Making Sense of People: The Science of Personality Differences, 2nd Edition

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Features

A leading neuroscientist explains personalities iesy science for everyone – now, with even more practical tools for understanding others and predicting their behavior  

• A step-by-step system for understanding any personality, based on decades of psychological, psychiatric, and neuroscientific research – is neuroscientific a word?
• Now includes even more practical help for gaining and using psychological insight about the people in your life: both “how to” and “here’s why”
• Provides usable guidelines for assessing character and motivation, improving your own responses to others, choosing your associates, and deciding whom to trust
• Illuminates the latest research behind extraversion/introversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, neuroticism, and openness

Description

A NEW, MORE PRACTICAL EDITION OF THE POPULAR SCIENTIFIC GUIDE TO UNDERSTANDING OTHER PEOPLE

What really bothers you about your boss—or your daughter’s boyfriend? Why are you so attracted to the person you’re dating? Can you rely on your intuition about people? This book will help you find out.

Drawing on extensive research, renowned psychiatrist and neuroscientist Samuel Barondes gives you powerful tools for understanding what people are really like and how they got that way.

Now improved with easy, step-by-step “practical summaries,” these tools will help you quickly assess anyone’s tendencies, patterns, character, and sense of identity. You’ll learn how to combine these into a unified picture of who that person is. With these insights, you can choose more satisfying relationships, recognize telltale signs of dysfunction and danger, and savor the complexity and uniqueness of everyone you meet.

A quick, easy system for understanding anyone!

• Supplement your intuition
• Identify character strengths and weaknesses
• Make better decisions about whom to seek out and whom to avoid
• Find out how all personalities are shaped by two great chance events: the set of genes we happen to be born with, and the world we happen to grow up in

Sample Content

Sample Pages

Download the sample pages (includes Chapter 1 and Index)

Table of Contents

Preface to Second Edition     xi

Introduction: When Intuition Isn’t Enough     1

Part I: Describing Personality Differences

1  Personality Traits     7

2  Troublesome Patterns     33

Part II: Explaining Personality Differences

3  How Genes Make Us Different     65

4  Building a Personal Brain     87

Part III: Whole Persons, Whole Lives

5  What’s a Good Character?     111

6  Identity: Creating a Personal Story     139

7  Putting It All Together     159

Endnotes     175

References     199

Acknowledgments     221

Index     227

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