The Village Effect: How Face-to-face Contact Can Make Us Healthier, Happier, and Smarter

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.

Advance praise for The Village Effect

?A terrific book . . . Pinker makes a hardheaded case for a softhearted virtue. Read this book. Then talk about it?in person!?with a friend.??Daniel H. Pink, New York Times bestselling author of Drive and To Sell Is Human
 
?What do Sardinian men, Trader Joe?s employees, and nuns have in common? Real social networks?though not the kind you?ll find on Facebook or Twitter. Susan Pinker?s delightful book shows why face-to-face interaction at home, school, and work makes us healthier, smarter, and more successful.??Charles Duhigg, New York Times bestselling author of The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business
 
?Provocative and engaging . . . Pinker is a great storyteller and a thoughtful scholar. This is an important book, one that will shape how we think about the increasingly virtual world we all live in.??Paul Bloom, author of Just Babies: The Origins of Good and Evil
 
?A fascinating, nuanced study of that most fundamental need: the need for human connection.??Maria Konnikova, New York Times bestselling author of Mastermind: How to Think Like Sherlock Holmes
 
?The Village Effect is a fascinating explanation of why we need regular contact with people, not just screens?and why time spent with your neighbors will enrich and extend your life in ways you never imagined.??John Tierney, New York Times bestselling co-author of Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength

?With a raft of surprising data, this compulsively readable, lively and meticulously researched book shows that direct and frequent human contact is at least as important to our survival as clean air or good nutrition.??Christina Hoff Sommers, author of Freedom Feminism: Its Surprising History and Why It Matters Today