The recap
Why do people do what they do, at their kindest and at their most violent? Robert Sapolsky, a Stanford neuroscientist who spent years studying wild baboons, tackles that question with an unusual structure. He starts with a single action and then steps backward in time: what was happening in the brain a second earlier, what hormones were doing hours or days before, how adolescence, childhood and even the womb left their mark, and how genes, culture and evolution set the stage long before that. Once the toolkit is assembled, he turns it on big themes such as tribalism, hierarchy, morality, empathy and violence. Sapolsky refuses easy answers, showing again and again that biology and environment are tangled together rather than opposed. The book is long and dense, but its humor, digressions and lively footnotes make it feel like a conversation with a brilliant, slightly irreverent professor. Readers come away with a richer vocabulary for human nature and a healthy suspicion of anyone who explains behavior with a single cause.
Why read it
For readers who want a deep, integrated tour of the science behind human behavior and are happy to commit to a big book. It rewards anyone interested in psychology, ethics, justice or politics.
Fun facts
- 01
The Washington Post named it one of its 10 Best Books of 2017.
- 02
It became a New York Times bestseller and won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize.
- 03
Reviewing it for The New York Times, Richard Wrangham pitched it as the kind of book readers would wish they had been given in college.
- 04
Not every critic was fully convinced: Stuart Ritchie, writing in The Spectator, questioned its reliance on certain social psychology studies while still valuing what it teaches.
“hands-down one of the best books I've read in years”
