The Social Leap The New Evolutionary Science of Who We Are, Where We Come From, and What Makes Us Happy

About this book

A wide-ranging exploration of how our species' evolution has shaped our behaviour, prioritised social skills over physical dominance, and affected nearly every facet of modern life, in work, play, ageing, our quest for the good life from leading psychologist William von Hippel. For the last century we've been thinking about social intelligence incorrectly. Popular theories of our species' evolution hold that our brains developed in response to the mortal physical threats all around us – think saber tooth tigers, starvation, lack of protection from the elements – but new research holds that our large brains are the result of social challenges. As humans made the social leap from the trees onto the savannah, they had to work together to survive and this transition fundamentally altered our psychological makeup.

In The Social Leap, leading psychologist William von Hippel unpacks this revolutionary social hypothesis, following the human mind through three critical evolutionary inflection points – banding together on the savannah, the genesis of language, and the agricultural revolution – to understand how these events in our psychological past manifest themselves in our present. From the way we lead and innovate to why marriages last longer in rural areas than in cities, the implications of the social hypothesis are far reaching and surprising.

In the tradition of Sapiens and Guns, Germs and Steel, The Social Leap is a convincing look at evolution through the social rather than the physical lens, that blends history, biology, anthropology, and psychology to new clues about what makes us happy, how we construe success, and how to use that information to improve our lives today.

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Biography

William von Hippel grew up in Alaska, got his B.A. at Yale and his PhD at the University of Michigan, and then taught for a dozen years at Ohio State University before finding his way to Australia, where he is a professor of psychology at the University of Queensland. He has published more than a hundred articles, chapters, and edited books, and his research has been featured in The New York Times, USA Today, The Economist, the BBC, Le Monde, El Mundo, Der Spiegel, and The Australian. He lives with his wife and two children in Brisbane, Australia.