Omega Social Experiment Episode

Omega

A Hunter-Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century

A bold, provocative history of our species finds the roots of civilization’s success and failure in our evolutionary biology. We are living through the most prosperous age in all of human history, yet people are more listless, divided and miserable than ever. Wealth and comfort are unparalleled, and yet our political landscape grows ever more toxic, and rates of suicide, loneliness, and chronic illness continue to skyrocket. How do we explain the gap between these two truths? What's more, what can we do to close it? For evolutionary biologists Heather Heying and Bret Weinstein, the cause of our woes is clear: the modern world is out of sync with our ancient brains and bodies. We evolved to live in clans, but today most people don't even know their neighbors’ names. Traditional gender roles once served a necessary evolutionary purpose, but today we dismiss them as regressive. The cognitive dissonance spawned by trying to live in a society we're not built for is killing us. In this book, Heying and Weinstein cut through the politically fraught discourse surrounding issues like sex, gender, diet, parenting, sleep, education, and more to outline a provocative, science-based worldview that will empower you to live a better, wiser life. They distill more than 20 years of research and first-hand accounts from the most biodiverse ecosystems on Earth into straight forward principles and guidance for confronting our culture of hyper-novelty.

Resistance and Persuasion

Resistance and Persuasion is the first book to analyze the nature of resistance and demonstrate how it can be reduced, overcome, or used to promote persuasion. By examining resistance, and providing strategies for overcoming it, this new book generates insight into new facets of influence and persuasion. With contributions from the leaders in the field, this book presents original ideas and research that demonstrate how understanding resistance can improve persuasion, compliance, and social influence. Many of the authors present their research for the first time. Four faces of resistance are identified: reactance, distrust, scrutiny, and inertia. The concluding chapter summarizes the book's theoretical contributions and establishes a resistance-based research agenda for persuasion and attitude change. This new book helps to establish resistance as a legitimate sub-field of persuasion that is equal in force to influence. Resistance and Persuasion offers many new revelations about persuasion: *Acknowledging resistance helps to reduce it. *Raising reactance makes a strong message more persuasive. *Putting arguments into a narrative increases their influence. *Identifying illegitimate sources of information strengthens the influence of legitimate sources. *Looking ahead reduces resistance to persuasive attempts. This volume will appeal to researchers and students from a variety of disciplines including social, cognitive, and health psychology, communication, marketing, political science, journalism, and education.