Contents
Aronson begins the book by citing a number of scenarios, real and constructed — reactions to the Kent State shootings, the Stanford prison experiments, and a four-year old boy given a drum set among them — that illustrate a variety of human behaviors seen in real life. The rest of the book is spent primarily on explaining how human minds operate and interact with each other, using these situations as examples. The book covering topics include the causes of prejudice, aggression, and cognitive dissonance.
In explaining the reasons why people behave in unusual ways, Aronson cites his "first law":
People who do crazy things are not necessarily crazy.
Read more about this topic: The Social Animal (Elliot Aronson book)
Famous quotes containing the word contents:
“Yet to speak of the whole world as metaphor
Is still to stick to the contents of the mind
And the desire to believe in a metaphor.
It is to stick to the nicer knowledge of
Belief, that what it believes in is not true.”
—Wallace Stevens (1879–1955)
“How often we must remember the art of the surgeon, which, in replacing the broken bone, contents itself with releasing the parts from false position; they fly into place by the action of the muscles. On this art of nature all our arts rely.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Such as boxed
Their feelings properly, complete to tags
A box for dark men and a box for Other
Would often find the contents had been scrambled.”
—Gwendolyn Brooks (b. 1917)