The Social Animal

"The Social Animal" is Elliot Aronson's book about social psychology. Originally written in 1972, "The Social Animal" covers, in a style written for the general audience, what modern psychology has deduced about the reasons for certain aspects of human behavior.

Contents

Aronson begins the book by citing a number of scenarios, real and constructed — reactions to the Kent State shootings, the prison experiments at Stanford, and a four-year old boy given a drum set among them — that illustrate a variety of human behaviors seen in real life. The rest of the book is spent primarily on explaining how human minds operate and interact with each other, using these situations as examples. The book covering topics including the causes of prejudice, aggression, and cognitive dissonance.

In explaining the reasons why people behaved in unusual ways, Aronson cites his first law:

People who do crazy things are not necessarily crazy.

tyle and use of experimental method

The vast majority of the book leans on the importance of case work and experimental study. Thus, the Social Animal's descriptions of human behavior are largely validated with citations of studies done by researchers of social psychology. Throughout the book, Aronson relies on the use of controlled experiments to validate empirical observation.

Examples

(dissonance reduction at three mile island, Genovese murders, jigsaw classroom)