Meangirlology


Book Description

Rumors. Veiled put-downs. Back-handed compliments. Sneaky attacks that are hard to pinpoint as attacks. Why do women do this to each other? If you’re looking for someone or something to blame, look no further. The culprit is our own DNA. We might be living in a modern world, but we are still driven by ancestral-era psychology, so these tactics remain with us today. In this curated collection of science-based columns from award-winning writer Amy Alkon, you’ll take a deep dive into the inner workings of female friendship, the methods women use to fight dirty, and the murky nature of the “frenemy.” What comes across as cattiness is actually evolutionary psychology at work. What appears to be an insult is mate competition in disguise. In Meangirlology, Alkon expertly guides you through the findings of renowned psychologists such as Anne Campbell, Joyce Benenson, Jaimie Arona Krems, and Tania Reynolds to help prepare you for the sneak attacks you don’t see coming from “the gentler sex.” By being aware of the evolved motivation for women to compete this way, we can spot the frenemies in our midst, deter attacks on ourselves, and be better friends to other women—and have more meaningful, satisfying female friendships.




Mean Girls, Meaner Women


Book Description

Why can so many women form wonderfully close connections with each other while some intentionally hurt other women? Why are girls so mean to other girls? What motivates them to betray, backstab, trash-talk, and humiliate one another? Why does this same hurtful behavior continue between women well into adulthood? What can women do to have closer and more authentic connections with one another? Mean Girls, Meaner Women, written by Dr. Erika Holiday and Dr. Joan I. Rosenberg, two well-known psychologists long involved in women's issues, provide answers about this baffling behavior. They take a look at hurtful behavior between women from the perspective of both the target and the victim. The authors use groundbreaking brain research to explain why being the target of a woman's hurtful behavior and being socially excluded can be so excruciatingly painful to women. Holiday and Rosenberg offer compelling information for understanding the hidden dynamics (psychological, biological, social and media influences) that lead women to hurt or oppress women and that comprimise authentic female relationships. Mean Girls, Meaner Women is a riveting read for females interested in understanding women's relationships, building closer and more collaborative bonds with each other, and living authentically. Questions designed to help girls and women increase self awareness and add strength and depth to their relationships with each other are found throughout the book. Readers will also discover: how the female brain is wired to be more relatinal and suffer more hurt; the emotional cost of countless "no-win" situations including the "Original Sin of Being Female", the "Paradox of the Healthy Adult", and "Beauty and the Bind"; the role angry and competitive feelings between women has on authentic and deep connections; how being "different" could make you the target of hurtful behavior; how the media supports and reinforces hostile behavior through the "Money Shot"; behavior that catches the attention of the "Gender Police"; what women can learn from men about communicating with each other; and critical steps for healing and creating closer connections with women.




Unf*ckology


Book Description

Amy Alkon presents Unf*ckology, a “science-help” book that knocks the self-help genre on its unscientific ass. You can finally stop fear from being your boss and put an end to your lifelong social suckage. Have you spent your life shrinking from opportunities you were dying to seize but feel “that’s just who I am”? Well, screw that! You actually can change, and it doesn’t take exceptional intelligence or a therapist who’s looking forward to finally buying Aruba after decades of listening to you yammer on. Transforming yourself takes revolutionary science-help from Amy Alkon, who has spent the past 20 years translating cutting-edge behavioral science into highly practical advice in her award-winning syndicated column. In Unf*ckology, Alkon pulls together findings from neuroscience, behavioral science, evolutionary psychology, and clinical psychology. She explains everything in language you won’t need a psych prof on speed-dial to understand—and with the biting dark humor that made Good Manners for Nice People Who Sometimes Say F*ck such a great read. She debunks widely-accepted but scientifically unsupported notions about self-esteem, shame, willpower, and more and demonstrates that: - Thinking your way into changing (as so many therapists and self-help books advise) is the most inefficient way to go about it. - The mind is bigger than the brain, meaning that your body and your behavior are your gym for turning yourself into the new, confident you. - Fear is not just the problem; it’s also the solution. - By targeting your fears with behavior, you make changes in your brain that reshape your habitual ways of behaving and the emotions that go with them. Follow Amy Alkon's groundbreaking advice in Unf*ckology, and eventually, you’ll no longer need to act like the new you; you’ll become the new you. And how totally f*cking cool is that?




Good Manners for Nice People Who Sometimes Say F*ck


Book Description

"Miss Manners with Fangs." —LA Weekly We live in a world that's very different from the one in which Emily Post came of age. Many of us who are nice (but who also sometimes say "f*ck") are frequently at a loss for guidelines about how to be a good person who deals effectively with the increasing onslaught of rudeness we all encounter. To lead us out of the miasma of modern mannerlessness, science-based and bitingly funny syndicated advice columnist Amy Alkon rips the doily off the manners genre and gives us a new set of rules for our twenty-first century lives. With wit, style, and a dash of snark, Alkon explains that we now live in societies too big for our brains, lacking the constraints on bad behavior that we had in the small bands we evolved in. Alkon shows us how we can reimpose those constraints, how we can avoid being one of the rude, and how to stand up to those who are. Foregoing prissy advice on which utensil to use, Alkon answers the twenty-first century's most burning questions about manners, including: * Why do many people, especially those under forty, now find spontaneous phone calls rude? * What can you tape to your mailbox to stop dog walkers from letting their pooch violate your lawn? * How do you shut up the guy in the pharmacy line with his cellphone on speaker? * What small gift to your new neighbors might make them think twice about playing Metallica at 3 a.m.? Combining science with more than a touch of humor, Good Manners for Nice People Who Sometimes Say F*ck is destined to give good old Emily a shove off the etiquette shelf (if that's not too rude to say).




Strategic Instincts


Book Description

"A very timely book."—Anne-Marie Slaughter, CEO of New America How cognitive biases can guide good decision making in politics and international relations A widespread assumption in political science and international relations is that cognitive biases—quirks of the brain we all share as human beings—are detrimental and responsible for policy failures, disasters, and wars. In Strategic Instincts, Dominic Johnson challenges this assumption, explaining that these nonrational behaviors can actually support favorable results in international politics and contribute to political and strategic success. By studying past examples, he considers the ways that cognitive biases act as “strategic instincts,” lending a competitive edge in policy decisions, especially under conditions of unpredictability and imperfect information. Drawing from evolutionary theory and behavioral sciences, Johnson looks at three influential cognitive biases—overconfidence, the fundamental attribution error, and in-group/out-group bias. He then examines the advantageous as well as the detrimental effects of these biases through historical case studies of the American Revolution, the Munich Crisis, and the Pacific campaign in World War II. He acknowledges the dark side of biases—when confidence becomes hubris, when attribution errors become paranoia, and when group bias becomes prejudice. Ultimately, Johnson makes a case for a more nuanced understanding of the causes and consequences of cognitive biases and argues that in the complex world of international relations, strategic instincts can, in the right context, guide better performance. Strategic Instincts shows how an evolutionary perspective can offer the crucial next step in bringing psychological insights to bear on foundational questions in international politics.




The Social Instinct


Book Description

"Enriching" —Publisher's Weekly "Excellent and illuminating"—Wall Street Journal In the tradition of Richard Dawkins's The Selfish Gene, Nichola Raihani's The Social Instinct is a profound and engaging look at the hidden relationships underpinning human evolution, and why cooperation is key to our future survival. Cooperation is the means by which life arose in the first place. It’s how life progressed through scale and complexity, from free-floating strands of genetic material to nation states. But given what we know about evolution, cooperation is also something of a puzzle. How does cooperation begin, when on a Darwinian level, all the genes in the body care about is being passed on to the next generation? Why do meerkats care for one another’s offspring? Why do babbler birds in the Kalahari form colonies in which only a single pair breeds? And how come some reef-dwelling fish punish each other for harming fish from another species? A biologist by training, Raihani looks at where and how collaborative behavior emerges throughout the animal kingdom, and what problems it solves. She reveals that the species that exhibit cooperative behaviour most similar to our own tend not to be other apes; they are birds, insects, and fish, occupying far more distant branches of the evolutionary tree. By understanding the problems they face, and how they cooperate to solve them, we can glimpse how human cooperation first evolved. And we can also understand what it is about the way we cooperate that makes us so distinctive–and so successful.







The Lucifer Principle


Book Description

“A philosophical look at the history of our species which alternated between fascinating and frightening . . . like reading Dean Koontz or Stephen King.” —Rocky Mountain News The Lucifer Principle is a revolutionary work that explores the intricate relationships among genetics, human behavior, and culture to put forth the thesis that “evil” is a by-product of nature’s strategies for creation and that it is woven into our most basic biological fabric. In a sweeping narrative that moves lucidly among sophisticated scientific disciplines and covers the entire span of the earth’s—as well as mankind’s—history, Howard Bloom challenges some of our most popular scientific assumptions. Drawing on evidence from studies of the most primitive organisms to those on ants, apes, and humankind, the author makes a persuasive case that it is the group, or “superorganism,” rather than the lone individual that really matters in the evolutionary struggle. But biology is not destiny, and human culture is not always the buffer to our most primitive instincts we would like to think it is. In these complex threads of thought lies the Lucifer Principle, and only through understanding its mandates will we able to avoid the nuclear crusades that await us in the twenty-first century. “A revolutionary vision of the relationship between psychology and history, The Lucifer Principle will have a profound impact on our concepts of human nature. It is astonishing that a book of such importance could be such a pleasure to read.”—Elizabeth F. Loftus, author of Memory




The Magic of Lifting Weights


Book Description

Lifting light weights with good form has helped Rick Newcombe look and feel youthful his whole life, especially in his golden years. Told in a lively style in the first person—and illustrated with nearly two hundred photos—Newcombe takes us on his journey, starting with wanting to be a bodybuilder as a thirteen-year-old and resulting in his love affair with lifting weights as an adult. He is passionate about this fantastic hobby because it helps build muscle and maintain fitness. His weightlifting story is one of inspiration, success, failure, frustration, and ultimate success, all while he was building a multimillion-dollar media company, traveling the world, and maintaining a close family life. He calls it magical because he went after one goal—muscles—and received a dozen unexpected and rewarding benefits, such as increased bone density, fat loss, better balance, and increased energy. The author says that working out has helped him to feel youthful with each passing decade, and it is the foundation for energy as a senior citizen. The key is to make exercising fun.




How Can I Forgive My Cheating Partner?


Book Description

Annie Lane has heard it all — from marital hardships to workplace disputes, family turmoil to household annoyances — and she has been trusted for decades to give thoughtful, helpful advice. No problem is too big or too small for her tackle with her reliable honesty and wit. In her second anthology, Annie takes on the topic of infidelity from every angle: the ones who cheat, the ones who are cheated on, the ones who are confided in and the ones affected by the fallout. Relationships are messy. There are no one-size-fits-all solutions. Let Annie give you the compassion you crave and the candor you probably need to push you in the right direction.