general interest in explanations of individual social behavior.
How can the stunning diversity of social systems and behaviours seen in nature be explained? Drawing on social evolution theory, experimental evidence and studies conducted in the field, this book outlines the fundamental principles of social evolution underlying this phenomenal richness.To succeed in the competition for resources, organisms may either 'race' to be quicker than others, 'fight' for privileged access, or 'share' their efforts and gains. The authors show how the ecology and intrinsic attributes of organisms select for each of these strategies, and how a handful of straightforward concepts explain the evolution of successful decision rules in behavioural interactions, whether among members of the same or different species. With a broad focus ranging from microorganisms to humans, this is the first book to provide students and researchers with a comprehensive account of the evolution of sociality by natural selection.
For the past fifty years anxiety over naturalism has driven debates in social theory. One side sees social science as another kind of natural science, while the other rejects the possibility of objective and explanatory knowledge. Interpretation and Social Knowledge suggests a different route, offering a way forward for an antinaturalist sociology that overcomes the opposition between interpretation and explanation and uses theory to build concrete, historically specific causal explanations of social phenomena.
How we learn from those around us: an essential guide to understanding how people behave. Humans are, first and foremost, social creatures. And this, according to the authors of I'll Have What She's Having, shapes—and explains—most of our choices. We're not just blindly driven by hard-wired instincts to hunt or gather or reproduce; our decisions are based on more than “nudges” exploiting individual cognitive quirks. I'll Have What She's Having shows us how we use the brains of others to think for us and as storage space for knowledge about the world. The story zooms out from the individual to small groups to the complexities of populations. It describes, among other things, how buzzwords propagate and how ideas spread; how the swine flu scare became an epidemic; and how focused social learning by a few gets amplified as copying by the masses. It describes how ideas, behavior, and culture spread through the simple means of doing what others do. It is notoriously difficult to change behavior. For every “Yes We Can” political slogan, there are thousands of “Just Say No” buttons. I'll Have What She's Having offers a practical map to help us navigate the complex world of social behavior, an essential guide for anyone who wants to understand how people behave and how to begin to change things.