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

Do you like email, text messages, and social media? So do I. But as Susan Pinker shows in this terrific book, electronic communication can never replace our deeply rooted, fundamentally human need for face-to-face interaction. Drawing on cutting edge research in social neuroscience, and supplementing the science with case studies and sharp observations, Pinker makes a hardheaded case for a soft-hearted virtue. Read this book. Then talk about itin person!with a friend.

Daniel H. Pink, New York Times bestselling author of Drive and To Sell Is Human

Intimate, face-to-face contact with partners, family, and friends is an ancient and deep human need. How do group-living primates like us make the transition to an online world in the evolutionary blink of an eye? Can they? Pinker shows how this is happening. Andeven more importantshe shows us how this should happen, with a valuable prescription based on the best science. Pinker writes with authority and verve, and she offers an integrated treatment of online and offline interactions. She sketches our modern digital interactions on the ancient parchment of our minds.

Nicholas Christakis, professor of social and natural science, Yale University, and co-author of Connected

We have a biological drive for social interaction. We long to belong. Susan Pinkers new book reveals the type of social contact that makes us tick. Written with verve, warmth, and style, it presents new science about what mattersraising healthy kids, leading a long and engaged life, being successful at work and play. This is a gem of a book!

Andrew N. Meltzoff, co-director, University of Washington Institute for Learning & Brain Sciences, and co-author of The Scientist in the Crib

Susan Pinkers The Village Effect is a bold, intelligent foray into what social isolation does to each of us in an age of technology. She offers keen insights into how social engagement enhances romance, parenting, career, family and friendship. Most impressively, Susan Pinker explores how gender and social forces play into our daily lives.

Susan Shapiro Barash, author of The Nine Phases of Marriage and Toxic Friends

In this provocative and engaging new book, Susan Pinker shows how intimate social contact is a fundamental human need and argues that Facebook, Twitter, and the rest of social media fail to meet this need, diminishing the lives of children, teenagers, and everybody else. Pinker is a great storyteller and a thoughtful scholar, and she expertly blends together personal stories and scientific research about marriage, cancer, obesity, happiness, longevity, religion, menstrual synchrony, solitary confinement, and much more. This is an important book, one that will shape how we think about the increasingly virtual world we all live in.

Paul Bloom, Brooks and Suzanne Ragen Professor of Psychology, Yale University, and author of Just Babies: The Origins of Good and Evil

Why would a weekly meal with friends add as many years to your life as quitting smoking? Why is face-to-face so much better than Facebook? Susan Pinker has the answers. With her usual flair and expertise, she combines the latest neuroscience and social psychology with stories of villagers in Sardinia, nuns in America, and the dating scene in Montreal. Its a fascinating explanation of why we need regular contact with people, not just screensand why time spent with your neighbors will enrich and extend your life in ways you never imagined.

John Tierney, co-author of the New York Times bestseller Willpower

In a time when we rely increasingly on virtual forms of communication and networking, The Village Effect is an important reminder of the value we derive from our real, personal networksand what we lose when we replace them with the social networks of the online age. Susan Pinker has written a fascinating, nuanced study of that most fundamental need: the need for human connection. No matter how far technology evolves, she reminds us, some things can never be replaced.

Maria Konnikova, New York Times bestselling author of Mastermind: How to Think Like Sherlock Holmes

Hell is other people, declared the French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre. Not so, says Pinker. With a raft of surprising data, this compulsively readable book reminds us that loneliness and isolation are our blightsother people are the source of our happiness. This lively and meticulously researched book shows that direct and frequent human contact are at least as important to our survival as clean air or good nutrition.

Christina Hoff Sommers, author of Freedom Feminism: Its Surprising History and Why It Matters Today

Copyright 2014 by Susan Pinker

All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Spiegel & Grau, an imprint of Random House, a division of Random House LLC, a Penguin Random House Company, New York.

S PIEGEL & G RAU and the H OUSE colophon are registered trademarks of Random House LLC.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Pinker, Susan
The village effect : how face-to-face contact can make us healthier, happier, and smarter / Susan Pinker
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 978-1-4000-6957-6
eBook ISBN 978-0-679-60454-9
1. Social interaction. 2. Interpersonal relations. 3. Interpersonal communication. 4. Eye contact. I. Title.
HM1111.P56 2014 302dc23 2014008307

www.spiegelandgrau.com

Jacket Design: Greg Mollica
Jacket lllustration: Felix Sockwell

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You cannot live for yourselves; a thousand fibers connect you with your fellow-men, and along those fibers, as along sympathetic threads, run your actions as causes, and return to you as effects.

The Reverend Henry Melvill, 1856