The New York Times bestselling author of Contagious explores the subtle, secret influences that affect the decisions we make—from what we buy, to the careers we choose, to what we eat—in this fascinating and groundbreaking work.If you’re like most people, you think that your choices and behaviors are driven by your individual, personal tastes, and opinions. You wear a certain jacket because you liked the way it looked. You picked a particular career because you found it interesting. The notion that our choices are driven by our own personal thoughts and opinions is patently obvious. Right? Wrong. Without our realizing it, other people’s behavior has a huge influence on everything we do at every moment of our lives, from the mundane to the momentous occasion. Even strangers have a startling impact on our judgments and decisions: our attitudes toward a welfare policy shift if we’re told it is supported by Democrats versus Republicans (even though the policy is the same in both cases). But social influence doesn’t just lead us to do the same things as others. In some cases we conform, or imitate others around us. But in other cases we diverge, or avoid particular choices or behaviors because other people are doing them. We stop listening to a band because they go mainstream. We skip buying the minivan because we don’t want to look like a soccer mom. In his surprising and compelling Invisible Influence, Jonah Berger integrates research and thinking from business, psychology, and social science to focus on the subtle, invisible influences behind our choices as individuals. By understanding how social influence works, we can decide when to resist and when to embrace it—and how we can use this knowledge to make better-informed decisions and exercise more control over our own behavior.

Product Description: This book critically interrogates the relationship between social media and protest from an interdisciplinary perspective, examining the multiple ways in which we need to politicize and contextualise commercial social media platforms, in particular with regards to their use for the purposes of anti-systemic and progressive protest movements...read more

Product Description: Every day we are asked to fulfil others’ requests, and we make regular requests of others too, seeking compliance with our desires, commands and suggestions. This accessible text provides a uniquely in-depth overview of the different social influence techniques people use in order to improve the chances of their requests being fulfilled...read more

Product Description: Leverage your online influence with this fun and friendly guide to Klout!Klout measures your online influence on a scale of 1 to 100 by looking at your number of followers or connections, as well as by measuring your ability to drive action on social networks...read more

Product Description: "Look out, Goliath―David has a training manual! . . . One of the best books on social psychology ever written."---Daniel Gilbert, New York Times bestselling author of Stumbling on HappinessNo one doubts the power of the majority. It makes the rules and enforces them, and most of us are willing to go along with it, most of the time...read more

This text helped launch the research program of social epistemology, which has fuelled imaginations and provoked debates across many disciplines around the world. Its opening question remains as pressing as ever: How should knowledge production be organised. The second edition contains a substantial new introduction, in which Fuller reflects on social epistemology's place in the history of analytic and continental epistemology and discusses the inspiration he has drawn from a wide variety of fields in the humanities and social sciences. It also includes a spirited attack on alternative philosophical groundings for social epistemology and a detailed response to the standard criticism that social epistemology has received from realist philosophers and natural scientists during the Science Wars. In this volume Fuller seeks to reconcile normative philosophy of science and empirical sociology of knowledge. He reinterprets key problems in the philosophy of science, such as realism, the nature of objectivity, the demarcation of science from other disciplines, and the nature of our knowledge of other times and places. In the course of this reinterpretation, which draws on concepts and argu

Product Description: Over the course of the last four decades, Robert Cialdini's work has helped spark an intellectual revolution in which social psychological ideas have become increasingly influential. The concepts presented in his book, Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion, have spread well beyond the geographic boundaries of North America and beyond the field of academic social psychology into the areas of business, health, and politics...read more

Product Description: Gabriel Tarde ranks as one of the most outstanding sociologists of nineteenth-century France, though not as well known by English readers as his peers Comte and Durkheim. This book makes available Tarde’s most important work and demonstrates his continuing relevance to a new generation of students and thinkers...read more

Pollster Mark Penn argues that the biggest trends in America are microtrends, the smaller trends that go unnoticed or ignored. One million people can create new market for a business, spark a social movement, or effect political change. In 1996, a microtrend identified by Penn ('soccer moms') helped re-elect Clinton. Now, Penn identifies the new microtrends sweeping the world, from Extreme Commuters and Working Retired to Old New Dads, from Bourgeois And Bankrupt to Uptown Tattooed. Highlighting everything from religion to politics, from leisure pursuits to relationships, this book will take the reader deep into the worlds of polling, targeting, and psychographic analysis.--From publisher description.A high-ranking pollster surveys the power of microtrends, identifying seventy-five forces that are influencing America and the global community, from religion and politics to food and entertainment.

First published in England in 1782, Crevecoeur's Letters from an American Farmer was one of the first works to describe the character of the average American at the close of the Revolutionary War. His famous question, ""What, then, is the American, this new man?"", summarized the European's interest in and questioning of the new country of America at a time when centuries of tradition had just been overturned and post-colonial Americans were attempting to describe themselves in a new way. Through the character of James, the letters celebrate the land of America, its space and fertility, and the character of Americans themselves, their work ethic and spirit of personal determination. The Letters also look at the darker side of American life, particularly the issue of slavery. The discussions of American identity, participation in war (or not), and the perception of immigrants and their ethnicity make this book as relevant to our understanding of ourselves today as it was in 1782.

This text helped launch the research program of social epistemology, which has fuelled imaginations and provoked debates across many disciplines around the world. Its opening question remains as pressing as ever: How should knowledge production be organised. The second edition contains a substantial new introduction, in which Fuller reflects on social epistemology's place in the history of analytic and continental epistemology and discusses the inspiration he has drawn from a wide variety of fields in the humanities and social sciences. It also includes a spirited attack on alternative philosophical groundings for social epistemology and a detailed response to the standard criticism that social epistemology has received from realist philosophers and natural scientists during the Science Wars. In this volume Fuller seeks to reconcile normative philosophy of science and empirical sociology of knowledge. He reinterprets key problems in the philosophy of science, such as realism, the nature of objectivity, the demarcation of science from other disciplines, and the nature of our knowledge of other times and places. (view table of contents)