Download the social leap pdf

Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment. Notify me of follow-up comments by email. It explains why our psychological health depends so heavily on our status within a particular social group. This is the argument psychology professor William von Hippel makes in his fascinating new book The Social Leap. According to von Hippel, the move from the rainforest to the savannah produced a cascade of advances in human intelligence and innovation that led inexorably to the world we live in today.

But it also cemented pathologies in the human mind that continue to shape how we live, think, and judge. Your book is obviously about the past, but it has just as much to say about the present, about why human beings are so strange and self-destructive. Why tell this story now? I want to know what makes people socially successful.

So I started to think, well, maybe the better way to understand this problem is not to look at where we are now, but instead to look at where we came from.

What caused that separation? What were they key events that occurred along the way? And can those events give us any purchase on understanding our social situation now? Well, I think it tells us a couple of very important things. Perhaps the most important thing is that what got us going, as a species, was when we came together to cooperate in our mutual defense on the East African savanna.

This happened 3. The consequences of this were profound for how we lived and how our minds worked. Suddenly, we were much more successful when our group goals aligned with our individual goals, which is, in this particular case, cooperation for mutual defense.

But it also mandated a massive change in our psychology. Chimpanzees do not cooperate very well. And so we had to change the way we oriented toward the world. Now, that tells us several important things. Sound familiar? This is what New York Times bestselling author Gay Hendricks calls the Upper Limit Problem, a negative emotional reaction that occurs when anything positive enters our lives.

The Upper Limit Problem not only prevents happiness, but it actually stops us from achieving our goals. It is the ultimate life roadblock. Every age and social strata has its bad eggs, rule-breakers, and nose-thumbers.

Goodman draws on advice manuals, court cases, and sermons to offer this colorfully crude portrait of offenses most foul. The six poets Rachel Galvin discusses-W. Consequently, these writers developed a wartime poetics engaging with both classical rhetoric and the daily news in texts that encourage readers to take critical distance from war culture. News of War is the first book to address the complex relationship between poetry and journalism. In two chapters on civilian literatures of the Spanish Civil War, five chapters on World War II, and an epilogue on contemporary poetry about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Galvin combines analysis of poetic form with attention to socio-historical context, drawing on rare archival sources and furnishing new translations.

In comparing how poets wrestled with the limits of bodily experience, and with the ethical, political, and aesthetic problems they faced, Galvin theorizes the concept of meta-rhetoric, a type of ethical self-interference.

She argues that civilian writers employed strategies drawn from journalism precisely to question the objectivity and facticity of war reporting. Civilian poetics of the s and s was born from writers' desire to acknowledge their own socio-historical position and to write poems that responded ethically to the gravest events of their day.

This is the first full-scale biography to take a literary as well as historical approach to the works, life, and times of Ibsen. Ivo de Figueiredo shows how, as a man, Ibsen was drawn toward authoritarianism, was absolute in his judgments over others, and resisted the ideas of equality and human rights that formed the bases of the emerging democracies in Europe.

The Write to Happiness is a miraculous tool that helps writers change their lives in the direction they choose. With this book, author Samantha Shad teaches self-help enthusiasts and writers how to create great stories and how writing can change their life for the better, whether it is the main focal point or not. Samantha shows writers how the process for positively changing the brain and the process for writing a great story are the same.

Not just because of the masterfully delivered scientific data that demonstrates how the act of writing can provide solace for heart, body, and soul, but especially for the hard-won wisdom that teaches how we can all manifest the confidence to create conscious choice in our lives.