Exploring Social Psychology 8th Edition by David Myers【ebook】

Exploring Social Psychology 8th Edition by David Myers

By: David Myers
Publisher: McGraw-Hill Higher Education
Print ISBN: 9781259880889, 1259880885
eText ISBN: 9781259956119, 1259956113
Edition: 8th
Copyright year: 2018

Preface

This is a book I (David) secretly wanted to write. I have long believed that what is
wrong with all psychology textbooks (including those I have written) is their overlong
chapters. Few can read a 40-page chapter in a single sitting without their eyes
glazing and their mind wandering. So why not organize the discipline into digestible
chunks—say forty 15-page chapters rather than fifteen 40-page chapters—that a student
could read in a sitting, with a sense of completion?
Thus, when McGraw-Hill psychology editor Chris Rogers first suggested that I abbreviate
and restructure my 15-chapter, 600-page Social Psychology into a series of crisply
written 10-page modules, I said “Eureka!” At last a publisher willing to break convention
by packaging the material in a form ideally suited to students’ attention spans. By presenting
concepts and findings in smaller bites, we also hoped not to overload students’ capacities
to absorb new information. And, by keeping Exploring Social Psychology slim, we
sought to enable instructors to supplement it with other reading.
As the playful module titles suggest, my new co-author, Jean Twenge, and I have also
broken with convention by introducing social psychology in an essay format. Each is written
in the spirit of Thoreau’s admonition: “Anything living is easily and naturally expressed
in popular language.” Our aim in the parent Social Psychology, and even more so here, is
to write in a voice that is both solidly scientific and warmly human, factually rigorous and
intellectually provocative. We hope to reveal social psychology as an investigative reporter
might, by providing a current summary of important social phenomena, by showing how
social psychologists