Stories are everywhere around us, and they have played a part in the cultural evolution of homo sapiens. But they have a dark side, and we should take care that we are masters of our stories and not enslaved by them.
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Drawing on state-of-the-art personality and developmental research, this book presents a new and broadly integrative theory of how people come to be who they are over the life course. Preeminent researcher Dan P. McAdams traces the development of three distinct layers of personality–the social actor who expresses emotional and behavioral traits, the motivated agent who pursues goals and values, and the autobiographical author who constructs a personal story — Amazon.o.uk
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One of the great intellectual battles of modern times is between evolution and religion. Until now, they have been considered completely irreconcilable theories of origin and existence. David Sloan Wilson’s Darwin’s Cathedral takes the radical step of joining the two, in the process proposing an evolutionary theory of religion that shakes both evolutionary biology and social theory at their foundations. — Amazon.co.uk
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In The Righteous Mind, psychologist Jonathan Haidt answers some of the most compelling questions about human relationships:
Why can it sometimes feel as though half the population is living in a different moral universe? Why do ideas such as ‘fairness’ and ‘freedom’ mean such different things to different people? Why is it so hard to see things from another viewpoint? Why do we come to blows over politics and religion? — Amazon.co.uk
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The literary mind–the mind of stories and parables–is not peripheral but basic to thought. Story is the central principle of our experience and knowledge. Parable–the projection of story to give meaning to new encounters–is the indispensable tool of everyday reason. Literary thought makes everyday thought possible. This book makes the revolutionary claim that the basic issue for cognitive science is the nature of literary thinking. — Amazon.co.uk
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