****** - Verified Buyer
4.5
Reading Social Animal is like trying to drink raw molasses. It's that dense. After a good conversational introduction, Social Animal becomes dry and textbooky and often reads like a military report. Essentially it's a catalogue of experiment results in prose. The content could have been framed much better. As-is, it's a better reference book than reading material.Yet, Social Animal is enjoyable for its thorough accounts of the major topics and experiments in social psychology, and it frequently offers surprising and counter-intuitive revelations about human behavior. Like optical illusions reveal the vast limitations of our sensory perception, social psychology experiments similarly reveal the limitations and irrationality of the human mind--which nonetheless likes to pretend that it is always perfectly rational.There are so many important studies densely packed into this book that a reference chart listing study authors, results, and conclusions would have been extremely helpful.Read once, the book can be off-putting because of its thick, dry writing. Read multiple times, however, I think there's enough information here to give the reader some powerful insight into the strange workings of the human mind.Eliot Aronson is informed and user-friendly. As a psychologist I would recommend to anyone wanting to start studying Social Psychology.Absolutely love! Its the bible of social psychology. Easy to read, powerful, and fascinating.Happy with the item. In a very good condition, well worth the money!
