The Village Effect, Susan Pinker
The Village Effect, Susan Pinker
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The Village Effect
How Face-to-Face Contact Can Make Us Healthier, Happier, and Smarter

Author: Susan Pinker

Narrator: Donna Postel

Unabridged: 11 hr 18 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Tantor Media

Published: 09/08/2014

Synopsis

From birth to death, human beings are hardwired to connect to other human beings. Face-to-face contact matters: tight bonds of friendship and love heal us, help children learn, extend our lives, and make us happy. Looser in-person bonds matter too, combining with our close relationships to form a personal "village" around us, one that exerts unique effects.

Marrying the findings of the new field of social neuroscience together with gripping human stories, Susan Pinker explores the impact of face-to-face contact from cradle to grave, from city to Sardinian mountain village, from classroom to workplace, from love to marriage to divorce. Most of us have left the literal village behind and don't want to give up our new technologies to go back there. But, as Pinker writes so compellingly, we need close social bonds and uninterrupted face time with our friends and families in order to thrive—even to survive. Creating our own "village effect" can make us happier. It can also save our lives.

About Susan Pinker

Susan Pinker is a developmental psychologist, journalist, and award-winning author. Her first book, The Sexual Paradox, won the American Psychological Association's most prestigious literary prize, the William James Book Award, and has been published in seventeen countries. A Globe and Mail columnist from 2002 to 2012, Susan has also been published or featured in the New York Times, the Times of London, the Guardian, the Economist, the Atlantic, Financial Times, and O, The Oprah Magazine, among other publications. Married with three children, she lives in Montreal.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Janet

I wish that everyone who is addicted to social media and the internet could read this book. There is nothing wrong with social media, but we all need face-to-face contact as well. The message this book delivers is critical to our happiness and well being. I have experienced this first-hand recently.......more

Goodreads review by Mike

Pinker connects some fairly disparate seeming facts: people in Sardinian villages have some of the world's longest lifespans; people with serious illnesses are more likely to survive, the more people they socialize with regularly; computers, ipads, and tablets in classrooms do not increase student p......more

Goodreads review by Mark

Besides being a well-written social psychology book, this spoke to an increasingly deep yearning in my life: to do a better job connecting with real people, face to face, who are part of my broader circle of friends. Has the Internet given me unprecedented reach to others and ways of connecting with......more

Goodreads review by Joanna

Did not manage to finish this book. The information is interesting enough, but its presentation is scattered and not compelling. I often disliked the way the author presented statistics, implying or claiming causation when there was no basis for anything but correlation. Face to face contact is grea......more

Goodreads review by Eustacia

This book and I got off to a bad start. In the introduction, it said "it's illegal to buy or sell organs for transplantation everywhere in the world except Iran and Singapore." That led to about half an hour of frantic Googling, and yes, you're going to read about it next. WARNING: THIS IS NOT RELATE......more

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