The Social Animal

Aronson's textbook, first published in 1972 and revised through many editions since, sets out what social psychology knows about the behaviour that matters most in ordinary life: conformity, persuasion, aggression, prejudice, attraction, self-justification. What separates it from other textbooks is the decision to write it for a general reader rather than for a syllabus, arguing from experiments and worked cases in plain prose, which is why it has been read outside universities for fifty years and why it won an award from the American Psychological Association. The organising idea, carried in the title, is that human beings are social before they are rational, and that a great deal of behaviour that looks like reasoning is better explained by the need to be accepted by others and to justify ourselves to ourselves. Anyone reading an early edition should know that a number of the classic experiments it reports have been re-examined in the years since, and the current edition is the one to cite.

Written from the wikipedia article on the book.

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• Elliot Aronson