The Cultural Animal: Human Nature, Meaning, and Social Life [Hardcover]

Roy F. Baumeister (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 10, 2005

What makes us human? Why do people think, feel and act as they do? What is the essence of human nature? What is the basic relationship between the individual and society? These questions have fascinated both great thinkers and ordinary humans for centuries. Now, at last, there is a solid basis for answering them, in the form of accumulated efforts and studies by thousands of psychology researchers. We no longer have to rely on navel-gazing and speculation to understand why people are the way they are - we can instead turn to solid, objective findings. This book, by an eminent social psychologist at the peak of his career, not only summarizes what we know about people - it also offers a coherent, easy-to-understand, though radical, explanation. Turning conventional wisdom on its head, the author argues that culture shaped human evolution. Contrary to theories that depict the individual's relation to society as one of victimization, endless malleability, or just a square peg in a round hole, he proposes that the individual human being is designed by nature to be part of society. Moreover, he argues that we need to briefly set aside the endless study of cultural differences to look at what most cultures have in common - because that holds the key to human nature. Culture is in our genes, although cultural differences may not be. This core theme is further developed by a powerful tour through the main dimension of human psychology. What do people want? How do people think? How do emotions operate? How do people behave? And how do they interact with each other? The answers are often surprising, and along the way the author explains how human desire, thought, feeling, and action are connected.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"A remarkably well-written book. Anyone interested in psychology and philosophy would find this book fascinating. It is thorough, very well informed, and clearly presented."--Diaglouge

About the Author

Roy F. Baumeister is at Florida State University.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 464 pages
• Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA; 1 edition (February 10, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0195167031
• ISBN-13: 978-0195167030
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.5 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #497,078 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars The First Chapter is the Book, October 2, 2011

By 

Herbert Gintis (Northampton, MA USA) - See all my reviews

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This review is from: The Cultural Animal: Human Nature, Meaning, and Social Life (Hardcover)

Baumeister writes that his "initial project was to provide a summary and overview of human nature, based on current lab findings in social psychology." After a year of hard work, he finished a draft of the book, and realized that it had no central theme, but rather was a compendium of scattered observations and partial, unintegrated, insights. Of course this is not surprising because the field of social psychology is just that---a bunch of unintegrated insights drawn together by insufferable pseudo-generalizations. Then, says Baumeister, "one day, sitting by a rooftop pool...I began to think that the giant mass of information really did seem to be ready for integrative explanation. The human psyche...was designed for something very specific. Inner processes serve interpersonal functions. What goes on inside the person is there to facilitate the types of relationships we have." (p. viii) He goes on to say "Nature built us for culture. The human psyche is thus designed by natural selection to enable us to belong to a culture."

Baumeister was chagrined to discover that this synthesizing theme would require a whole year of rewriting, "which involved a growing struggle with my own impatience," he writes. A whole year? A year is a very short time to deal with such a big theme, especially since the idea itself is quite foreign to traditional social psychology. Unfortunately, Baumeister's impatience shows. Except for the first chapter, the book is filled with vapid and off-hand observations well known to all and hardly reflecting "current lab findings" in any serious way. Here is a typical, randomly chosen quote from the chapter How People Act and React: "In terms of money, rationality means doing what is best for the self in the long run." (p.326) This of course is just false. It is rational to give to charity, to contribute to the struggle for democracy, civil liberties, and racial equality, to vote, and to reject positive offers in an ultimatum game. Baumeister continues: "Economic incentives do generally have a significant impact on human behavior. Economists often take this as a sign that people are generally rational." The mind boggles at the banal superficiality of this statement, at its lack of references, and its ignorance of truly key considerations in the question of human rationality. He goes on to say "It would be an overstatement to say that people are always rational, but it is hard to dispute that basic economic rationality does succeed as a general principle for explaining and prediction (and controlling) a great deal of human behavior." The book is full of such superficial and unsupported pseudo-reasoning.

Baumeister's first chapter, by contrast, is a gentle, insightful, and nicely written introduction to the theory of cultural evolution and gene-culture coevolution, although the author appears not to have read some of the important contributions to the field (where are E. O. Wilson, Marcus Feldman, Luca Cavalli-Sforza, Robin Dunbar, and William Durham, among others). Similarly, Baumeister does not refer to the extremely important literature on niche construction, of which gene-culture coevolution is a special case (see the works of John Odling-Smee, Kevin Laland, and Marcus Feldman). Finally, Baumeister's careful discussion of the meaning of `culture' does not recognize that human culture is a form of epistatic cross-generational transmission, and hence that culture is information the same way that genes are information. For a short introduction to this way of thinking (the only correct way of thinking, in my humble estimation) see my paper "Gene-culture Coevolution and the Nature of Human Sociality", Proceedings of the Royal Society B 366 (2011):878-888.

As a result of his not having read the relevant literature, Baumeister does not have a secure handle on the application of gene-culture coevolution to the nature of human sociality, which probably accounts for the superficiality of the remainder of the book.

3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Very interesting reading, December 16, 2009

By 

PST "A Reader from Germany" (Eislingen Deutschland) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Cultural Animal: Human Nature, Meaning, and Social Life (Hardcover)

Firmly based on Darwin's Evolutionary Theory, the author attempts to explain what makes humans unique cultural animals. Rather than focussing on the differences between cultures, he points out, how cultural animals (man being the only such species)are different from social animals (e.g. woolves, horses..). His explanation is, that this must have offered an evolutionary advantage to the animal, so so it evolved over time

He draws from a huge pile of information from experiments done by countless phychologists over many decades, and manages to offer logical explanations of their results.

There is much information in this book about results on human behaviour, which are interesting in their own right - even if the reader is not interested in how / why they evolved.

I can highly recommend this book to anybody, who is interested in how humans "operate", and even more so to people, who (like me)want to know the evolutionary background of human traits.