Description
| Product ID: | 9780199386451 |
| Product Form: | Hardback |
| Country of Manufacture: | GB |
| Title: | A Talent for Friendship |
| Subtitle: | Rediscovery of a Remarkable Trait |
| Authors: | Author: Professor John Edward Terrell |
| Page Count: | 320 |
| Subjects: | Social and cultural anthropology, Social & cultural anthropology, ethnography, Social, group or collective psychology, Cognition and cognitive psychology, Social, group or collective psychology, Cognition & cognitive psychology |
| Description: | This lively and provocative text presents a new way to understand friendship. Professor John Terrell argues that the ability to make friends is an evolved human trait not unlike our ability to walk upright on two legs or our capacity for speech and complex abstract reasoning. Terrell charts how this trait has evolved by investigating two unique functions of the human brain: the ability to remake the outside world to suit our collective needs, and our capacity to escape into our own inner thoughts and imagine how things might and ought to be. This book frames our biological and psychological capacity to make friends as an evolved ability, comparing friendship to other evolved traits of human beings such as walking upright on two legs, having opposable thumbs and a prominent chin, and possessing the capacity for speech and complex abstract reasoning. Professor John Terrell investigates how the human brain has evolved to perform two functions essential to friendship that, at first glance, appear to be at odds with one another: remaking the outside world to suit our collective needs, and escaping into our own inner thoughts and imagining how things might and ought to be. We must all deal with our species'' hereditary legacy--that we are social animals who need to include others in our lives for our biological and psychological survival. Yet we are also able to exercise the cognitive freedom to detach from the adaptive realities and demands of life. These thought patterns have important consequences for how we understand aggression and cooperation. Terrell claims that conflict is best understood in terms of friendship--as challenges that emerge when we are forced to reconcile the inner, private worlds of our imaginations with the experienced realities of our daily lives and each other. |
| Imprint Name: | Oxford University Press Inc |
| Publisher Name: | Oxford University Press Inc |
| Country of Publication: | GB |
| Publishing Date: | 2015-01-15 |
