Synopses & Reviews
In her surprising, entertaining, and persuasive new book, award-winning author and psychologist Susan Pinker shows how face-to-face contact is crucial for learning, happiness, resilience, and longevity.
From birth to death, human beings are hardwired to connect to other human beings. Face-to-face contact matters: tight bonds of friendship and love heal us, help children learn, extend our lives, and make us happy. Looser in-person bonds matter, too, combining with our close relationships to form a personal “village” around us, one that exerts unique effects. Not just any social networks will do: we need the real, in-the-flesh encounters that tie human families, groups of friends, and communities together.
Marrying the findings of the new field of social neuroscience with gripping human stories, Susan Pinker explores the impact of face-to-face contact from cradle to grave, from city to Sardinian mountain village, from classroom to workplace, from love to marriage to divorce. Her results are enlightening and enlivening, and they challenge many of our assumptions. Most of us have left the literal village behind and don’t want to give up our new technologies to go back there. But, as Pinker writes so compellingly, we need close social bonds and uninterrupted face-time with our friends and families in order to thrive — even to survive. Creating our own “village effect” makes us happier. It can also save our lives.
Just a few of the reasons why human contact matters, as revealed in The Village Effect:
• Those with a tight circle of friends who regularly gather, even if only to eat or share news, are likely to live an average of fifteen years longer than loners.
• The lowest rate of dementia appears in people with extensive social networks.
• A hug or a pat on the back lowers one’s physiological stress response, which in turn helps the body fight inflammation and infection.
• Social contact at the beginning of life helps us cope with stress later on.
• A study of women with breast cancer found that those with large networks of friends are four times as likely to survive as those with sparser social connections.
About the Author
Susan Pinker is a developmental psychologist, columnist, and broadcaster who writes about social science. Her first book, The Sexual Paradox, was published in seventeen countries and was awarded the William James Book Award by the American Psychological Association. Her work has been featured in The New York Times, The Times of London, The Economist, The Atlantic, Financial Times, and Der Spiegel and on the BBC, the CBC, and NBC’s Today show. She lives in Montreal.